The Grudge (2004)
So you’re looking for a house, huh? Well, in today’s market you have to take what you can get, what with loans being so hard to come by…ah, I see you’ve noticed the ghosts covering every inch of the place. Well, sorry, you can’t walk away from this one–the undead are a lot like pornstars’ boyfriends; you can barge right in ’er but that doesn’t mean they have to like it–hey, come tour the rest of the house so they don’t have to bother haunting your Blackberry tonight.
Clocking out here at 5am, I proudly claim the “First Review!” title, along with the seasonal title of “Semihain” since Samhain’s been parked. Apparently it’s been a really long time since I did one of these, so it’s good to be back.
Sam Raimi produced this American translation of the J-Horror hit Ju-On, which my nonexistent Japanese fluency tells me probably literally means “gentle payback” or “gentle revenge obligation”. It’s a dumb title because these ghosts are beefin’ hard with anyone who visits their house. Seriously, no one survives the faintest involvement with this little para-goda.
Premise: 3/5
The plot’s original enough: an American college-student couple take up residence in Japan, and Karen (Sarah Michelle Gellar) gets a job providing home care to invalids. She’s not adapting well to her new milieu, unlike her somewhat distant boyfriend Doug (Jason Behr). The work takes her to a quaint little two-story and a catatonic client, and from there she’s pretty much fucked, regardless of what she’s getting for bennies. Through this simple setting, the key horror elements of unfamiliarity and isolation are easily achieved. Sadly, that’s about all the work the storytelling’s bringing to the table, with a lazy execution and by-now tired plot developments.
This movie jumps around a LOT, having an extremely nonlinear design. It’s hard to keep track of relationships and to make yourself care about the characters when the story doesn’t emphasize anything in particular. Much attention is paid to secondary characters who are so threatened that you don’t invest any attention, knowing that they’ll drop right off the radar in a scene or two. Additionally, the flick’s pace is rushed, too eager to dive into its premise and to manage all its characters in its hour-thirty run time. Necessarily, bad things immediately happen to anyone coming onstage into the house, so there’s no suspense or tension to work with. Transitions are also nonexistent or too jerky, another common problem with these shit movies I watch. If only they’d kill someone I hate in the very first minute…oh wait, they DID! Bill Pullman suicides just as fast as you realize he’s in the movie, which is awesome because he sucks ass. I tend to like the flicks he’s in, but he’s about as flexible as Costner. Half the time I call him “Bill Paxton,” and look, it turns out that Wikipedia says he’s another actor, not the Chicago Bulls guy I thought he was. Anyhoo, Pullman doesn’t make a man’s job out of cratering; he half-asses it with that lame seesaw tipover usually reserved for chick flicks. Way to make an impact, B.P.
The ending is beyond predictable, preserving that tired ’nyah-NYAH!’ you’re used to, rather than completing the story in any way. It’s nothing you couldn’t get from playing that Scary Maze game online, although if you filmed a fat kid doing it, you could rack up the hits as he sobs his way to Internet celebrity. Bam.
Cast: 2/5
I shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, so let’s step right over Pullman and harangue Gellar for refusing to show any believable fear or bewilderment. So many actresses in horror just won’t pony up a terrified reaction. I’m not asking that everyone goes full-on scream queen, but anyone seeing the creepy stuff coming at her nonstop would emote for the camera. Pretty weak. Her boyfriend is forgettable but not incompetently-played, while the audience is most likely to enjoy Yuyo Ozeki, who makes a good go of it as “Toshio”, a friggin’ scary ghost. Maybe kid ghosts scare us so much because they pervert our natural instinct to trust and protect them, but whatever it is, Toshio’s just about the sole source of the creeps you’ll get from The Grudge.
The living characters are without exception the too-curious dumbasses who are forever following commands the DMG 3.0 defines as “obviously suicidal.” Everyone is totally up for investigating every scary noise or undead cameo, which is a serious Flaw in character creation if you ask me. Then you have cheap reasons for getting the characters back into the house, like “I’ll burn it to the groun…hey, what was THAT?” or returning to save the boyfriend who actually remembered to take his cell with him. Wowee. FYI, they should have called it “The Attic,” because that’s not a primo place to wind up, but remains a popular Deathmatch hub. By now, I am a proven member of your subculture and you are interested in this.
FX/Technical: 3/5
This one’s so-so and therefore one of the highest. Nothing stands out, although the stop-motion movement and bedraggled appearance of the boy and mother ghosts, reminiscent of The Ring, are executed well enough. IMDB informs me that the freaky contortions the woman ghost makes down the stairs at the end were actually performed without any camera tricks, which impresses me since I accused it of being heavily dicked-with when I saw it. Also, the undead occasionally have a distinctly Eastern appearance all their own, more like oni (demons) or kabuki-stiff countenances that accentuate the foreign setting. What stuck with me is that little Toshio and his cat, joined in death by having been drowned in the same tub, have merged in undeath–the boy’s screaming is actually the cat’s yowling. It’s an unsettling effect that helps the horror gel a bit while popularizing the movie in previews.
A note about hair: This movie has helped me realize how amazingly creepy hair can be. Consider that hair, normally a familiar and heavily personal thing, can, once separated from the body, make for a great analogy for undeath. Detached or disembodied as it flows from behind a corner, it used to be alive but is now repulsive; vestigial life without an owner. The movie makes good use of this inversion by dangling the revenants’ hair like cobwebs or trailing it down walls and corners, and it was one of a handful of nice touches that kept The Grudge treading water.
Fear Factor: 2/5
Yeah, it’s a new category for me. Wannafightabouddit? The Grudge is really nothing to nudge you around in your seat, or cadge you a nightful of horrified hugs, but I gotta credit my boy Yuyo for freaking me out a little. He’s got a manic stare (see him in the poster?) and a tense crouch that keep you in suspense for about as long as his scenes last. He’s a close second to Samara from The Ring. Since ghosts usually cause little actual onscreen violence, it’s their insanely hate-maddened gazes that have to produce the frights, and he does a better job than his mom who happened to get more screentime. Oh yeah…ghosts should stop being so goddamned tech-savvy in these movies. I am not intimidated in the slightest when a ghost calls me up on mobile or hacks my computer because we’ve got some 14-year-olds out there who do it much better. Seriously, I know they’re Japanese ghosts and are therefore molecularly bonded to t
hat shit, but can we see a little creativity?
’Nuff said then…I wouldn’t drop the 90 minutes again on The Grudge. I rented it believing that it would suck but that it would somehow be a mini-milestone in the genre, or at least a fairly influential flick on the stuff that’s been coming out, but it was all-round forgettable and disappointing. This of course means that I now have the requisite grudge needed to review the sequel. Oh, you hoped I would disdain the pun? Well, your hope was wasted on one without HONA!!! Cheers.