The Grudge is directed and written by Nicolas Pesce and is a reboot of The Grudge franchise which has gained somewhat of a cult following since its original Japanese feature Ju-On in 2003.
First of all I am a fan of the original Japanese film and even a fan of the 2004 American remake. I thought the films were not particularly scary but more creepy and tense in places than most modern horror films which is nowaday just cheap jumpscares and gore with some exceptions. The films are compared to another Japanese horror The Ring and mostly the reviews are less favorable than the ring e but I actually prefer the grudge but this reboot is something of nightmares and not in a good way. It’s one of the worst horror films i have ever seen…allow me to explain.
The film opens up with the quote “When someone dies in the grip of a powerful rage…A curse is born. The curse gathers in that place of death and those who encounter it will be consumed by its fury”. Now if I were to have died in the cinema soon after this film finished then I would have cursed the VUE cinema I was at and my fury would have consumed everyone in the screening and it was packed.
The film ticks every box when it comes to generic horror films and even my girlfriend, who is pretty terrible with watching horror films and doesn’t really know much about the ins and outs of film making, agreed that the film was pretty poorly made and also wasn’t scary or unnerving in the slightest. Honestly it’s really really bad and I will explain why but if you want to end reading the review here the guy in front of me in the cinema summed the film up pretty accurately when the credits started to roll he shouted out loud “That’s it? What a load of bollocks”.
First of all here is my synopsis of the film ; Andrea Riseborough who plays a detective, who has just had a tragedy in her life and moves to a new town with her young son, just like you’ve seen before she gets a sense something in a case is not quite right. She is warned to leave it alone, but she ignores the advice and does what she wants then BOOM things go bad and she needs to try to stop this thing once and for all.
The first sin the film makes is have the original curse start in Japan at the same home as the original film despite being a reboot. They have the lady who the curse wants to kill leaves Japan as something feels off and travels back to her home in the good ol’ U.S of A. However, the curse goes with her and then starts to manifest in her home and gets her to kill her entire family. Now this is all well and good beside it doesn’t make any sense as we see a girl that looks like the original Cursed Soul Kayako Saeki but then when the family dies they become the new apparitions…sooooo where does Kayako go? back to japan? Who knows but they did this so they could have a fully American cast and make their own original story but it doesn’t quite go that way. This means we have a boring mess that relies on flashbacks that add nothing to the story of our main characters and due to its reliance on flashbacks the film has a rushed finale and plot points that make no sense. It would have made the film a little better if they had focused on them a little more.
For example, the curse kills this family and they become the new apparitions as i mentioned above, so as the opening quote suggest they must have died in a grip of a powerful rage except now they seem a happy family that all get on and love each other. The filmmakers must have realised that they didn’t give anyone in this family a reason to manifest a curse in their house so in the last 10 minutes we see that the husband hit his wife ‘once’ so she bashed his skull in but if this is The Grudge it may have made more sense but she was already trying to kill him when he hit her so…it was self defence? Or just a vision the curse wanted the detective to see? Or just a lazy “wait a moment that doesn’t make any sense, through in a plot thread about domestic violence to give her something to be mad about”. Yeah i think that’s it.
I could possibly see that the daughter and husband could be the new face of the curse as i’d be pretty pissed too if my wife showed up and beat my ass to death and drown my daughter in the bathtub but its so poorly executed and there is no background to it the audience is left to assume things happened but not given any point in the timeline where it could have happened so it’s sort of left like “it doesn’t matter, just believe us it makes sense”. It doesn’t.
The film is really poorly shot, the jump scares are awful. For example John Cho is looking in a bathtub and the scene plays out like this:
- First shot of John Cho
- First shot of Bath tub
- Second shot of John Cho
- Second shot of Bathtub
- Third shot of John Cho
- Third shot of Bathtub and monster jumps out.
The film plays this 3 shot system for jump scares all the time. Everytime we see something for a second time you betcha that there’s a jump scare so it doesn’t make you jump you’re just playing peekaboo with the screen “awww there he is, He’s a scary little fella” there is no tension. Just a let down. Another way they have “Scary scenes” is having empty space to either side of the screen if a character is too the far left of the shot and not in the centre then by god something will jump out of the right side of the screen.
The structure is the scariest part of this film we have an opening 20 minutes of Detective Muldoon discovering the curse then the rest of the film is flashbacks with the occasional 5 minutes back in the present. Then it’s more flashbacks and then the flashbacks end with 15 minutes left of the film and nothing major has happened to our main character yet. Now they just cram everything that we wanted to see in to the last moments and it sucks Nicolas Pesce has clearly never read “Definitive guide to screenwriting” by Syd Field as there is a whole section on pacing and story shown with a simple graph that even the most inexperienced people could understand.
The Grudge reboot is a terrible Horror movie and just a bad movie in general. It is the first bad movie i have seen this year out of 7 which is surprising as the first couple months of the year is usually a dumping ground for flops but so far so good until the latter. It is poorly acted with just generic dialogue and most of the time its just people sat around feeling sorry for themselves.
Final Score.
Title:The Worst.
the film insults the audience by delivering an unscary and boring ‘horror’ that sets itself up for a sequel that I definitely will not be seeing. If there is anything to hold a Grudge to its just how bad The Grudge Reboot is
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