This time, the nurse gets a love interest, and there are some teasing moments of intimacy that were obviously created to satisfy American expectations of romance in just about any movie.
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Following the commercial success of "The Ring", movie distributors have been busy acquiring and releasing "the new breed of Asian horror cinema", which is psychological in nature and not dependent on extreme violence to shock viewers. There have been a run of re-makes, too. What these acquisitions and re-makes--movies like "The Eye" and "The Grudge" don´t do is replicate the artistic success of "The Ring".
"The Grudge" is both a re-make of "Ju-On: The Grudge" and a continuation of the "Ju-On" series written and directed by Takashi Shimizu. Apparently, every movie works as a stand-alone entity because they all explain what happened in the first place that causes a house to be inhabited by vengeful ghosts capable of physically interfering with the world. Based on "Ju-On: The Grudge", I wonder why Japanese audiences keep watching this series. After all, the stories involve the same damn haunted house each time at bat, and characters disappear after having anything to do with the house. You would think that someone would wise up and stop going to the blasted place.
Like "Ju-On: The Grudge", "The Grudge" begins with a nurse (Sarah Michelle Gellar) going to a house to take care of an elderly woman whose son and daughter-in-law are too busy to tend to her most of the time. The nurse sees some weird things, including a boy covered in white flour, a black cat, some smoke, and a woman with long hair covering her face. Occasionally, the boy screeches like a cat. This time, the nurse gets a love interest, and there are some teasing moments of intimacy that were obviously created to satisfy American expectations of romance in just about any movie.
The movie then follows other threads, including what happens to the nurse a few months after her first encounter with the house, what happens to a cop who investigated the murders that took place in the house in the first place, and what happens to the old woman´s daughter. Unlike "Ju-On: The Grudge", the my interest was not in the old woman´s daughter but in the nurse. Sarah Michelle Gellar plays a character who is very different from Buffy Summers in the TV series "Buffy, the Vampire Slayer". Gellar is a substantially better protagonist than the actress in "Ju-On: The Grudge", but the other American actors are all mis-cast, canceling out Gellar´s commendable performance. Therefore, "The Grudge" gets the same 6 rating as "Ju-On: The Grudge".
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[release]14049[/release]