director
Takashi Shimizu
screenwriter
Stephen
Susco
based on
a screenplay by
Takashi
Shimizu
producers
Doug Davison
Taka Ichise
Roy Lee
Rob Tapert
cinematographer
Hideo Yamamoto
music
Christopher Young
editor
Jeff Betancourt
cast
Sarah Michelle Gellar (Karen)
Jason Behr (Doug)
William Mapother (Matthew)
Clea DuVall (Jennifer)
KaDee Strickland (Susan)
Grace Zabriskie (Emma)
Bill Pullman (Peter)
Ted Raimi (Alex)
Ryo Ishibashi (Detective Nakagawa)
Yuya Ozeki (Toshio Saeki)
Takako Fuji (Kayako Saeki)
mpaa rating: PG-13
running
time: 88m
u.s.
release: 10/22/04
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
official website
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Who exactly has a grudge against
whom in The Grudge? Having just seen the movie, I still
don't quite know. What I can tell you while shunning spoilers
is this: Something bad, evil, happened in a Tokyo house,
and the sheer bad vibes of the event have trapped its victims
inside as yowling, crawling ghosts that apparently scare people
to death. Such ghost stories are common in every storytelling
culture, of course, but the Japanese have a long tradition of
taking vengeful spirits seriously, in life as well as in art
(Kabuki theater was devoted to tales of wrathful female ghosts
for much of the 18th century). But what if the rightful target
of supernatural rage is already dead? Then, I guess, the grudge
is reserved for anyone foolish enough to enter the place of tragedy.
And there are quite a lot of
fools in The Grudge. Its nonlinear plot aside,
the movie -- a reworking of a story told in two TV movies and
two theatrical films in Japan -- is little more than a series
of scenes in which one character after another ventures slowly,
sloooowly, into a dark and creepy place while the audience waits
for the big jump moment. This happens so often that the repetitiveness
begins to strike the audience funny, a fatal response to a movie
that takes itself so deadly, glumly seriously. The Grudge,
directed by Takashi Shimizu (who helmed the previous four incarnations),
is a gray and dreary affair that seems inspired less by great
Japanese horror (Kwaidan or Onibaba, to name just
two) than by whatever's making kids spill their popcorn these
days: M. Night Shyamalan's films, The Eye,
Ringu
and its American remake, and so on.
Instead of transplanting the
story to America, as The Ring did, producer Sam Raimi
chose to keep the action in Tokyo but with a mainly American
cast, which requires the new screenwriter to draft bad expository
dialogue explaining why various unconnected Americans are hanging
out in Japan. Sarah Michelle Gellar, for instance, is there because
her boyfriend is studying architecture there (though we know
she's really there because she needs a non-Scooby Doo
hit after Buffy). Hired to take the place of a health-care
worker who's mysteriously disappeared, Gellar goes to the aforementioned
bad-vibe house to look after a catatonic woman (Grace Zabriskie,
cast as usual for her spooky thousand-yard stare that's kept
food on her table since Twin Peaks). People begin to freak
out and die. Gellar is traumatized, then is forced to return
to the house. It all has something to do with an English professor
(Bill Pullman) and a Japanese woman who shows up in the background
of every photo of him.
Some have said that 2003's
Ju-On: The Grudge, which got a limited run in theaters
earlier this year and will hit American DVD soon, makes very
little sense unless you've seen the two TV movies before it.
The new American version is nonsense squared; once the mystery
of the motivating event is revealed, there are no other twists
in store, and the movie ends on a cheap, unresolved note that
unreasonably demands we return for a sequel. Gellar is reduced
to a wimpier version of Buffy, looking as though she needs a
Giles to explain everything. The closest she gets is a Japanese
detective played by Ryo Ishibashi, of Suicide Circle and
Takashi Miike's notorious Audition;
Ishibashi has had better days, as has Clea DuVall, who has a
couple of scenes before turning up quivering and shell-shocked
in bed. She's not the only one to flee to bed; the movie's biggest
laugh comes when yet another victim of the ghosts locks herself
in her apartment, jumps into bed, and pulls the covers up to
her face like a kid spooked by a scary movie -- though probably
not this one.
The Grudge doesn't even work as a travelogue
of Japanese spiritual beliefs, and it very well could have. By
having a bunch of Americans in the cast led by the callow Gellar,
the movie could have taken the opportunity to educate us ignorant
gaijin about, say, Shinto, or the noble history of spirits
in religion and art. Instead, the story might as well be set
in Cleveland, and it adds the weird subtext of Americans being
terrified by damp-haired Japanese women. At least The Ring
took what was universally eerie about Ringu and Americanized
it; The Grudge just cannibalizes itself, exploiting Japanese
spirituality for a few Saturday-night shocks to make teenagers
shriek and giggle.
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