The Grudge 2 was so bad, people who won tickets to see the movie at the same time I did started laughing and leaving throughout the movie. I call them The Lucky Ones.

Amber Tamblyn stars as Aubrey Davis – a young woman from California who must head off to Japan when her sister, Karen (Sarah Michelle Gellar), is held in a hospital after apparently killing her boyfriend and setting a weird, haunted house on fire in the process (that’s roughly what happened in The Grudge, for those who forgot, or worked as hard as I did to wipe those memories from your brain). As soon as she arrives, Aubrey starts to realize something just ain’t right, so she teams up with a reporter, Eason (Edison Chen), who is equally curious about the strange events that take place in that house, and how everyone who goes into it DIES!

Can they get to the bottom of it all before the grudge kills them? Will they go into the house?

The Grudge 2 doesn’t even try to make sense as the evil ghosts show up everywhere! They’re in Tokyo! They’re in the haunted house! They’re at the hospital! They’re in Chicago! They’re at the snack bar buying a bucket of popcorn and a super size soda! They’re sitting behind you in the theater talking all the way through the movie (no, that’s just the typical idiot you always get stuck next to)! Sadly, this just serves as more evidence that writer Stephen Susco has no desire to create something interesting, intellectually challenging, comprehensible or even mildly entertaining.

Director Takashi Shimizu does a fantastic job scaring the audience with quick, shocking flashes of images and giving us clues as to when something freaky is going to happen. You have to always look in the background, in the mirror, and around the corner. Even then, Shimizu makes the action happen in surprising ways. However, it all becomes cheap thrills due to a story that barely exists.

Susco practically admits he can’t come up with enough of a story to drive the movie forward by sticking us with several stories, none of which are fully developed, appear to go together or contribute to an overall mystery and plot that would keep the audience interested on anything other than a blood thirsty level. In addition to Aubrey chasing answers to what happened to her sister, some school girls go to the house, and have some creepy stuff start to happen. Then, a family in Chicago seems to be afflicted for vague reasons (when did the ghosts/grudge learn how to get past Homeland Security at O’Hare? Are they part of the Axis of Evil?). You would think a character in the movie would try to explain all of this, or figure it out for the audience, but no. That would be too hard.

Worst of all, Susco adheres to no rules whatsoever when it comes to the actions of the grudge. At first, you have to go into the haunted house to be afflicted. Then, the grudge just starts going after anyone it darn well wants to, and people are getting all grudged for no reason. Which is it? Why does it change? Should it change?

Rules contribute to solving the mystery and making the audience wonder why everything is happening the way it is (and giving us some sort of closure), but, since Susco can’t come up with any mystery until it is way too late, I guess he just wants to play it fast and loose so Shimizu can get all imaginative with how characters get whacked, which is the only reason people will want to go to The Grudge 2.