The Grudge

Don't they have Caller ID?

2004

Director: Takashi Shimizu

Starring: Sarah Michelle Gellar, Jason Behr, Bill Pullman, KaDee Stickland

It'll help you feel the creeps.

THE SETUP:

You can't go 2 minutes in this Japanese house without some blue kid popping out or some bloody woman sliding down the stairs and croaking at you.

DISCUSSION:

I had watched the original Ju-On on a borrowed bootleg DVD, and couldn’t get the subtitles to work, so the story was a bit murky, but it didn’t distract from the scares. My impression at first was that it is almost TOO intensely scary. The Japanese horror sense is much more intense and pervasive, whereas American scares are usually either jump scares or are soon relieved by humor or adventure, so there’s not much chance for a creeping dread to settle comfortably under your skin.

That said, after an hour I was bored stiff. Watching one repetitive horror set piece after another without much connective tissue of story [even if I were able to understand the dialogue] or modulation in tone just becomes dull. And soon the fast-forwarding began.

The American remake The Grudge is really a carbon copy of the original, with a slightly more explicated story. I was a little more interested, being able to understand the story, yet knowing what’s going on also has the unintended effect of making it all THAT much more ridiculous. If you piece the non-chronological order all together you realize that these ghosts are really QUITE active. Not a second apparently passes that they aren’t popping out here or croaking there, and I suspect that if the events were presented in chronological order it would become unbearably ridiculous.

The other interest for me was to see Sarah Michelle Gellar outside of Buffy [but not in Scooby-Doo], but it was similarly unrewarding. She just doesn’t have that much to do except stand looking scared and stressed. It was nice to see KaDee Stickland again, after enjoying her presence in Anacondas, but she doesn’t have much to do either, though she’s quite lively and enjoyable on the commentary. More KaDee!

SHOULD YOU WATCH IT?

You could do worse.