WHERE do I begin to account for where it all goes wrong in The Grudge?
And before you scribble in to tell me how great it is, I'd advise you to pop down the local video shop and rent a) the original or b) anything in the vein of Nightmare On Elm Street.
Because they, unlike Takashi Shimizu in this murder of his own original film, have some clue how to put plot, scares, blood, death and coherency all in a pot together and get a superb end result.
This remake is unusual in that it retains its original location, Japan. But now we have a nice Caucasian pretty lady to appeal to a wider box office, Sarah Michelle Gellar, who plays the key female, Karen.
Recently relocated to the country with her dull boyfriend, she pops along to help out an elderly client as part of her job as a care worker.
When she arrives at said house, she finds all sorts of weird shenanigans going on, and the sudden appearance of a spooky female figure sets her off on a mission to discover what's at the root of it all.
The key concept of the film is that when a person dies as a result of extreme rage, the rage remains, and this is all that an audience is given to desperately cling on to throughout.
Plot holes here are on a Michelle McManus scale. Not only do the bad guys have the ability to phone people up, but they can also disappear completely, suck souls out, break jaws, appear anywhere and dissolve into water. There are seemingly no patterns and no limitations.
And an uncomfortable, echoed element of Ringu leads me to believe that you just can't come back and haunt people in Japan without a long head of black hair.
From the decent beginning to the appallingly poor end, this is a hugely disappointing non-scary movie, a series of sharp shocks which abruptly fade to black before everyone twigs how big a fuss this is over absolutely nothing.
Terrible.
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