Tag Archives: The Grudge

The Grudge: Audiences Likely To Hold a ‘Grudge’ Against This Re-Quel

Posted on by
1
Advertisements

Following the success of The Ring, Hollywood spent several years combing the J-horror catalogue for remakes. Most of these American J-horror remakes were, for lack of a better word, horrible. Takashi Shimizu’s The Grudge, a remake of his own Ju-On, didn’t wow critics, but got audiences into theatres. Now that Hollywood has remade just about every horror movie, we’ve moved on to remakes of remakes. Technically, Sam Raimi’s Ghost House Productions’s 2020 The Grudge isn’t a remake. It’s a mix of soft reboot and sequel, or ‘re-quel’, that exists in the same universe as prior Grudge movies. Not that anyone cared. In a rare show of unity, critics and audiences alike hated The Grudge. Though it didn’t necessarily bomb at the box office, we’re not likely to see a sequel any time soon.

Synopsis

After witnessing horrific events in a Japanese house, home care nurse Fiona Landers returns to her family in America. But she hasn’t come home alone. A curse born from rage has followed her. Now this curse, or ‘ju-on’, has set in motion an endless chain of tragedy. Everyone who comes into contact with the Landers’ house is similarly cursed. When young Detective Muldoon ignores her colleague’s warning and continues to investigate the seemingly unrelated incidents, she puts herself and her son in mortal danger.

The Grudge Does Too Little To Distinguish Itself From Past Movies

Early promotional material promised an intense remake. With Nicolas Pesce (Piercing) writing and directing, along with a stellar cast, The Grudge was positioned to be the first good horror movie of 2020. Yet in spite of the talent assembled, The Grudge is a listless remake that never strays far from its predecessors. Aside from re-locating the action from Japan to America, Pesce follows Ju-On’s same problematic story structure. Things bounce back and forth across multiple characters at different times. It didn’t work for Ju-On or its remake; it doesn’t work here either. We get the same basic story with different characters – people have contact with the house, bad things happen to them. Even a great cast that includes Lin Shaye, John Cho, Jacki Weaver, Andrea Riseborough (Mandy), Demian Bichir (The Nun), and Betty Gilpin (The Hunt) can’t do much when their characters’ arcs are so disjointed and similar.

Too bad The Grudge recycles the same jump scares and loud sounds for most of its runtime.

What’s particularly frustrating about The Grudge is Pesce’s reliance on lazy horror set-ups. If you’ve seen Pesce’s previous work – The Eyes of My Mother or Piercing – you know he’s a creative filmmaker with a gift for atmosphere. Too bad The Grudge recycles the same jump scares and loud sounds for most of its runtime. Though some of these scars hit their marks, The Grudge feels strangely lifeless. There’s little in the way of mood or tension, and no sense of urgency to the story. Pesce teases us with a flash of brilliance in Lin Shaye’s introduction before settling back into the same rote scares. For most of the movie, it’s a case of rinse, lather, and repeat.

A Final Act That Pulls The Grudge From The Abyss

Just as The Grudge feels like a it’s tipping into truly bad territory, Pesce shifts course in the movie’s final act. As The Grudge’s multiple stories converge, Pesce delivers on the intensity promised in the trailers. In his prior directorial efforts, Pesce exhibited an uncanny ability to contrast horrific acts with striking camera work. There’s some gruesome imagery in The Grudge’s final third, and it’s captured with some haunting cinematography. In addition, Pesce seemingly changes the movie’s tone – the last 15 minutes or so is actually quite tense and scary. And watch out for the movie’s last scene. It’s probably the best moment of the entire movie and is likely to have you wondering aloud, ‘Where was that for the first 90 minutes?’

The Grudge Delivers Too Little, Too Late

Contrary to critics’ reviews and the abysmal CinemaScore rating, The Grudge isn’t quite that bad. Why audiences and critics piled onto the movie is a little strange. To be clear, The Grudge isn’t a good movie. Nearly two-thirds of the ‘re-quel’ seems content to recycle derivative, loud jump scares. And the disjointed narrative – a problem in the original and 2004 remake – makes it feel less like a movie and more like just a series of scary images. Pesce picks things up with a genuinely disturbing, intense final act. It’s a hint at what The Grudge could have been. Unfortunately, it’s too little, too late.

THE PROFESSOR’S FINAL GRADE: C

The Ring and J-Horror: Re-Visiting the Japanese Horror Remake Craze

Posted on by
8
Advertisements

In addition to ‘Torture Porn‘ and remakes, the early 2000’s was defined by a brief fascination with J-horror. As compared to Saw and the movies it inspired, Japanese horror, or J-horror, dismissed gore in favour of atmosphere. With its stories of ghosts, or Yurei, and haunted technology, J-horror was stylistically unique. Everything from use of sound to its contortionist dead, wet girls made the sub-genre stand out from the slasher-lite renaissance that followed Scream. Not surprisingly, American studios quickly jumped on the bandwagon. In 2002, Gore Verbinski directed The Ring, a remake of Ringu. Following its success, several remakes followed, including Pulse, One Missed Call, and Dark Water. Though The Ring remains a genuinely scary movie, most of these remakes failed to make a last impact.

The Ring Re-Imagined J-Horror For Western Audiences

In spite of the poor reception to much of the North American J-horror craze, The Ring was a proper introduction to Japanese horror. Generally, remakes – particularly Westernized re-imaginings of foreign films – fall short of the original. Yet The Ring may be the rare case of a remake surpassing its predecessor. Both Hideo Nakata’s’ Ringu and Verbinski’s The Ring share author Koji Suzuki’s basic premise. Unsuspecting individuals who watch a cursed VHS tape die seven days later. Each version seeps inself in sustained dread, packing several effective jumps. But Verbinski streamlines the story in a way that preserves Suzuki’s concept, while creating a greater sense of urgency.

…The Ring, like its J-horror counterpart, understood the horror underlying its technology.

Arguably, one reason The Ring succeeded in its translation of Ringu was the remake’s understanding of its source material’s themes. Despite its use of what’s now out-dated technology, Verbinski’s remake retains both its ability to frighten and social relevancy. That is, The Ring, like its J-horror counterpart, understood the horror underlying its technology. Before his death, Brian Cox’s ‘Richard Morgan’ remarks, ‘What is it with reporters? You take one person’s tragedy and force the world to experience it, spread it like sickness.’ In 2002, this sentiment could easily have referred to the fear agenda in the 24/7 news cycle. But it’s not hard to see how The Ring foresaw the toxic nature of viral social media.

The Ring Reinforced the Viability of Remakes

Following The Ring’s success, Hollywood jumped on the J-horror bandwagon and remakes more generally. In 2003, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre proved the profitability of raiding 70’s and 80’s horror stables. And Ghost House Pictures’ Ju-On remake, The Grudge, proved The Ring wasn’t a fluke. J-horror was here to stay. Japanese director Takashi Shimizu helmed the remake of his own movie, retaining most his movie’s DNA along with its complex, multi-narrative structure. Creepy Toshio and those creaky sound effects were back. Fresh off of Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s final season, Sarah Michelle Gellar also headlined the remake. While The Grudge was a box office hit, paving the way for two sequels, critics hated it.

Truth be told, The Grudge wasn’t particularly good. Certainly, it fell far short of The Ring. Given that Shimizu directed his own remake and kept much from his original vision, it’s hard to nail down what went wrong. There are subtle differences in some of the underlying themes across both versions. Though Ju-On doesn’t focus on collective anxieties over technology, it retains J-horror’s fascination with viruses. Much of Ju-On’s horror centred around the viral nature of hate and rage, which was lost in translation. At times, The Grudge is a confusing movie that feels like it can be summed up as people who go into a haunted house and bad things happen to them. In other words, the remake misses the historical and social content in which Ju-On was produced. Comparatively, The Ring understood and successfully translated Ringu’s themes to a Western context.

‘What is it with reporters? You take one person’s tragedy and force the world to experience it, spread it like sickness.’ (The Ring, 2002)

One Missed Call and Subsequent J-Horror Remakes Miss the Point

The next J-horror remake, Dark Water, roughly The Grudge’s approximate in quality, paled in comparison to its predecessor. Some of its problem was misinterpreting what made the original Japanese version unnerving. Dark Water also just suffered from underwhelming direction. Its moody atmosphere couldn’t hide a lack of jolts and pacing that dragged. Most importantly, Dark Water marked a significant downturn in the critical and box office fortunes of J-horror remakes. Misunderstanding what made many J-horror movies so good would inevitably plague most of the Westernized remakes.

Horror has always worked best when exploiting cultural anxieties and fears. Techno-horror, though in smaller in scope, has enjoyed a niche among fans. Cultural fears over rapidly expanding technology was at the core of much of J-horror. If 2006’s Pulse, a remake of Kairo, is bad, One Missed Call was the death knell for J-horror remakes. Both movies exhibit no understanding of J-horror’s psychological examination of the effects of technology on our lives. Instead, Pulse and One Missed Call substitute jarring, distracting scores and safe PG-13 jumps in place of more introspective horror. The result was disposable horror movies that failed to resonate with audiences.

The Ring Has Outlasted the J-Horror Remake Legacy

Ultimately, the Western J-horror trend followed a remarkably similar trajectory to the 2000’s’ ‘Torture Porn’ cycle. As the 2000’s came to a close, Hollywood shifted its attention elsewhere and J-horror fizzled out. Later attempts to re-ignite the trend with 2017’s Rings and this year’s The Grudge remake (again) bombed. The J-horror remake phase really struggled with the issues that plague remakes more generally. The Ring, for instance, has stood as a classic horror movie in part because it re-imagined the source of Ringu’s horror for a Western context. It had a raison d’être. In contrast, J-horror rip-offs, like One Missed Called, used their sources as flimsy excuses to cast attractive rising stars for tween-friendly box office scares.