The Grudge
“I’m-a get out of this boring movie even if I have to crawl.”
The Grudge gets off to a promising start — the opening sequence with Pullman is startling and effective — but it’s all downhill from there. I kept asking the TWoP bullpen, all of whom had already seen it, if it got any less boring. They unanimously agreed that it didn’t, and right they were.
It’s hard to say exactly where the problem lies, but the movie never really gets going. It has some strong, eerie imagery, like the sister going up in the elevator and the boy visible in the windows at each floor — but it never gets pushed far enough, and because the eponymous grudge doesn’t have any apparent internal logic, even the startle moments don’t work very well.
You don’t always get the same sort of explicated arc from Japanese or Japanese-derived horror that you’d get from a Western film in the genre. I liked the The Ring and Ringu, and thought they were both effective, but in different ways; Ringu gave me more of a “sometimes, haunting just happens” vibe. But while I got a similar sense from The Grudge, the time shifts didn’t really work to create atmosphere; they just confused things. Does Pullman see Buffy? Where exactly do the two of them exist? It’s not that important to explain it fully if it works tonally, but it doesn’t.
It doesn’t really work, period. It’s too full of itself, it’s neither creepy enough nor gross enough, casting Jason Behr is a shot across the mediocre-acting bow right off the bat…disappointing movie.
Tags: movies
Ah jeez, this really was a snorer. I remember actually paying the nine bucks; something to do. I’ve always wondered though whether it really was boring or it was just that the seventh grade girls behind me screaming at any provocation kept me from noticing things first for myself and becoming properly scared. So thanks for clearing that up. Still wanted my money back. It might have been my worst movie experience so far really. Seventh grade girls. aaack!
I guess I should say I don’t really like horror in the first place, but I thought this was a really terrifying movie. And by terrifying I mean I had nightmares about it afterward. I thought it really reflected well the eeriness of being a foreigner and being disconnected. I really didn’t like that there was no way to break the grudge- what sort of a story does that make if some combination of luck, skill, and sweat can’t get you out of a mess?- and I think that, for me, was what made it so scary.
So I think, actually, that I’m agreeing with you that it’s not an enjoyable movie, just for a different reason.
I’ve never seen The Grudge, but I did see Ju-On, and it scared the crap out of me. It’s my understanding that while the two films were basically the same, The Grudge just ended up being shittier for some reason. Ju-On scared me more than any movie has ever scared me. It almost gave me brain damage.
I can’t speak for the American version, but I am 100% with the previous poster on Ju-On. Holy crap that was a scary movie. Or should I say, scary first 30 minutes of a movie, because this was the first movie that scared me so much I stopped watching. I think the setting was what did it for me – everything looked so ordinary and real and un-hollywood-polished until freaky stuff started happening. More than any other horror movie I could actually picture the things on screen happening in real life and that was what made it extra scary.
This movie really just dragged and I always felt like I had missed something. Like, did I walk out of the room and miss some major plot point? I dunno. I felt like I never really understood what the fuck was going on.
It’s been a while since I saw this one, but I remember that what drove me crazy about it was how stupid and passive the heroine was. I never had any sense that she was really trying to figure out what to do about this situation or even really how to escape it, beyond some perfunctory “oh-what’s-going-on”. If it’s impossible to escape, fine, but let’s see some effort before we reach that conclusion, eh? The Blair Witch Project and The Ring both worked really well on that score – they ratcheted a sense of urgency straight through the roof – but I was never satisfied that The Grudge had really exhausted all the other options. I mean, if you’re in a foreign country and you run into a particularly strange and scary ghostly phenomenon, maybe the thing to do would be to talk to somebody who knows the local mythology…?
Nicole, I agree. I think that the lack of scare-chords made it really eery, too. Like, usually whenever a scary part happens in a horror movie, there’s all this music building it up so you can anticipate being startled. In Ju-On, all of that is absent, and it’s very effective. I considered stopping the movie as well–the only reason I watched it all the way through was because I hoped that at the end, there would be some sort of a resolution as to how to stop Ju-On, like there was in The Ring.
All of the Ju-On sequels really, really suck, though.
I’m a total chicken shit, and this movie didn’t scare me at all. Very disappointing. I hated that weird “vocal fry” noise the ghosts made.
It’s also one of those movies with a title that totally lends itself to cheesy lines in movie reviews:
“I’m holding the real grudge…against the movie studio for stealing my $8!”
AAA-OOOH!
I say: check out the Japanese original. Much more effective, as others have said, even though it should have been essentially the same, what with the same director, etc. What struck me most about the original is that it’s so unstructured narratively, abstracting the mechanics of fright to the point of near avant-gardism. It’s enjoyable just for curiosity’s sake for that reason, even if it doesn’t manage to scare you. The same is true of the similarly stylized and enigmatic original version of “Pulse” (aka: “Kairo”). Both are superior to “Ringu,” in my opinion, though not necessarily scarier. And both are hypnotizing rather than boring, at least to me, maybe because of that very disregard of classical Hollywood structure; the remakes break down because they try to strike a compromise between the two extremes, so everything ends up a mushy, half-baked mess. “The Ring” avoided this by simply being an effective Hollywood movie, in my opinion, even filling it with all sorts of sly allusions to Hitchcock, etc. along the way. Would that more remakers had the same sense of fun and creative zest to let their new creations actually be new.
This is one of the very rare movies that I actually saw in theaters. When I watched it for the first time — in a theater, surrounded by other people — it scared the living daylights out of me. It is the first and so far only movie I’ve ever literally watched through my fingers.
When I got up the guts to watch it at home a few months later? Not so much. I couldn’t believe how cheesy, boring, and umotivated it was. I’ve watched it a couple of times since then, and my reaction stays firmly in the “meh” category. Of course, this could also be remnants of my Buffy addiction; I can’t resist the urge to shout, “Come on, Buff! Use your Slayer strength!” at the screen during crucial events. Still… meh.
Also, a word to the wise: the sequel is worse. Way, way worse. Just… bad. Bad. Bad. Don’t bother. I’ve heard reports that Ju-On is better because it’s actually both Grudge and Grudge II, and that splitting the movies is what made the American versions suck, but that doesn’t negate the awfulness of Grudge II. It does, however, make me curious about Ju-On.
I don’t think the story translated well for an American audience. It’s actually based on a old Japanese folktale, about the avenging ghost of a wife scorned and tormenting her samurai husband into madness and eventual suicide. Avenging spirits in Japanese stories don’t usually differentiate between the blameless and the jerks they seek revenge on; hence, the haunting of SMG. I believe the Japanese version is a lot more scary, if only because it’s culturally more… “aligned”. (For lack of a better word.)
For the record, I’ve seen neither one, but probably should watch Ju-on.
Sounds like the US hackjob of Pulse, which I paid $8 to see when it came out because it looked zOMGZ SCARY! Scary? Nope. Creepy? Eh. Decently paranoid, even? No. Even looking at the people who are dying slowly of The Plague: Part Deux wasn’t really scary/creepy/gross/anything.
I’m not happy with where American horror is going. I hope it does something… else. Anything.
God, this scared the shit out of me when I saw it. I’m not that great with horror films anyway, but found it absolutely terrifying. It’s such a quiet film. Weirdly, I didn’t find The Ring scary, but then I’ve only seen the Naomi Watts remake, not the original.