Ju-On: The Grudge 2 review

You know the drill. Spooky house, haunted by girl-demon-thing with rickets. Anyone who enters it - the house, that is - is cursed then killed in bizarre circumstances... Creepy and crackpot, Shimizu Takashi's rehash of his Ringu-baiting original again strings together a series of vengeful vignettes, though this time with even more mixed results. For every slow-build, masterful sequence (top marks for girl-demon-thing emerging from photocopier, sheet by sheet) there's another that's simply too been-there-seen-that. Sure, neither the original, Sarah Michelle Gellar's version, nor any of the sequels made much sense, but here Shimizu breaks so many of his own rules that his only escape is a climactic 'birth' that'll have audiences simultaneously crossing legs and scratching heads. The US remake, due in October, promises "considerable plot changes". Smart.