Director: Takashi Shimizu
Starring: Sarah Michelle Gellar, Jason Behr, William Mapother, Clea DuVall, KaDee Strickland, Grace Zabriskie, Bill Pullman, Ryo Ishibashi, Rosa Blasi, Ted Raimi

- Reviewed by Linda

From Ringu to Dark Water to The Grudge, many Asian horror films have played to one of my personal phobias: wet hairballs. I don't know what it is, but when one of our hapless characters reaches into a sink, a tub, a well, or whatever, and comes up with their hand entangled with a snarly mess of wet black hair, well... I kind of throw up a little. It just ain't right.

And speaking of images like this appearing in multiple Asian horror movies, that is part of the nagging problem that I had with The Grudge. Sure, Japanese director Takashi Shimizu is remaking his own film Ju-On: The Grudge (2002) with a mostly English-speaking cast, but it is not just himself that he is borrowing his material from. The Grudge has a lot of style, but Shimizu owes more than a little inspiration credit to Hideo Nakata, creator of the Ringu series, which was a horror sensation starting with the original film in 1998.

Sarah Michelle Gellar plays a social worker-in-training, who has accompanied her boyfriend (a VERY pretty Jason Behr) to go to university in Tokyo. She gets assigned to visit an ailing American woman, whose previous student-caretaker just met an untimely demise after investigating strange sounds in the house's attic (Sarah doesn't know this, of course).

As anyone can tell, something just ain't right with this house. Seems the place is always trashed despite the fact that the old woman is bedridden and the woman's son and daughter in law are mysteriously never around, and there are strange scratching sounds coming from behind a taped-shut closet door (don't open it! don't.... DON'T!!!). Let's just say, there are bad vibes.

Without giving too much away, The Grudge serves up its chills in the good old-fashioned way: messing with your mind, rather than splattering the screen with blood. There is a ghostly (wet-haired) specter-woman who crawls towards her victims, mouth agape as a black hole. There's a little boy who yowls like a cat. There are creaky ceilings. There are ghostly, disturbing forms that appear on surveillance cameras. And there are split second images of things that just shouldn't be there (that of course the characters never quite see). Much of this is great, but I had a sneaking feeling I'd seen much of it before (see the Ringu series). In face, the poster of The Grudge is a blatant ripoff of Ringu's original poster, crazed-eyeball glaring behind wet hair and all.

Despite the familiarity of the chills (which, I admit, are well done), The Grudge also suffers from a baffling timeline involving several subplots. There's Gellar's character, there's the storyline of the young couple with mother-in-law who bought the house, there's a flashback to the demise of an American professor (played by Bill Pullman), and there's the original story of the family whose slaughter scarred the house with bad vibes in the first place. These stories are presented in a somewhat haphazard order. It was difficult to tell which events took place over a day, three days, three months, or three years. Transitions often left me with a confused, "Wha?"

But for those viewers who have never seen any Asian-style horror films, there are some good scares to be found in The Grudge. It is not a bad introduction to the psychological chills of the genre, which I find so much more disturbing and nightmare-inducing than any slasher film. Despite the storyline's problems and familiar chills, as soon as the credits rolled, I announced to my friend that I'd have to go home and watch several episodes of Sex and the City to clear my head of images before I went to bed.

Wet hairballs. Eeeecccccchhhhh.

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