THE GRUDGE 2
It’s easy to forget how big The Grudge was back in 2004, but it was massive. One of the biggest horror debuts of all time. It made more money than the 2004 classics Mean Girls and Anchorman. The sort of hit that brought with it the possibility of a parade of sequels, each with a greater profit margin than the last. The producers would have been counting the piles of money in their mind. Where would they put it all? Could they buy another house? Surely? Is that too extravagant? A second house just for my money to live in? Close enough to my current mansion so that I can drive around to it and tuck my money into bed at night. Is that too much? I don’t think so. We have a franchise that will run for a decade.
The Grudge was huge.
The Grudge 2 was not.
And just like that it was gone. The sequel flopped. In 2006 horror was reaching heights that hadn’t been seen since the heyday of the 80s and even in the middle of all that The Grudge 2 went splat. The easy explanation for why is because it sucks. It’s a baffling mess of a movie that doesn’t even boast the star power of a ‘the year after Buffy ended’ Sarah Michelle Gellar. Instead, we’ve got Amber Tamblyn from ‘being found dead in a closet in The Ring’.
The Grudges love a bit of a non-linear (read: muddled) plot. Jumping around characters and timelines in an effort to make you remember none of the movie once it’s over. And it works! I saw this movie so recently but when I started writing this newsletter I couldn’t think of a single thing that happened in it. Even reading the plot on Wikipedia hasn’t helped. The Grudge 2 is like The Ringexcept instead of dying a week after watching a video, you watch this and a week later you remember none of it.
How would I fit into The Grudge 2? Well, the dumb-dumbs in these movies are always going into attics and burned down houses that are almost definitely haunted and that sort of thing is not for me. Amber Tamblyn’s character Aubrey is trying to figure out what happened to her sister (Sarah Michelle Gellar from the first movie) and needs to retrieve the diary of Kayako (who is a murderous ghost) from a house. I think if I were in this movie I would be able to help her out.
IF I WERE IN 'THE GRUDGE 2' I WOULD: GIVE THAT TERIYAKI TWISTER A GO
