THE GRUDGE (2004) Buffy in Japan...oh boy The Grudge is summed up easily enough - the house is haunted and everybody who goes into the house meets a terrible death. Inevitably we will be shown the night of horror that made the house haunted in the first place, and it will be explained to us that the house must be destroyed to prevent further damage to Tokyo's less-rapidly-expanding population. In a movie which gives us one bizarre grotesquerie or death after another for most of its length, I was expecting something a little less anticlimactic in the second half when we finally got to hear about the razor-thin plot that strings them all together. The Grudge is a remake of a Japanese movie which I haven't seen, but it has the same director, Takashi Shimizu. The only other example of this I can think of is The Vanishing, where George Sluizer directed his own English-language American-cast remake with a very different ending which, while clever and kinetic, was timid and utterly powerless compared to that of the original. I don't know of any major changes here beyond the language and the cast, though one wonders what the point is of setting a movie in Japan where almost all the major characters (one cop excepted) are white Americans, especially when all of them seem to speak fluent Japanese and experience no apparent culture shock - it might as well have been set in New York. Sarah Michelle Gellar has all the horror cred in the world with people under a certain age, and none at all with people over that age. I don't know what that age is, but it's under 31. She's the top-billed star here, though she has nothing to do other than look frightened. Clea DuVall is an actor who usually makes me pay just a little closer attention, but she's just more meat on the hoof here, and Ted Raimi is just a giveaway that somehow Sam must be involved (executive producer). There are a fair number of good "oogy" moments in The Grudge, what with the malevolent stair-descending phantoms, Bill Pullman's hilariously abrupt demise about thirty seconds into the film, and that cool moment in the shower where the hand appears in the back of Gellar's head. No matter how many times she turns around, she still can't see it! There isn't much of a plot connecting them all though, and you know me - I'm not much for these "logic of a nightmare" movies. I need a sense of narrative momentum (my failing, sure, why not), and this movie doesn't demonstrate any until it's about two-thirds over. Sure made a lot of money though, partly on the draw of Gellar (whose top billing is sure to make any PG-13 horror movie a slam dunk), and partly what seems to be a strong, second-hand reputation - I don't know many people who've seen this movie themselves, but they all tell me that someone they know saw it and said it was soooooooo scary! BACK TO THE G's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE