The Grudge
Columbia
Starring: Sarah Michelle Gellar
The Verdict: Watching this will make you curse the film and everyone involved with it.
1 star out of 4 stars
Somewhere in Japan there is a house so cursed that all who enter will exit with their days numbered. If they exit at all. Some people just save time and die on-site. Like this one guy who meets his maker in the bathroom. Or this girl who has her jaw ripped off by this black smog monster-thing with green eyes that spin and stop like cherries on a slot machine.
OK, so you probably wouldn’t want to visit this house on a package tour, but wouldn’t its renovation make for a rollicking episode of “Trading Spaces”?
Happy almost-Halloween, boys and ghouls. The skies are dark, the moon is full, the witching hour is almost nigh. It’s the time of year when Hollywood unleashes scaaaaaaary movies like “Saw,” “Taxi” and “Surviving Christmas.” And this week’s “The Grudge.”
There’s little to be said of the premise of “The Grudge,” but here goes my attempt. Haunted house. Sarah Michelle Gellar. Beaucoup box office. Ha-cha-cha-cha!
Tonally, this film feels more noir than horror. It plays out in a flashback-reliant, non-linear style that’s heavy on atmosphere and slim on story. Director Takashi Shimizu has a nice eye for visuals (pedestrian-flooded crosswalks, an imposing high-rise stairwell, etc), but his pacing needs a major overhaul. Problematic as well is the dead-ending script, which follows episode after brief episode of people entering the house and falling prey to its goofball curse. Big whoop. Look out! A devil cat! Oh, snap! An undead toddler! The film’s really just a tiresome string of inevitable deaths.
A sample episode plays out right at the film’s beginning. A young caregiver named Yoko makes a house call to a kooky old American broad named Emma. Emma doesn’t speak or even show emotion; she just sits silently with a look of perpetual dread plastered on her craggy face. So she can’t warn Yoko not to walk upstairs to investigate the spooky noises coming from the attic. Oh, well. Before you can say “Yoko… Oh no!” there’s one less cast member to worry about and five dull minutes of your movie-watching life down the drain.
“The Grudge” emits the stench of fledgling hubris. Shimizu places his “Directed by” credit immediately after what’s supposed to be a big scare. If you jump on cue, the credit may make you sit up and take notice. If you roll your eyes (as I did), the ensuing credit just makes you angry. Also, the new film’s opening titles, publicity material and script seem to reference “Ju-On,” the Japanese film that directly inspired “The Grudge,” as the holy grail of Asian horror films. That Shimizu directed both films feels less like synergy than overkill. Strange that Shimizu uses his native Japan to such muted effect as a setting.
There’s a nice gray look to his locations, and he attempts, albeit briefly, to juxtapose images and ideologies of old Japanese culture with the impersonal bustle of its modern business and technology. Apart from that, though, the writer-director wastes great fish-out-of-water potential by having almost every character speak English and by reducing culture clash to simply removing one’s shoes at the front door of a house.
Perhaps Shimizu thought his cast would make things interesting. Eh, no such luck, sir. Sarah Michelle Gellar sleepwalks through “The Grudge” with zero charisma and two facial expressions: one for bemused concern and the other for unmitigated fear (this one resembles the face of a two-year old caught off guard by something shiny across the room). Lightweight supporting player Bill Pullman has no time to register in an underwritten role, and you know your film’s in trouble when Ted Raimi proves your most engaging onscreen performer.
Yes, but what of the scares, Gabe, the scares? The “chill factor,” so to speak? I must report that Sunday night’s audience at Hollywood Premier Cinemas seemed genuinely freaked out by this film, and people screamed more often and loudly than at any film I’ve seen since “The Ring.” Dare I say, this was the screamin’-est audience I ever did see or, more aptly, hear.
I, however, was not amused. Loud noises just don’t scare me. Nor do scenes built explicitly around an entirely synthetic “big scare.” So when floorboards creak and idiotic heroes dumbly reach for the closet door, this critic yawns and checks his watch. There are scares here and a strong mood, but they amount to little without a strong plot to support them. And the scares are cheap ones at that, the kind of “booga-booga” hokum that gets one-upped regularly at your average Jaycees’ haunted house.
The film’s final minutes are its most effectively chilling, but they are also its most inexplicable. Heroine Gellar enters the evil house one last time and then magically travels back in time to the point when the curse was born. Huh? There’s never any explanation as to how or why this occurs, nor does it really add much to the viewer’s understanding of the curse itself.
Horror fans that go to “The Grudge” in search of a few cheap thrills probably won’t be disappointed. Silly me, I went to “The Grudge” in search of a satisfying movie. Nothing on the screen came close to scaring me as much as the college-age girl who sat beside me and only paused text messaging long enough to ask her friend the occasional “What’s happening?”
To sum up with an analogy: you’re a trick-or-treater in search of a candy fix. “The Grudge” is an attractive-looking stranger with a Pandora’s cauldron of sugary goodies. Remember the old adage about strangers and candy? Good. Please, dear readers, don’t accept candy from “The Grudge.”