By Richard James
It’s that time of the year folks! Halloween has reared its ugly head with more gore-but-bore horror movies that try to scare the hell out of us. Of course, there is emphasis on the word try. Usually there are hits and misses among the horror, pre-Halloween movie marathon. Last year’s remake of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre was a hit, but the dismal House of the Dead was a flat-out miss. The new denizen among these proceedings is The Grudge, which is a remake of the Japanese horror film.
Most of the action takes place in Japan. There is already a sense of terror when the film opens with a young woman going into a two-story house. She seems to be the caretaker of an old woman, who suffers from dementia. All of a sudden, there’s a strange noise upstairs and being the “I’m-curious-but-I-know-I-will-be-killed” person that she is, she investigates. It doesn’t take an Einstein to know what happens next.
The drama switches to Kate (a lost Sarah Michelle Gellar), who is an exchange student living with her boyfriend (Jason Behr) in the big foreign city. She gets assigned as a replacement to care for the woman in the spooky house.
No sooner is she there that she starts to hear things go bump in the night with ominous sound effects attached for that jump-in-your-seats feel. Also, it seems that once you enter the house, you can never escape whatever seems to inhabit it, as the various people entering the place soon learn.
The Grudge is just one of those horror movies that do deliver some reasonable jolts but, in the end, disappoints.
The main problem starts with the expositional scenes. These try to explain the history of how the house became such a terrorizing force on its residents. Unfortunately, the scenes minimize the suspense factor and suspend disbelief in logic. Where did Kate, or for that matter her boyfriend, come from? Why is that scary looking kid making all those cat noises? Why is this ghost happening to be this vengeful? The movie fails to answer a lot of these questions.
When the movie switches back and forth for more back story, it ends up feeling choppy lacking intelligence. Of course, that’s what most horror movies are made to do; give us the gore and nothing more. At the same time, similar Japanese-American transition movies like The Ring proved more successful because it delivered a coherent story with obvious chills.
It also doesn’t help that Gellar looks like she stepped in the wrong movie; it made me long for her Buffy days. What doesn’t make sense is that even from her previous “scream queen” roles in movies like I Know What You Did Last Summer and Scream 2, Gellar’s expressions and mannerisms made you feel for her character’s ultimate demise. Here, she just looks like a lost cat trying to find a happy home.
Director Takashi Shimizu, who also wrote and directed the Japanese version, has a knack for the usual technical flairs. The creeks, the shrieks, and the ghost has a memorable death cry that sounds like a lobster scratching on a phone. The techniques are usual standard horror fare but they are put to good use here. Unfortunately, when looking at these kinds of movies you are expecting the people to go down the wrong path, or opening a door they shouldn’t be opening, you expect these kind of clichés to come forthright. The Grudge tries to add something new with a feel of claustrophobia and dread, but ultimately, somewhere along the line, the movie got lost in translation.
Final Grade: C+
While Sarah Michelle Gellar (right) has been convincing in her past roles in horror films, her role in The Grudge never seems to develop very naturally. (Image courtesy movies.yahoo.com)