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Overall Rating
  Awesome: 15.28%
Worth A Look: 27.78%
Average: 40.28%
Pretty Bad: 8.33%
Total Crap: 8.33%
5 reviews, 42 user ratings
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| Ju-On: The Grudge |
by Scott Weinberg
"Three yawns for every scare...but at least they're good scares."
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Compared to the more familiar American fare, Japanese horror films seem to take a decidedly different approach to delivering the goods. In other words, they're kind of boring. It's not hard to understand why many consider the U.S. version of 'The Ring' an improvement over its source material, and one suspects that the upcoming remake of 'The Eye' could follow the same pattern: retain all the clever concepts and creepy ideas that made the first entry so popular, and then replace the big yawning stretches of arid narrative with a plot that actually commands one's interest. Frankly, an American version of 'The Grudge' could turn out a huge improvement over this one. Call it culture-clash if you must, but boredom is a universal language...and much of 'The Grudge' bored me.The tough part is describing the plot of The Grudge while avoiding the term "Entirely Familiar Haunted House Flick" - but that's essentially what we've got here.
A pretty young social worker is commanded to visit with a sickly old woman and ascertain why there's been no recent contact from the woman's family. After arriving at the house and discovering a huge mess all over the place, our cautious young do-gooder comes across something...evil!
And then back and forth we skip, from recent past to near-future, as several other unfortunate souls stop by the same house and realize way too late that there's something horrible and hungry within the walls of the dastardly domicile. Neighbors, friends, sisters-in-law, policemen, you name it. People keep wandering it; very few end up wandering out.
When The Grudge (which is a remake of an earlier Japanese TV production) focuses on the scary stuff, there's no shortage of fun to be found. And there are several moments of quietly effectiveness creepiness. But there are also huge gaping stretches (mainly in Acts 2 and 3) where pretty much nothing happens. Characters hastily introduced (and therefore not all that interesting) are afforded huge blocks of pointless backstory and meandering subplot, and the result is a movie that gets looser at the precise moment it should be getting tighter.
Perhaps it's just that American horror flicks are usually boring at the beginning and then end with a bang, so it's that reversal of narrative that had me yawning so profusely. One thing that seems universal: all of The Grudge's best moments (and to be fair, there are a several) were shown in its trailer. So at the point where you're supposed to be the most chilled and horrified, what you're left thinking is: oh yeah, this is that scene with the blanket that I saw in the trailer!
The Grudge is basically a modern take on a hoary old ghost story. As can be expected from most Japanese horror flicks, a truly creepy little child is the source of all the rampant evilness. If you took the five or six best sequences from The Grudge, and you transplanted them into a movie that already had five or six solid scares of its own, well then you'd have something.There's an admirably downbeat air of doom & gloom laden throughout 'The Grudge'. But unfortunately it's tough to maintain a tone of consistent creepiness when the movie stops for 20 minutes at a time with nary a single "Boo!" I'm all for a horror movie taking its time and setting up the scares, but 'The Grudge' is a schizophrenic little affair, and a film that often seems to forget that it's a horror movie.
link directly to this review at http://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=8875&reviewer=128
originally posted: 03/24/04 07:56:28
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OFFICIAL SELECTION: 2004 SXSW Film Festival. For more in the 2004 South By Southwest Film Festival series, click here.
OFFICIAL SELECTION: 2004 Los Angeles Film Festival. For more in the 2004 Los Angeles Film Festival series, click here.
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USA
23-Jul-2004 (R)
DVD: 09-Nov-2004
UK
N/A
Australia
N/A
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