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Here's a much better review of the movie than anything I could come up with. Writing credits go to Rich Kyanka of SomethingAwful.com
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My girlfriend and I recently made the tragic mistake of refusing to not see the movie "The Grudge" around 7:30 PM last Friday. In case you're out of the pop culture loop and you somehow missed the many, many commercials for this fine feature-length film about a boy who accidentally swallows a cat despite the protests of his rapidly shedding mother, it conveys the harrowing tale of a haunted house which murders roughly half of Japan and causes Sarah Michelle Gellar to adopt a facial expression best described as "somewhat concerned or possibly constipated." I'd like to offer up a mini-review of this wonderful American film remake of a Japanese film remake of a made-for-television movie which cost $19 to produce, including the cost of dustbusters to clean up the tumbleweeds of black hair which constantly rolled through the set, knocking over backdrops and crushing small children.
Sarah Michelle Gellar plays the role of Sarah Michelle Gellar in the Hollywood remake of the Japanese horror film "Ju-On: The Grudge." When a woman and her small child are murdered by their very hairy husband, their ghosts prowl throughout the house and downtown Tokyo, killing every single person who enters for some reason which is explained in a scene that can best be described as "very white and blue." Every horror film produced since "The Ring" has taken advantage of the glorious "white and blue" cinematic technique which guarantees their film will be at least 238% scarier, as it's a proven fact the colors blue and white are the most terrifying of the color wheel. For example, Booberry is white and blue and that guy is scary as all hell. I mean, a ghost that haunts breakfast cereals while wearing a derby and bow tie? Enough said.
The famous white and blue film technique is very simple and cost-effective for even the most amateur of Hollywood directors. Basically the filmmakers shoot their movie, edit it, and then run it through a giant rusty machine built by Martians which miraculously transforms every color into either blue or white. Red apples? Hope you like blue apples! Hey, is that a rainbow over there? No, it's a big blue floating horseshoe which has traces of ghost semen in it! I love blue and white, please Hollywood, keep eliminating every goddamn color of the rainbow because when I pay money to see a movie, I want it to look like I'm watching the reflection of my television set showing static inside a pan of antifreeze!
Bill Pullman has a wonderful supporting role as "some guy who does something" and kicks the film off into high gear by killing himself in an attempt to escape being in the movie. His death also marks the first of many unintentional comedic moments that causes the audience to laugh uncontrollably, a hallmark of any great horror film. Gellar is visiting Japan, taking courses at a local university when her boss, Ted Raimi once again playing the role of a man whose face was mutilated in a printing press, gives her a job taking care of an old woman who sleeps in the aforementioned haunted house of doom. Somehow the old woman has an immunity to ghosts that Japanese girls and married couples lack, and she takes advantage of this by staring at the bedroom wall for a good three days or so while a couple ghosts walk around and toss Snickers bar wrappers all over the floor.
Gellar soon discovers that there's something strange going on in the haunted house, mostly due to the fact that it's haunted but also because roughly a half a million people have been murdered there and are decaying all over the place. After cleverly using the Internet and asking a Japanese detective why he was standing on a roof, she mashes the pieces of the puzzle together and realizes the house contains restless spirits of a mother and her son, both murdered by their husband years ago. It turns out that when you die in Japan, and you were experiencing some tremendously powerful emotion at the time, your ghost haunts the area where you were murdered because, well, it's Japan and that's just how things work. So if you're some really fat dude and die from a heart attack while eating a cheeseburger, your spirit will float around and make everybody who approaches very hungry for McDonalds. Likewise if you die using the Internet, your ghost will start making people act retarded and talk nonstop about Firefox and the .ogm file extension.
Soon sleepy blue ghosts (not Booberry) begin appearing all over Japan and somehow kill every single person who ever entered the house except the extras who weren't important enough to warrant their own death scenes. I think they only haunt you if you physically walk in through the door; that is, if you're playing in the yard, you're probably safe. Or if you check their power meter outside, you're safe too. But if you walk in to fix the cable or you're there to deliver some flowers, then you're screwed. "Never deliver flowers to a haunted house" is one of the most prevalent mottos in the floral industry. To make matters worse, getting killed by a ghost makes you become a ghost as well, and then you are forced to murder Sam Raimi's brother, a man whose fight-or-flight reflex fell off a horse during an episode of "Xena: Princess Warrior." Gellar, who visited the ghost house to pick up trash that the dead Japanese girl before her left behind once she was murdered in a closet, realizes that the she's next on the ghost's hit list, so she must act quickly and do something before something else happens and it's too late to do something else.
Unfortunately, the ghost already has her targeted, and it causes very scary things to occur like grow a hand out of her hair (which disappears before she can notice it) and have her ghastly son hang out on every floor of an apartment complex while she uses the elevator (and never sees him). I've always wondered why ghosts in movies were so goddamn ineffective. I mean, they spend a ton of time ensuring scary things appear behind characters and in mirrors, but the people they're trying to scare never even see them. If I was a ghost and I was attempting to scare somebody, I wouldn't devote all my energy to doing crazy stupid things behind my target; I'd make damn well sure they saw me when I was materializing and sticking my own jawbone up my ass while projecting morbid images of Tori Spelling's father with my hair.
The audience seemed to laugh more watching "The Grudge" than they did during "Napoleon Dynamite," although to be honest, folks seemed to cringe in disgust more frequently while watching "Napoleon Dynamite." Modern Asian cinema is known for creepy visuals, dark atmospheres, and terribly nonsensical plotlines which constantly require the viewer to suspend disbelief. Modern American horror is known for it's white and blue film, sound effects suddenly playing at 100 million decibels to signify something scary has happened and you should therefore be very scared, and telling stories about a bunch of annoying retarded teenagers figuring out mysteries by using the Internet. Combine both together and you get... well, I'm not exactly sure what you get, but it wasn't very good. The only frightening part of the movie occurred in the first 15 minutes, before I grew accustomed to seeing the ghost appear every 10 seconds, dictating exactly what to expect and when to expect it. "Horror" does not mean eliminating every non-blue color of the rainbow and flashing clips of a cat boy emitting screeching noises in a closet at ear-shattering levels, and the only "grudge" I had during this movie was one against Sam Raimi for tricking me into spending my money to watch a bastardized Asian horror film processed in Smurfette's vulva.
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