Review: Ju-on 2 (OV)

By kevin on October 06, 2006 at 10:59am EDT

Let me start by saying Ju-on 2 isn’t so much a true sequel of Ju-on as it is a fairly short final act to show the aftermath of everything that happened. In fact even though the movie is accurately listed at 70 minutes long, 30 minutes of that is cut right out of the end of the first movie. And since I wouldn’t recommend ever watching the second one before the first this feature is utterly pointless. Just think of this a 40 minute epilogue to the first one. That brings the total time of both halves combined to about 100 minutes, a perfectly reasonable running time for a feature film. So why is it split into two separate releases? I guess greed would be the obvious answer.

Ju-on 2 starts in earnest after the events of Ju-on which ended with the real estate agent, Tatsuya Suzuki (Makoto Ashikawa), selling off the house with a troubled history to a young couple, Hiroshi and Yoshimi Kitada (Hua Rong Weng and Kaori Fujii, respectively). At the same time his son Nobuyuki (Tomohiro Kaku) seems to be having some trouble adjusting to their new apartment. You’ll recognize the apartment from the events of the first film and it’s now so rife with bad karma from those events that he’s rendered borderline catatonic. Tatsuya asks his sister Kyoko (Yuko Daike) to see if there’s anything she can do for him, but instead she also gets affected by what she sees there. After discovering the history of the apartment Tatsuya brings Kyoko and Nobuyuki to stay with their parents for a while.

Back at the Kitadas’ place things are not exactly a bed of roses either. Yoshimi is slowly being taken over by the spirit of Kayako, made evident by the fact that she’s gathering some of Kayako’s old possessions and displaying them in the house. That’s one of the main differences between Ju-on 1 and Ju-on 2. Now instead of the ghosts of Kayako and Toshio killing people directly they just cause them to gradually lose their sanity. The insanity then spreads from person to person like a disease until the afflicted people actually get possessed by Kayako.

While the premise of Ju-on 2 is fairly interesting, it’s just not very scary. There’s not as much tension watching people go insane as there was waiting for Kayako or Toshio to kill people in the first film. Plus, the way the curse spreads like a disease is a little too similar to Ringu. In fact, a whole lot of this film’s details are way too similar to Ringu from Suzuki’s son being haunted by a fuzzy TV signal to the way Kayako crawls on all fours near the end. It’s actually kind of embarrassing compared to how good the first film was.

The acting was passable but nobody sticks out as being particularly good. Yuko Daike is normally a pretty good actress but in this one she’s slightly over-the-top with the facial expressions. The unfortunate down side of a series with a 0% survival rate is if you kill off all the good actors in one movie the next movie has nobody left.

Special effects are more ambitious in Ju-on 2 than Ju-on and that’s not a good thing. They’re so cheaply done that it becomes a distraction. When you have creepy characters like Kayako and Toshio it doesn’t make much sense to rely on cheap effects to get scares, and yet Shimizu still attempted it for some inexplicable reason. When Kayako finally does start showing up and offing people it’s a little too late to save the film and she just doesn’t seem quite as creepy as she did when she was covered in blood and accompanied by crackling bone sound effects with every movement.

The fact is you really should only watch Ju-on 2 for your own edification, knowing beforehand that it’s not a particularly high point of the series. Ju-on works perfectly well as a stand-alone story and the events of the second part only serve to expand it way beyond what was necessary, seemingly attempting to take a simple little scary haunted house flick and turn it into something unfittingly grandiose.