The Criterion Channel is featuring a plethora of horror movies this month. They have at least three different horror themes going on, one of which is Japanese Horror. Naturally, I’ve seen almost all of them, but I’d never watched this sequel. I try to watch the originals again before I watch the sequel which is why you were treated to my thoughts on Ju-On: The Grudge yesterday.

This sequel is basically the same film with different characters. Once again it acts like a series of vignettes in which a bunch of people are haunted, terrified, and murdered by some evil spirits. The same evil spirits that haunted the house in the first movie (er, the third movie as there were two films before Ju-On: The Grudge). There is the creepy kid and the freaky girl who can twist her body in extreme ways.

This one does have more of a semblance of a plot and there is a bit of a through line, but it still jumbles up the chronology. It, more or less, follows horror film actress “Horror Queen” Kyoko Harase (Noriko Sakai) who is given a role in a paranormal television show. They “investigate” haunted houses and the like. For this episode, they visit the house from the last film.

Naturally, things do not go well. Nearly everyone involved in the shoot is haunted by the curse and killed. The kills remain quite effective and creepy. I might even give the ones in this film a slight edge over the last one.

There is an excellent sequence in which a woman keeps hearing a banging on her apartment wall at a certain time at night. The reasons behind it are quite clever and scary.

The way this film moves back and forth in time is much more effective than the previous one. I was often confused during the previous film, but here they will show a snippet of the same scene, albeit from a different character’s point of view, before moving on to something we haven’t seen before. Those connecting points allowed me to understand what was happening at all times. That worked for me much better than in the previous film.

But really, much like the other film, the plot in this one is just an excuse to move us from one creepy scene to another. And again this worked completely for me.