REVIEWED - THE GRUDGE 2: AMONG the less obvious reasons to celebrate Takashi Shimizu's English-language remake of the 122nd of his 433 episodes in the Grudge franchise (I exaggerate only slightly) was that 2004 film's proud refusal to make any sense. writes Donald Clarke

As in the original Japanese entertainment, cleverly imagined shocks came at the viewer in an apparently random order with little regard to pace or structure.

If you take yourself to a dark room after The Grudge 2 and think long and hard you should find a sensible pattern in which to arrange the pieces. But up until the last few minutes the new film seems even less coherent than its predecessor.

Waters are muddied by the director's decision to focus on three only obliquely related plotlines. Sarah Michelle Gellar appears briefly as the now deranged young woman whose adventures in and about a haunted house somewhere in Tokyo bemused viewers of the first film. This time her sister (Amber Tamblyn), dispatched to investigate by an ailing mother, is asked to put herself in the way of pale shrieking children and gaunt women with split ends. Meanwhile, three schoolchildren have their own unhappy encounter with the cursed house and, back in Chicago, Jennifer Beals begins to feel sinister vibrations emanating from the neighbouring apartment.

We have become used to setting aside any desire for narrative order when viewing Japanese horror. So it's hardly worth complaining that the eventual hurried tying up of loose ends does not quite compensate for the lengthy disarray that goes before.

More damagingly, the supposed shocks have become so familiar from previous Shimizu films that they no longer carry any potency. True, the sound design features some distinctly unsettling creaks and scrapes. But the abundant faces leering from corners and numberless heads ascending from dampness are becoming very wearisome indeed.

And what's with all the blasted hair everywhere? Did nobody tell you to clean the bath after you've used it, young lady?