PREMIERE.COM'S REVIEW (posted 10/21/04)


More redundant than Gus Van Sant's shot-for-shot remake of Psycho, more unnecessary than the Blair Witch sequel, and more terrifying than the thought of Paris Hilton revisiting the classic House of Wax, Takashi Shimizu's The Grudge is a near carbon-copy of its Japanese original (Ju-On) with the same director, the same cast, and the same locations. The only notable difference is the addition of American actors to the Tokyo-set horror story, namely raspy-voiced scream queen Sarah Michelle Gellar.

In theory, the instant-remake idea shows some promise. Assuming the original hadn't been theatrically released in this country, why not suppress it and empower the director to re-create the film for Western audiences as he would if he'd had the right resources the first time around? It's a theory I wish American distributors had tried with The Blair Witch Project and a dozen other amateur indies, snapping up the films at Sundance and allowing their creators to try again on a bigger budget (put the original on the B side of the DVD and let purists argue about how Hollywood compromised its integrity).

But American audiences have seen Ju-On. And The Grudge just goes to show why remaking it is such a frivolous idea: What's the use in wasting so much energy if the filmmakers aren't going to fix what was wrong with the movie in the first place? The original features some of the all-time scariest images ever put on film (like a woman rinsing her hair in the shower, only to find a cold, disembodied hand clutching her scalp), but it strings them together in a confusing, nonsequential fashion. The premise was simple — walk into the haunted house where a mother and child were murdered, and their spirits will hunt you down wherever you go — but the movie made no sense. There was no pattern to the murders, other than that each was designed to find new and creative ways to creep out the audience.

The remake features the same surreal visuals and blood-curdling sound design as the original — like the nightmare visions of a twisted music-video director — but there's still no logical justification for anything that happens. The filmmakers have supplied Gellar, who drifts through the film with all the charisma of a blow-up doll, with a boyfriend whose sole function is to state the obvious, and yet even he can't provide an explanation. Instead, we get an English-language delivery device for distinctly Japanese scares. Some things just don't translate.

—Peter Debruge