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141 of 168 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
More of an interesting production than a great horror movie, February 3, 2005
Despite the $39 million that "The Grudge" earned in its opening weekend to make it the #1 film in the nation, I had low expectations when I popped this DVD in to watch. This was because my youngest daughter had rushed out to see the film (because it had Sarah Michelle Gellar a.k.a. "Buffy the Vampire" in it) and she was bitterly disappointed. While I would not trust her opinion as to what is a great movie (she loves "Gone With the Wind" but does not get "The Godfather"), I thought she would know what was a bad horror movie. Consequently, I think my expectations for "The Grudge" were so low that there was nowhere to go but up once I actually watched it.
I knew this 2004 horror film was a remake of the Japanese movie "Ju-on," in the tradition of "Ringu"/"The Ring," but I did not know that it was filmed in Japan by the same director, Takashi Shimizu (I tend to avoid finding out a lot about films until I actually see them so that I be pure of mind when I first watch them). This makes a big difference because the idea behind this production is behind both the strengths and the weaknesses of "The Grudge" as a film. However, since I lived in Japan for a couple of years, have enjoyed Japanese films in general and "Spirited Away" in particular, and have an ability to understand non-linear narrative forms, I have to admit that I have a peculiar position from which to view the film (so take what follows with a grain of salt).
As the opening of the film explains, "When someone dies in the grip of a powerful rage a curse is born. The curse gathers in that place of death. Those who encounter it will be consumed by its fury." When you listen to the DVD extras you learn that there is another key ingredient: the source of that rage is that the victim does not know why they were murdered. This is important because this is not your typical American horror movie where the guilty die grizzly deaths. The innocent are the only items on the menu this time around. If you want other clear indications that this is a Japanese horror movie then notice that Shimizu goes for the creeps over suspense (guessing who is next to die is never difficult), the camera never lingers on the film's grossest images, and seeing the ghost happens early and often. The last one presents the most problems in terms of cultural translation because the Japanese conception of demons is so foreign to American audiences (I know, duh, but it is true) as is the idea of a Japanese monster house ("Obakeyashiki").
Executive producer Sam Raimi had seen "Ju-on" and came up with the idea of remaking the movie in Japan with the same director but with American actors for an English speaking audience. So this is not the same thing as splicing in scenes of Raymond Burr to turn "Gojira" into "Godzilla," but it is somewhat pointed in that same direction. Stephen Susco's screenplay has to come up with reasons why the American actors are working (and dying) in Japan and while he certainly comes up with plausible means of employment, there is an elephant in the living room in that the body count consists mostly of gaijin but that is never a part of the equation. Granted, Detective Nakagawa (Ryo Ishibashi) is suspicious of the house given what had happened three years earlier, but this film really needed to deal with the gaijin issue better (I was going to say that having more Japanese killed off in the movie would help, but then we have the problem a gaijin being the heroine in a story set in Japan).
However, at some point a decision was made for Jeff Betancourt to edit "The Grudge" in a non-linear fashion. Now, what they came up with is an interesting approach, but clearly most viewers are not picking up on what is happening right away. Beginning with the opening deaths before the title credits are over, "The Grudge" follows the first death backwards to the beginning of the tale and the second forward to the ending. These two plotlines alternate to the climax in which they actually come together. Unfortunately, this is just way too convenient as the only way that our heroine can understand what is going on. At a point where the puzzle is coming together we are wondering how this is happening when the focus should be on understanding why everything is happening.
Another way in which the production is more interesting than the movie is the limited use of CGI. Throughout the commentary track, Gellar talks about the lengths to which Japanese filmmakers keep things real. The shot of the hand coming out of the back of her character's head in the shower is not a CGI shot. The ghost creepily crawling down the stairs is all the performance of actress Takako Fuji and not a puppet on wires or anything else. When characters listen to messages on an answering machine, there are actually messages on the answering machine. But, again, unless you check out the DVD extras you have no way of appreciating the realism of this particular movie. The more you check out the more you will rethink what is going on in the movie.
"The Grudge" is a creepy movie where the ghost is a lot more interesting than Karen the heroine. But then most of the characters are simply in the wrong place at the wrong time so that bad things can happen to them. Still, my wife screamed twice and jumped three times while watching this, so it can have the desired effect (at least on those unaccustomed to the way modern horror films work). More importantly, the attempt to make a Japanese horror movie for Americans, versus an American version of a Japanese horror movie, is worth paying attention to. Ultimately, I am trying to convince you to watch this movie twice, after checking out all of the DVD features in between.
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11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
completely satisfying, October 15, 2006
WOW. That's the only thing I can say after reading all sorts of negative reviews. I admit, the very first time I watched the Grudge with my father NEITHER of us thought the movie was scary at all and couldn't understand its success, but after watching the movie a second time two months later by myself late at night I REALLY began to see how frightening the movie is. Probably contains the same amount of fear as the original Exorcist, another movie that's really effectively well done. You HAVE to watch the Exorcist and the Grudge at night to get the proper effect.
The Grudge benefits greatly when it comes to maintaining a moody atmosphere and a pretty interesting story. I say "pretty interesting" because the storyline isn't the best, or the easiest to understand. Just interesting enough to get the job done. The Grudge also benefits when it comes to not giving away too much or too little. In fact, this is probably its strongest point.
Every time something scary happens, you see just a "little bit" of that scary monster boy or some kind of strange shadow effect, which is *very* important if you want to effectively scare someone. If the scary boy had appeared on screen for longer than a few seconds it wouldn't have scared me nearly as much because I would have gotten used to seeing it. The boy appears, and then he's gone. Not giving away too much REALLY works with this movie. You see, to really scare me you simply CAN'T put a scary monster on screen for long periods of time and you HAVE to create a moody atmosphere to make the film believable. The Grudge works *extremely* well it this area.
The fact that something scary happens almost always unexpectedly in the Grudge allows me to give the film another compliment. I'm telling you, the scene with the woman inside that building by herself (well, except for a security guard) and having to travel home to an apartment building all by herself is about 10 minutes of total bone-chilling excitement. I *loved* this scene.
I was totally on the edge of my seat wondering when the woman was finally going to have something bad happen to her. The scene where the woman saw darkness coming before walking down the stairs and having to hurry up to get out of there was *awesome*, and the scene a few moments after this happened where she DID see something in the shadow was ANOTHER awesome display of bone-chilling brilliance. There's a bunch of scenes like this throughout the movie. Freakin' AWESOME!
Excellent pacing and suspense makes the Grudge a true horror classic, in my opinion. I've seen a thousand horror movies in my time and I'd easily put the Grudge right up there as one of the best.
People today have drastically different opinions when it comes to what makes a movie scary. Remember the good old days when everyone could agree that the Exorcist was the scariest movie of all-time? I wish everyone agreed that the Grudge is a total classic, and that the Ring is another excellent one.
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11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Japanese Ghosts Hold a Grudge, May 4, 2005
Japan has a long, ghostly tradition with beings from beyond the grave. Nemerous stories and legends in Japan of these otherworldly visitors abound. Ghosts often play key roles in Kabuki theater and were a favorite though perhaps somewhat overly-used character by Kabuki playwrights. Many of the ghosts that appear in plays and stories are females seeking revenge for wrongs done to them during their lifetime typically by cruel, heartless husbands.
In the old ghost stories, vengeful Japanese ghosts would continue haunt their victims until they went insane, died, or at least made some form of restitution to appease the angry spirits. Some Japanese ghosts were born out of tragedy or sorrow and would haunt any person who came near. These spirits were particularly feared because they represented a danger to all unless they were somehow put to rest.
Although I knew about the horrific nature of old Japanese ghosts, I had thought modern Japanese ghosts would be more polite and demur. I had imagined a modern Japanese ghost timidly coming up to someone and saying "Suimasen (Excuse me)! BOO! Gomen naisai (I'm sorry)!" before whisking away. "The Grudge" (2004) showed me how wrong I was about modern Japanese phantoms.
"The Grudge," starring Sarah Michelle Gellar of TV's "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" fame, depicts a haunting by very impolite spirits. Gellar plays an American student nurse in Tokyo who accidentally gets involved with a haunted house that has the nasty habit of killing visitors. The ghosts of the house were victims of a tragedy and now they rudely kill anyone who comes in contact with them.
The spirits' motivation for killing is explained at the beginning of the film in a brief written prologue which states: "when someone dies in the grip of a powerful rage, a curse is left behind."
For Western audiences it may seem unusual that the two main ghostly antagonists who having been innocent victims of a violent death themselves would seek to cause the death of another innocent person. This flies in the face of a Western audience's sense of justice and fairness.
In many Western ghost stories, ghosts despite their spookiness are often motivated by the same things as living people namely the pursuit of justice for wrongdoings. The ghost of a murdered person will seek vengeance on the person or persons responsible for their death.
If a ghost is malevolent, it often turns out they were a bad person in life - as in the back-story to the main ghost character in the "Poltergeist" (1982-1986) movies.
To understand the nature of the supernatural entity of "The Grudge," one has to understand Japanese belief in spirits and the supernatural.
In the book "Ghosts and the Japanese: Cultural Experience in Japanese Death Legends" by Michiko Iwasaka, there is a passage which is a direct echo of the opening lines of the movie:
"Anyone who dies under great emotional stress creates an energy which is not easily dissipated; these yurei [ghosts], thus, have an impact on the local environment..."
This type of spirit is called a "goryo" - vengeful ghost. A goryo, however, is less like a consciously aware ghost that plots revenge like those featured in Kabuki plays and which would be more familiar to Western audiences. A goryo is more like the energy of the emotion created at the time of death. And to some degree it represents the unconscious mind free of the limitations and morals of the conscious analytic side.
Formal belief of goryo can be traced to the Heien Period (794-1185) when goryo were believed to be the angry spirits of political enemies that had died in exile or had been executed. The noted scholar Sugawara-no-Michizane became one such goryo. Through guileful manipulations, his enemies at the Imperial Court engineered his banishment from Kyoto. Sugawara died in extreme sorrow while in exile. Shortly after his death, a number of natural disasters occurred from droughts and epidemics to lightening strikes. It was believed to be caused by the angry spirit of Sugawara. To appease his goryo, Sugawara was given ceremonial promotion at the Imperial Court and eventually he was made into a god-spirit whom modern-day students pray to for success on their exams.
Goryo were vengeful spirits from the aristocracy who like Sugiwara have the power to affect the very seasons. Another more commonly experienced type was onryo. While less powerful than the goryo, the onryo were the ghosts that kept Japanese of then and now frightened out of their wits. Onryo are typically depicted with wild unkempt hair in a white burial kimono.
Although onryo could be either male or female, the most popular onryo were women. Often powerless while in life, these female onryo wielded great power in death. They would wreak vengeance on husbands and lovers who spurned or hurt them in life usually by driving them mad with fear.
Director Takashi Shimizu has built on this old concept to create a deadly onryo of a very frightening ghostly Mother and Son duo. "The Grudge" is an American remake of the original Japanese thriller "Ju-on" (2003). "Ju-on" is Shimizu's horror franchise. "Ju-on" grew out of a short TV story to become a successful and scary theater-release movie which was followed by a sequel. Famed Spiderman director, Sam Ramie, who helped produce the American remake thought "Ju-on" to be one of the scariest movies he had ever seen.
"The Grudge" opened in America during the Halloween season last fall but it has only recently opened in Japan. One notable difference is the inclusion of a few extra violent moments that were left out in the American version in order for the movie to keep a PG-13 rating in the States.
Overall there's not much of story. Some people die, then some other people die. Most of the film is just one scare after another with little character development or plot. "The Grudge" is more like a series of creepy vignettes strung together to make a film. However, these vignettes are quite scary. Its the cultural nuance of the goryo/onryo-type spirit that "The Grudge" represents and the genuinely frightening moments that makes the film an interesting experience for Japan-o-philes and horror fans alike.
On the Scare-O-Meter, "The Grudge" rates about 4 out 5 Screams.
On Plot, it rates about 2 stars out of 5; however the concept behind the movie rates about a 4.
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