Year of Release - 2003
Rating - R
Director - Takashi Shimizu
Running Time - 95 Minutes
Distributor - Lionsgate

Read the review, then watch the trailer on FEARnet.com!

The same week that the big-budget American production The Grudge 2 opened in theatres, Lionsgate quietly released the DVD edition of an earlier Takashi Shimizu film with the same title, in Japanese: Ju-on 2. Actually the fourth separate entry in the Ju-on ? Grudge series, after two V-cinema films and the first theatrical Ju-on, Ju-on 2 is arguably the best and most creative episode of the seemingly never-ending franchise.

Wisely taking the story of Ju-on 2 in a different direction from the three previous entries, Shimizu opens up the plot about ghostly murdered wife Kayako, her son Toshio, and the house they died in, to introduce Noriko Sakai (also seen in Norio Tsuruta?s ?J-Horror Theatre? entry Premonition) as Kyoko Harase, a movie actress and ?Queen of Horror? who agrees to appear on a reality television program devoted to ghosts and strange phenomena. She and the TV show?s hostess, accompanied by a small video crew, tour the infamous house where Kayako and Toshio once lived, which ? by incorporating the events of the first three films of the series into the TV show-within-the-film plot of the fourth one ? has become the site of a number of strange deaths and disappearances.

Little surprise, then, when the hostess and her boyfriend are found hanged, the makeup artist disappears under bizarre circumstances, and the show?s director has a ghostly encounter with a malfunctioning copy machine. Even poor Noriko ? after a car accident terminates her pregnancy and lands her boyfriend in a coma ? finds herself stalked by a ghostly little blue-skinned boy who keeps turning up where he?s least expected. When a doctor inexplicably tells her that she?s still pregnant and seemingly doing fine, she begins to put the pieces together about the house, the murdered family and what the designs of Kayako?s evil spirit on her womb might be.

Constructed in the same episodic manner as all the other films in the series, Ju-on 2 maintains the previous films? creepy mood and off-kilter, nightmarish (il)logic. But after the needlessly-confusing, overlapping plot lines of the first theatrical Ju-on, the relatively simple construction of Ju-on 2 is most welcome, as is the fact that most of its story centers on Noriko and the small TV crew ? notwithstanding an ill-advised episode that briefly takes the viewer back to the first film and a schoolgirl named Chiharu.

Shimizu also adds some black humor to the series for the first time, notably in several situations involving the TV crew and their reaction to scary phenomena. Even the mundane central house is commented on ? ?I thought this place would be scarier,? says the director at one point. But that?s where the brilliance of the entire series is most evident: in the way Shimizu is able to imbue mundane locations and familiar surroundings with terrifying import, from the garden-variety, middle-class house and its now-infamous staircase and upper-floor, to the aforementioned photocopier, the makeup department?s wigs, and especially Japanese-centric props such as low, floor-sitting tables and the blankets which skirt them in wintertime. Such common household sights are transformed into dark, terrifying recesses under which anything might lurk, ready to grab out when least expected. And for the first time in the series, the ending gives viewers a very specific, and quite tantalizing, future course for all subsequent films (overlooking the two English-language entries, of course). In fact, based on the amount of creativity Shimizu has shown with one simple premise and his familiar pair of blue-skinned, croaking wraiths, dare I say that I?m actually looking forward to what might be in store for us in the inevitable Ju-on 3 (though perhaps not 4 and 5 just yet)?