Cast: Sarah Michelle Gellar, Jason Behr, Clea DuVall, William Mapother, KaDee Strickland, Bill Pullman, Grace Zabriskie
Director: Takashi Shimizu
Producers: Sam Raimi, Doug Davison, Roy Lee, Robert G. Tapert, Taka Ichise
Screenplay: Stephen Susco, based on "Ju-On: The Grudge" by Takashi Shimizu
Cinematography: Hideo Yamamoto
Music: Christopher Young
U.S. Distributor: Columbia Pictures
Perhaps it's just that I don't "get" Japanese horror. I wasn't a big fan of The Ring or its inspiration, Ringu, and, while I have never seen the original Ju-On, The Grudge doesn't impress me as especially scary or coherent. The director of this English-language remake is Takashi Shimizu, the force behind the Japanese version. This is the second time in recent memory that a foreign director has been asked to take control of an American re-working of his movie. On the other occasion (George Sluzier and The Vanishing), it was an unmitigated disaster. At least in Shimizu's case, I can find a few nice things to say.
The Grudge managed to hold my interest for about 30 minutes. But it's pretty much a one-trick pony, and, after a while, that trick loses its ability to impress. This is a haunted house film, and is packed to the rafters with horror movie clichés. "Boo!" moments abound. There's a cat that jumps out at an inopportune moment. Weird sounds and musical zingers punctuate the soundtrack. Characters go places where they shouldn't and do stupid things for no reason other than that this is a horror movie and that's the way people are supposed to react in horror movies. We get lots of shots of things that are there one second, and gone the next. Dead people often look like they have spent several weeks reclining on the deck of the Titanic at the bottom of the ocean. The atmosphere is one of relentless gloom. Based on anecdotal evidence, it's night about 21 hours per day.
The Grudge takes place in Japan, but uses mostly English-speaking actors. Shimizu gives us a great opening hook, as Bill Pullman gets out of bed and throws himself over his apartment railing, killing himself. You don't expect to see a star of Pullman's stature dead within the first 60 seconds (although he appears later in the film, in flashbacks). From there, we visit the haunted house, which is currently inhabited by a shut-in named Emma (Grace Zabriskie, acting pretty much like she did in "Twin Peaks"). The caregiver who visits her makes the mistake of going into a dark crawl space, and the next time she's seen, she has acquired a retractable jaw. During its early scenes, The Grudge is genuinely creepy, although not especially suspenseful, since it's never hard to guess who the next victim is. Eventually, the "Boo!" moments reach the point of overkill, we see the ghosts a few times too many, and the film starts to veer in the direction of unintentional comedy. And some really ripe dialogue doesn't help. (Supposedly, Shimizu didn't understand a word of English when he began work on the movie, so maybe that explains how he could allow some of these lines to get into the final script.)
The film's protagonist is Karen, an American exchange student who has come to Japan with her boyfriend. She's played by Sarah Michelle Gellar in an unfortunately wooden performance. Gellar, who has shown a lot more energy in other outings, exhibits only two expressions here: petulance and bewilderment. She does a lot of squinting and scrunching up of her face in an attempt to broaden the range. Despite getting top billing, Gellar really isn't on screen that long, because the movie insists on jumping back and forth between characters and in time. There doesn't appear to be any logical reason for doing this, other than to confuse audiences and cause legions of viewers to lose patience with Shimizu. I suppose the real reason The Grudge is presented in such a non-linear, jigsaw-like fashion is that if it was presented chronologically, we would rapidly come to the conclusion that there's no real story. This is just the tale of how a bunch of stupid people wander into a haunted house and either die while within or shortly thereafter.
Why is the house haunted? We learn this eventually, although the answer is pretty obvious before the director shows it to us in grainy black-and-white. A caption at the beginning of the movie informs us that when someone dies in a particularly horrible manner, a curse is born, and that curse is attached to the place of death. It then wrecks havoc on anyone who comes into contact with it. In this case, that's a lot of people. But I do wonder about the poor neighbors, and what this does to their property value.
The Grudge is being released at the perfect time of the year. With the approach of Halloween, viewers are often willing to turn off the higher functioning areas of their brains in return for a few cheap scares. As a movie, this isn't much, but as an excuse to clutch someone's hand in a darkened theater or to let out an occasional yelp, it works well enough. Generally speaking, I like a little more plot with my "Boo!" moments, but for those who aren't quite as picky, The Grudge may fit the bill.
© 2004 James Berardinelli