The Unseen Movie Review

The Grudge

Japanese horror movies are all the rage at the moment. Here Japanese writer/director Takashi Shimizu cashes in on the recent success of the Americanised remake of his fellow countryman Hideo Nakata’s cult smash-hit Ringu (or Ring) by Americanising and remaking one of his own films. The fact that Shimizu’s film was itself a fairly blatant (if effective) rip-off of Nakata’s better-known horror flick simply underlines the point.

In Ringu the central conceit was that by watching a cursed video, you would be doomed to die within a week unless you passed the curse on by getting someone else to watch it. Here, the curse is there, but it doesn’t come from a video, and although it can be passed on to others, it can’t be got rid of. Once you’re cursed, that’s it – you are doomed to be consumed by an all-powerful rage which will eventually kill you and anyone unfortunate enough to cross your path. Bit of a downer, really, but makes a nice change from the typical horror fare where you know that the hero will almost always manage to find an escape route.

To be fair, this isn’t so much a remake or rip-off of just one movie, but rather takes aspects of Shimizu’s entire four-film Ju-On series alongside ideas from Nakata’s Ringu and its sequels – it even shares the same producer, Takashige Ichise, as the original Ringu. For the switch to the US a more recognisable name is needed, however, and is amply provided in the form of Executive Producer Sam Raimi – a cult horror hero thanks to his brilliant Evil Dead series, and now a mainstream super-director thanks to the success of the Spiderman franchise.

Going along with the whole English language theme, the casting of a nubile American in the lead was a given, and the choice of actress is superb – Sarah Michelle Gellar, aka Buffy the Vampire Slayer herself.

With Gellar in the lead, audience expectations are instantly thrown into turmoil. Will she be the kick-ass kung-fu superheroine of Buffy or the screaming parody of horror movie starlets of Scream 2? One thing that is guaranteed is that Gellar almost always puts in a good performance, so even though this may be a remake of a bunch of sequel rip-offs, most people going to see this will probably hope that perhaps it might not be that bad.

The trouble with this sort of remake is that the original is not only still very recent (the last Ju-On movie only came out last year), but that since the advent of DVD any horror fan can easily get hold of it. The original Japanese Ringu was far superior to the Americanised remake, despite the latter still being halfway decent, but the core audience had already seen the Japanese version, so what was the point in making another version so soon? As happened with Gus Van Sant’s remake of Hitchcock’s all-time horror classic, Psycho, hardly anyone could see the point, and those who cared about the original thought it sacrilege.

For the non-Japanese horror fan, the added sense of unease created by the unfamiliar culture and language of the original are utterly lost here. With that goes a lot of the attraction of the original film. Although it may well still be scary, and although it’s not a terrible job, why bother paying to see this at the cinema when you can buy the superior originals on DVD and watch them as often as you like? Horror films are always scarier watched at home, and this one’s missed Halloween by a week anyway.

posted by Nosemonkey @ 12:00 AM