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For some Japanese Buddhists, existence is an eternal wheel of futile desire, passion, and suffering, and that seems to be the pattern followed by some Japanese filmmakers as well, at least those behind many of the genre movies that have been exported to this country lately. These films always seem somewhere in the midst of a series of sequels without beginning or end. That’s the case with Takashi Shimizu’s Ju-on, the third in a popular Japanese series. The title refers to a curse in which a person dying in the midst of great rage passes that spirit onto whoever enters the place where the person died. The problem is that the rage gets lost in the midst of incoherent flashbacks to the previous movies. The result is a muddled haunted-house thriller in which people are caught up in the hocus-pocus and die mysteriously. What to make of the little boy and the insect-like woman dolled up in butoh make-up, or the black cats, the croaking, and the mysterious entity that looks like fuzz caught up in the movie projector? Although confusing and predictable, Ju-on isn’t very scary. No doubt Shimizu will gussy up the effects in the Hollywood remake (The Grudge) that’s due next month, but I fear otherwise it will be the same old grind. In Japanese with English subtitles. (92 minutes)