Dylan Holds A "Grudge"

American remakes of Japanese horror films have a solid track record going back to the original Godzilla in 1954.  Most recently we had The Ring, an excellent addition to the genre that touched a national nerve and went on to gross $129 million at the box office.  (As of this writing, The Ring is the top grossing horror remake of all time.)  One would assume that The Grudge, a remake of an intensely scary and successful Japanese film, with a solid cast working with the director of the original film, and with minimal changes to the actual story, would make for a gripping, memorable horror film experience.  To assume this would, unfortunately, be wrong.

The opening scene of the film is also its most effective.  Peter (Pullman), an American professor, greets his wife and steps out onto his balcony overlooking Tokyo to greet the day.  As his wife calls out to him he – well, it is the kind of shocking scene that gets your attention, perfect for opening the movie.  It is something to build on, but the film goes nowhere with it.  Perhaps Peter was treated to an early cut of this movie and didn’t like what he saw.

From there we are introduced to Karen (Gellar), an American student living in Tokyo with her boyfriend Doug (Behr).  Karen gets a job as a caretaker for an older woman after the usual sitter disappears.  Karen is not in the house long before the horrors there become apparent.  Before anything is fleshed out, we move into a series of flashbacks that is more intrusive than anything else.  The film becomes unintentionally funny and repetitive, as one unsuspecting person after another enters the house, some of them never to return.  The sad part of it all is that a story like this is loaded with interesting possibilities, most of which are utterly wasted.

The cast is okay, going through the motions.  Gellar, the “star” of the film, does well with what she has, but she does not have a lot of screen time and even less in the way of dialogue.  Jason Behr, proving the theory that he has all the range of a roof shingle, does little more here than we saw him do as a teenage alien in TV’s Roswell.  Ryo Ishibashi is solid as Detective Nakagawa, but it is difficult to get around just how awkward his English is.  (To be fair here, Ishibashi is a terrific actor, as evidenced in Takashi Miike’s Audition, Suicide Circle, and Takeshi Kitano’s Brother, among others.  He has a strong screen presence that is wasted on The Grudge.)  The lone stand out here is Bill Pullman, but he has only limited screen time.  Even the direction is awkward, which is interesting considering that the same director made a Japanese television version of The Grudge, a TV sequel, the original theatrical version, and the sequel to the theatrical version.  One would think that the same man bringing the fifth incarnation of his film to the screen would be a little more assured than this.

The Grudge is the kind of film with which one quickly looses patience.  The story is choppy and disconnected and ultimately goes nowhere.  In the end we are left with nothing more than a scattershot mess of a film whose slap-it-together overwhelms a story brimming with potential.