Courtesy of Columbia Pictures

Two years ago, Japanese filmmaker Takashi Shimizu frightened American audiences with “The Grudge” – a remake of his movie “Ju-On” – which tells the story of a curse created when a woman named Kayako died in a fit of fury and how her ghost seeks revenge on the living.

The story continues in a second installment, “The Grudge 2,” with a new cast of characters, confusing plot lines and recycled scare tactics.

Shimizu returns to direct the sequel, which is not a “Ju-On 2” remake, but an original story created by screenwriter Stephen Susco, who adapted the first film.

“We knew we wanted the latest installment to blaze a new trail, to deepen and enrich the story we already knew,” Susco said in a press release.

Shimizu said the sequel also explains the mystery of the curse, which wasn’t revealed in the first film.

While Susco did throw in a few twists and a partial explanation of the curse’s origin by the end of the second film, the audience is left with just as many questions as they had when they entered the theater.

Sarah Michelle Gellar reprises her role as Karen Davis for “The Grudge 2.” Fans of the original may be thinking, “Didn’t ‘the grudge’ get Karen in the last moment of the film?”

Apparently not.

At the beginning of the sequel, Karen is being held in a Japanese hospital while police investigate the death of her boyfriend and the fire she started. It seems the authorities aren’t buying her story that a ghoulish girl with long black hair killed her boyfriend and she burned down the house to destroy the evil specter.

After Karen’s mother hears about the trouble she’s in, she sends her daughter Aubrey (Amber Tamblyn) to Tokyo to bring Karen home. At the hospital, Aubrey meets a journalist named Eason (Edison Chen), and the two work together to unravel the mysteries of the curse.

“The Grudge 2” is told in non-sequential order by three different groups of people – Aubrey is picking up where her sister left off, while two other stories are being told.

One story is of Allison (Arielle Kebbel), who is a new girl at an international high school in Tokyo and desperately wants to fit in, so she tries to prove herself to the popular girls by entering the cursed house. The other story takes place back in the United States, where Jake (Matthew Knight) is having trouble adjusting to his father’s girlfriend moving in and is curious about the odd happenings in his apartment building.

The unorthodox structure, although ambitious, is disjointed and makes the film hard to follow. Confusion can sometimes add suspense, but this film’s plot doesn’t really make sense and leaves the audience unsatisfied.

No matter how improbable, all horror films follow a set of rules, and “The Grudge 2” breaks many of the original’s rules – the most important being that anyone who enters the house becomes cursed.

In the sequel, “the grudge” mysteriously spreads to people who haven’t had any direct contact with the house, and although it is implied that burning the house unleashed the curse, the screenwriter never reveals why.

Unfortunately, many of the same scare tactics are used in the sequel. Kayako (Takako Fuji) signals her presence with a loud, croaking noise and appears to her victims in the shower, in bed and out of dark corners along with her ghostly son, Toshio (Ohga Tanaka). One of the most memorable and haunting scenes from the last film, in which Kayako strangely contorts her body as she walks slowly down a hallway with flickering lights, is recreated in the sequel.

Although the film has its share of startling

and creepy moments, the familiar frights aren’t as haunting the second time around.