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The Grudge 2 (2006) A Movie A Day Journal Entry

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The Grudge 2 (2006) – A Movie A Day 2021 #50

The Grudge 2 poster

Today’s movie was an easy choice. As a follow-up to The Grudge (2004) yesterday, today’s movie of the day is The Grudge 2 (2006). Director Takashi Shimizu is back for the sequel to his American remake of his own movie, and even though The Grudge 2 isn’t as good as The Grudge (2004), it’s still quite effective in a lot of ways. Unlike The Grudge (2004) being a fairly close remake of Ju-On: The Grudge, The Grudge 2 is not a remake of Ju-On: The Grudge 2 despite bringing over some elements from previous Ju-On movies. Not being a remake helps The Grudge 2 feel a bit like a fresh start, and a bigger focus on Kayako’s curse venturing out of the house and over to America helps it feel different than a lot of what came before it.

Like The Grudge (2004) and other Ju-On movies, The Grudge 2 tells multiple stories that begin to converge as the movie goes on. One story follows Aubrey (Amber Tamblyn) as she travels to Japan to make an attempt to bring her sister Karen home. Karen (Sarah Michelle Gellar) is still in the hospital after the events of the first movie, and Aubrey becomes overwhelmed with family baggage, her sister’s condition, and the mystery behind what happened to Karen and her boyfriend. Aubrey tries to find out what happened to Karen which leads her to the cursed Saeki house.

Another story follows three young women who attend an international school in Japan together. One of the girls, Allison, is tricked into entering the Saeki house by two bullies, Vanessa and Miyuki. The prank obviously goes bad, and the curse begins to follow them.

The third story takes place in Chicago, and it follows a young boy named Jake who is dealing with his father re-marrying after Jake’s mother passed away. As Jake is processing his feelings, something strange begins happening to the people around him, and the strangeness seems to be centered around a nearby apartment.

Each story is told linearly, and the intercutting between all three makes it feel like they’re all happening at the same time. If you’re paying attention to some early dialogue you can figure out when two of the stories are happening in relation to each other, but the third story’s time is left a mystery until the end. At first it’s not entirely clear how the stories are connected, but connections are made in a fun though not always unpredictable way. One of the reveals at the end is quite good, but another one isn’t so much of a reveal since it seemed pretty obvious what the connection was about halfway through the movie. It was still enjoyable watching the characters figure it out though. This movie feels a lot more linear than other Ju-On/Grudge movies I’ve seen, and despite the opening scene and a few overlaps, the three main stories never skip back and forth in time. That definitely makes the movie easier to follow than some of the Ju-On movies, though following the timeline was never a big deal in my opinion. As long as the narrative delivers tension ad scares, I’m fine with a bit of time and space ambiguity.

There are a good number of effective scares in The Grudge 2. One of my favorites is one that caught me a little off guard. I won’t spoil it, but it happens when Allison is talking to a counselor at her school. I thought the scare was going to be one thing, but then something else happened and it got me good. I also enjoyed some of the riffs Takashi Shimizu did on some familiar scares from the series. For example, there’s a shower scene, and one of the most iconic scares from the Ju-On/Grudge franchise involves a scare in the shower. Shimizu doesn’t do what you might expect though, and I enjoyed that very much. There’s also a reference to the scene he’d already done twice where a ghost creeps up on a person in their bedsheets, but again, Shimizu changes it up.

Watching some of the featurettes on the DVD helped give a little insight on Shimizu’s mindset and probably explains why he chose to change things up a bit with this movie. The Grudge 2 was Shimizu’s sixth feature length installment of the franchise in six years. Including the two short films that came before the features, Shimizu had been writing and directing the series for eight years. In come of Shimizu’s comments on the DVD, he talks about wanting to do something different if he was going to take the job to direct this second American installment. The Grudge 2 does feel different than what came before, but maybe not always for the best.

I enjoy The Grudge 2 quite a lot, but apparently it was quite a struggle to get the movie written. The Japanese writers (including Shimizu) and the American writers had very different ideas about what the movie should be and how they should approach it. Japanese and American storytelling can be quite different in a lot of ways, and Shimizu apparently had to make a lot of concessions with regards to how he wanted to tell the story. What I saw didn’t go into specifics about what Shimizu may have wanted versus what was actually shot and edited, but The Grudge 2 doesn’t feel quite as genuine as The Grudge (2004), if that makes any sense. The sequel feels a little too clean and easy to digest while there was some ambiguity to The Grudge (2004). The Grudge 2 dives into Kayako’s backstory a lot more, and the curse feels less mysterious because of it. The atmosphere is still often very good, but I suppose it felt like the movie was holding my hand a bit too much.

That said, I still think The Grudge 2 is a very good sequel. I like the story picks up pretty much where the first movie ended, and it continues to move Kayako’s curse forward. There are a bunch of creepy moments and nice scares, and that’s about as much as I can ask for from a sequel to a remake. Now I suppose I need to watch the third American Grudge, because I know I’ve never seen that one. Takashi Shimizu would not return to direct that, and in fact, The Grudge 2 was his last time directing any movie in the franchise. That’s a shame, but I can imagine wanting to move on to other things after spending so much time in the same mindset.

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The Grudge (2004) A Movie A Day Journal Entry

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The Grudge (2004) – A Movie A Day 2021 #49

The Grudge (2004) poster

Cherry blossom season is coming up in about a month, and I’m making tentative plans to doing something during that time for my horror podcast The Last Theater. Thinking about what I want to do has made me want to watch certain Japanese horror movies, but I kind of want to wait until I figure out exactly what I’ll be doing before I dive into what will surely be a J-horror binge. So I did the next best thing to watching a Japanese horror movie and watched an American remake of a Japanese horror movie. Now, you might be thinking that watching an American remake of, well, anything is a bad idea, but there are good J-horror remakes out there. Today’s movie of the day is one of those good remakes, The Grudge (2004).

I did a podcast episode about my distaste for The Grudge (2020) about a year ago, but The Grudge from 2004 is a genuinely good movie, remake or not. First of all, Sarah Michelle Gellar is the star, and that already gives the film a bunch of points. Sam Raimi and Rob Tapert are among the producers of The Grudge (2004), and that adds a few more points. And the smartest thing the filmmakers did was to hire Takashi Shuimizu, the director of Ju-On: The Grudge which The Grudge (2004) is based on and the creator of the entire Ju-On franchise. Rather than hiring an American director to localize the movie for American audiences, Takashi Shimizu was basically allowed to recreate his original movie while trying to improve on things he thought could be better. The Grudge (2004) is basically a do-over for Shimizu. I don’t know if The Grudge (2004) is necessarily better that Ju-On: The Grudge, but it might be. I’ll need to watch the original again to really begin to make that assessment. What I do know is that The Grudge (2004) is a great horror movie that manages to deliver real Japanese horror from the perspective of a foreigner in Japan.

The Grudge (2004) stars Sarah Michelle Gellar as Karen, an American student living in Japan with her American boyfriend Doug. Karen volunteers as a care worker for school credit, and one day she is asked to go care for an elderly woman named Emma when the usual care worker doesn’t show up for work. Karen finds Emma incommunicative and living in filth, and after cleaning her up, Karen also discovers that there is something wrong with the house Emma lives in. Karen and Emma encounter a frightening presence, and from there the movie branches out to tell the stories of multiple people who have come into contact with the presence in the house.

Like most movies in The Grudge/Ju-On franchise, The Grudge (2004) is told in multiple vignettes that move forward and backward in time. Eventually the stories begin to come together and even overlap in a few ways. Karen seems to be the thread that connects everything, though a lot of that just has to do with the fact that Karen is the first character we really get to meet (after a brief, tone-setting intro sequence), and Karen is the last character we follow. Within the story, the connection for everyone is the house itself and its former residents. I know this is all kind of vague, but I don’t want to spoil anything if you’ve never seen any of these movies before. These early Grudge and Ju-On movies are quite good and well worth watching. I haven’t seen many of the later Japanese movies in the franchise, and I think there are two American releases I haven’t seen either, though I’ll be taking care of that very soon.

The Grudge (2004) is a very good and scary haunted house movie that emphasizes tone and tension over cheap scares or, really, even plot. Sometimes the weaving of the different times feels disconcerting, and some of the overlaps make you wonder what is actually happening, but it all comes together well to heighten the creepiness of the movie. There is some blood and gore in The Grudge (2004), but not nearly as much as in The Grudge (2020) which I complained about. The Grudge (2004) is rated PG-13, and it’s a great example of the fact that you don’t need a gory R rating to make a great haunted house movie.

One thing that really struck upon this latest viewing of The Grudge (2004) is the fear associated with being a foreigner in an unfamiliar country. Most of the people we follow in the movie are American, and they each have some degree of apprehension about living in a foreign country where communication can often be difficult. Maybe it’s because I haven’t watched The Grudge (2004) since before I lived in Japan for two years myself, but I totally understand the uneasiness a lot of the characters are feeling. It’s not that they dislike where they are, it’s just that it can be easy to feel isolated and alone even in everyday situations. These fears are made clear in the movie, and I feel like Takashi Shimizu was able to use those normal, understandable fears to heighten the supernatural fears that are a part of the American characters’ adopted country. I might not be explaining this very well because I haven’t taken the time to really iron out the ideas the movie presented to me this time, but I am impressed with how Shimizu was able to integrate those feelings of isolation into his movie. I think it’s something that he couldn’t have done in the same way with his original movie. It’s a great example of adding complexity in a remake rather than diluting it for a different audience.

I want to think more on that. But for now, I think I might move on to The Grudge 2 because I don’t think I’ve ever seen it. I’m also going to start planning out what I want to do for Sakura season, but that’s still a little ways away. Until then, I have a lot more movies to watch.

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Haunted Office A Movie A Day Journal Entry

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Haunted Office (2002) – A Movie A Day 2021 #41

Haunted Office DVD cover

For today’s movie, I wanted to pick something with one of my favorite actors of all time, Shu Qi. I became a huge fan of Shu Qi’s back around the year 2000 when I saw her in the movie Gorgeous. After watching her steal scenes from one of my favorites of all time, Jackie Chan, I had to see more. So, I imported and watched a bunch of her movies on DVD, and I’ve been a superfan ever since. There are still lots of her movies I haven’t seen yet though. She’s been in tons of stuff, and finding her movies in the United States can be difficult and pricey in a lot of situations, but I’ve been trying to slowly see everything Shu Qi has done. Some of her movies are easier to track down than others, and today’s movie of the day is one that wasn’t too difficult to find. Plus, it gets bonus points for co-starring Karen Mok, another great actor I discovered while I was collecting a bunch of Hong Kong DVDs nearly two decades ago. Today’s movie is Haunted Office, a Hong King supernatural horror movie that is fairly light on scares but has a nice twist at the end.

Haunted Office feels like an anthology movie even though the stories do sort of overlap in places. Effectively though, the movie is made up of three separate short stories that all happen to take place in the same office building. The first story stars Karen Mok as Pat, an office worker who encounters some ghostly happenings centered around the bathroom on the floor her office is on. The second story stars Jordan Chan as Richard, a young and spoiled head of a small business who connives to get a nice old lady to quit so he doesn’t have to pay her pension. And the third story features Shu Qi as Shan, an office worker haunted by a female ghost, and Stephen Fung as Ken, Shan’s new fellow employee who tries to help her out. All three stories are simple and fun ghost stories with little twists at the end. Then at the very end of the movie, all three stories are brought together for one big final twist. They’re all enjoyable, but I don’t want to say any more than that about the plots for fear of ruining any surprises if you happen to watch the movie.

Shu Qi’s story was my favorite, then Karen Mok’s, then Jordan Chan’s. Jordan’s Chan’s story was basically a comedy while the other two were more serious, so there’s good variety in the film. I didn’t realize Haunted Office is basically an anthology movie until I got well into it, so the pacing seemed really odd at first. We see Shu Qi and Stephen Fung in one of the first scenes with Karen Mok, but then we follow Karen Mok and don’t see the other two until over halfway through the movie. Jordan Chan’s story acts as kind of a bridge in the middle, but really, there’s no meaningful crossover until the final couple of minutes of the movie. It works fine, I just wasn’t expecting it at first.

That’s really all I have to say about Haunted Office right now. It’s light and fun, and there’s just enough going on in the background that you can probably start piecing together some of the mystery that is revealed later on in the movie. I give it a recommendation for fans of Hong Kong horror that doesn’t take itself too seriously.

 

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Curse of Aurore A Movie A Day Journal Entry

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Curse of Aurore (2020) – A Movie A Day 2021 #22

Curse of Aurore poster

I’ve been doing this A Movie A Day 2021 challenge for just over three weeks now, and you know what I haven’t watched yet? I haven’t watched any brand new horror movies. Part of the fun of this challenge is clearing out my backlog and discovering movies from the past that I’ve missed out on, but in case you didn’t know, I adore horror movies. I even have a web site about them (among other related things): The Last Theater. So yeah, I should be using part of my challenge to watch lots and lots of new scary movies so I can keep up better with modern times, and so I have something to write/talk about on my site (The Last Theater). With that in mind, I watched Curse of Aurore, a horror movie that was released on VOD on January 12, 2021. As the first horror movie released in 2021 that I’ve seen, I enjoyed it pretty well. 

Curse of Aurore is a found-footage horror movie. More specifically, it’s a haunted-house-style movie framed as real footage being shown to us by a YouTuber. I’ll get back the YouTube aspect in a bit, but the main film follows three independent, no-budget filmmakers who are in rural Quebec, Canada to figure out what they want their next movie to be about. Lena, the star of their productions, is staying in a house owned by her family, and she is joined by Aaron, the director, and Kevin, the guy that does everything else. Lena has learned about a local legend that she thinks would be great for a scary movie, and she excitedly pulls Aaron and Kevin along as she tries to dig up more information from the locals.

The legend Lena is chasing is that of Aurore Gagnon, a girl who was killed by her step-mother in 1920 after years of horrible abuse. The tale of Aurore Gagnon is a real-life story (with at least two movies being made about her life), and in the world of Curse of Aurore, supernatural occurrences have been happening for years in the town where young Aurore died. Things get creepier and creepier as Lena, Aaron, and Kevin continue to investigate, and after a while it seems as if their investigations have attracted some unwanted attention.

The story is told in a way that is not unexpected for a supernatural found-footage movie. There are minor scares here and there throughout the first hour or more, and the real action kicks off in the final few minutes. It’s a structure that feels natural in a movie that is supposed to be showing us real people actually filming extraordinary things. Like I said when I wrote about The Last Exorcism, if things got crazy right away, logically the camera would turn off and everyone would just go home. But the writing in Curse of Aurore is good enough to convince me that, for the most part, these people would continue to record even when things started to go poorly for them. 

In a movie like this where we’re stuck with essentially just three people for about an hour and a half, it’s important to create interesting characters and dialogue. Maybe it’s because Lena, Aaron, and Kevin are no-budget filmmakers with a passion for movies (which I can relate to), but I enjoyed getting to know these people who I was fairly certain would not be making it to the final credits. They have good banter, and I believed that they were friends even when their personalities began to clash. There’s also a scene towards the middle of the movie that I really enjoyed where Lena breaks down a bit and laments about pouring so much effort into making movies only to have no one see them. I think anyone who tries to do something creative can relate to that on some level, though I do wonder if that was somewhat of a cathartic scene for the people who were actually making Curse of Aurore. Well hey, I saw your movie, and I liked it. 

It did feel like there were some red herrings and dead ends plot-wise in the first part of the movie, but in found-footage, I think a lot of that can be attributed to giving the movie a more natural feeling. People say and do things for no good reason all the time. As long as that sort of thing isn’t overdone, I think it can add to the charm of the “real life” footage. And of course, some of the stuff that was said and done was for setting a tone, and some of it made more sense later on as character building. 

As for the supernatural aspects of the movie, I mostly enjoyed the way they were handled. If you’ve seen Netflix’s The Haunting of Hill House, you’ll know that it can turn into something of a game when you’re looking in the background of every scene for when you might see a ghost. Curse of Aurore has a similar approach to a lot of its earlier scares. The camera will catch things that the characters miss, and the first time I thought I saw something I went back to watch the scene again. Some of the ghostly images are pretty obvious if you’re paying attention, but some of them are very subtle and extremely quick. There’s a fair amount of replay value in Curse of Aurore just to go back and try to find more haunting images. 

The ghostly things we see are used sparingly which I very much appreciate. I’m sure the budget didn’t allow for elaborate effects to be added to a bunch of scenes, and I think that works in the movie’s favor. Some of the images do feel unnatural in a computer-like way, but they’re supposed to be unnatural anyway. Well, supernatural which is pretty close to unnatural. Overall, the added images were effective more than they weren’t, and they never brought me out of the movie. I liked them, and they were done very well. 

The plot did involve some amazing coincidences in order to keep things moving along, but once the movie is over, you could make an argument for the “coincidences” being orchestrated by someone or something. I can’t say anything more without major spoilers though, so I’ll leave it at that. And as for the resolution of the story, even though it wasn’t dissimilar to a number of similarly themed movies, I though it was well done. Again, there would be spoilers if I said more, so you’ll just have to watch the movie or send me a message or something if you want to know what I mean. 

I’ve already said a few times now that Curse of Aurore feels like other movies of its type in many ways, but I don’t mean that as a bad thing. I’ve said it before that if a movie is well made, then it’s a good movie even if I’ve basically seen it before. I mean, genre movies are called genre movies for a reason. They follow a familiar pattern and deliver generally expected plot progressions and stories. That’s how a movie fits into a genre. I think that point is lost on like half the people that reviewed Curse of Aurore on IMDB. Anyway, I won’t get into a rant about genre or random people reviewing movies online. I’ll save that for another time. I guess my point here is, don’t believe pretty much any of the written reviews on IMDB. Just believe me. Or don’t. But I do try to be fair.

Anyway.

I enjoyed Curse of Aurore. The one thing I didn’t care for as much was the framing device they used. It’s similar to what I wrote about An American Haunting, if you’re going to frame your movie with something to the extent where the final shots of the movie aren’t going to involve any of your main characters, there needs to be a good reason for it. The framing here focuses on a YouTuber (Casey Nolan of Mind Seed TV) with a horror channel opening a blind box he bought on the dark web. He shows us some of the items in the box, and at first I thought it was kind of clever. He pulls out this red beanie with a hole in it, and when we go to the found-footage, we see one of the characters wearing the beanie in the first scene. Will we see how the beanie got a hole in it? Spoiler, we don’t. Another thing the YouTuber found in the box is a doll with a thumb drive attached to it. The footage we’re watching for the main part of the movie is supposed to be the video found on the drive. 

So, I do like the idea of trying to frame the footage in a way that might explain why we are seeing what is essentially an edited down version of what was “really” filmed. Many found-footage movies leave me with the nagging question of, if this is supposed to be real, then who found all the cameras or tapes or discs or whatever, took the time to edit it, and then sent it out for the world to see? Having the YouTuber show it to us answers half of the question (he’s showing it to us), but the half of the question about who put the footage on the drive and sold it on the dark web is left unanswered. I don’t need an answer for that really (ambiguity can be good), but the way the footage ends really seems like anyone who might’ve had access to it wouldn’t want it to get out. That’s a small complaint though.

I also didn’t necessarily care for how the YouTuber reacted at the end of the movie. After watching the footage with us, he says he’s done and just walks away. That’s fine, but clearly he still did multiple takes with different camera setups, he edited the footage, and he still released “real” crimes for the world to see. It felt weird to me, and I didn’t care for that being the thing the movie left me with. I would’ve rather ended the movie with Lena, Aaron, and Kevin. But now that I think about it, if the whole YouTuber thing is supposed to be a comment on the irresponsibility of some YouTubers putting out stuff that they shouldn’t, then I take back everything I just wrote. It’s a brilliant ending (though I’d still rather be left with Lena, Aaron, and Kevin).

If you’re looking for a pretty good horror movie to start 2021 with and enjoy some supernatural found-footage, I’d recommend Curse of Aurore. It’s a fun movie with some creepy moments and satisfying finish. You can find it for rent on all sorts of streaming services including, yes, YouTube. I watched it on Amazon, but it’s cheap anywhere, so give the trailer a watch and go from there. 

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