The Grudge (2004)
Directed by Takashi Shimizu
An American nurse living and working in Tokyo is exposed to a mysterious supernatural curse, one that locks a person in a powerful rage before claiming their life and spreading to another victim.
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What critics compared The Grudge to
It's also the most desperate effort anyone is ever likely to make at copying The Ring and a pathetically inadequate attempt at that.
"The Grudge" remake is more successful a reinterpretation than "The Ring."
The 2003 original, "Ju-on: The Grudge," is part of the new wave of Japanese horror, joined by "Ringu" (in America, "The Ring") and the Pang Brother's "The Eye."
And then we have the shadowy girl figure from The Ring make a cameo.
First came THE RING, an above average creepfest, and now we get THE GRUDGE, which director Takashi Shimizu remade from his own film JU-ON.
Like the far superior The Ring, also based on a Japanese horror sensation, The Grudge employs a cold, bleak look -- virtually all color has been drained from the film's settings, as though the celluloid were a corpse on the mortician's table.
It’s not often that a foreign director agrees to remake his or her own film in English and the results are no guarantee of quality - see (or rather, don’t) Dutch director George Sluizer’s abysmal remake of his own cult thriller The Vanishing.
It also delivers – at least most of the time – with an extremely creepy ghost reminiscent of the chilling title character from “The Grudge.”
It lacks the requisite blood, gore and severed limbs for hard-core horror fans, but "Mama" does offer the shadowy suggestiveness of some of the better Japanese horror flicks such as "The Grudge."
The film’s prologue and Mama’s origin creates something that’s more than just a haunted house movie although physically, “Mama” falls into the Japanese ghost territory of “The Ring,” “The Grudge,” et al. – long scraggly hair and movement as if every bone in her stick-thin body has been shattered and reassembled.
Some scenes reminded me of “The Grudge” (the japanese version) like the ghost’s floating frizzed out hair..and the ghost appearing from just the Hair…or from a rotting blot on a wall.
Instead, the film — which fittingly began life as a short — turns into a rote, protracted take on the imitation J-horror of The Ring and The Grudge.
It deals, as so many creepy tales from Henry James to The Grudge, with children, starting with a young tot (Roger Pr�ncep) playing with imaginary friends in his new home, a dilapidated building that was once the orphanage where his mother (Bel�n Rueda) lived.
But perhaps the source that it most unfortunately borrows from is "The Grudge", that last unraveling of the Japanese horror trend.
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It's easy to spot the Asian horror influences—the daisy-chain urban legend of The Ring here, the doomy relentlessness of The Grudge there—but It Follows owes its largest debt to John Carpenter, whose presence can be spotted in every slow pan across a leaf-blown street or uncomfortably lengthy shot of a dark hallway.
The plot mixes the curse theme of The Grudge or The Ring with the sexually transmitted plague of David Cronenberg 's Shivers, while its pulsating digital score is straight out of John Carpenter 's playbook.
The concept of an evil curse that can spread almost virally between victims owes more to J-horror classics like The Grudge and The Ring than any particular innovations on the part of the filmmakers however.
Sly reference is made to The Grudge and Hellraiser, to werewolves and zombies and fishmen and pretty much everything else known to go bump in the night.
When we see, e.g., the haunted attic and desperate recourse to a priest (The Exorcist), the spectral sisters in the corridor (The Shining), the unhinged séance (Drag Me To Hell), the disembodied demonic footprints (Paranormal Activity), the comatose patient who seems only to be half asleep (Patrick), the body of a hypnotised man used as a portal by the dead (Two Evil Eyes), and the photographs exhibiting an eerie clairvoyant power (The Grudge, Shutter), Leigh and Whannell are not merely 'paying homage to as many films as they can', but throwing us apparent interpretative breadcrumbs that lead viewers - especially, but not exclusively, genre savvy viewers - in so many different and conflicting directions (how exactly do you get from The Exorcist to Patrick to Shutter?) that all this hyper-allusiveness conjures up its own kind of uncanny.
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We've seen a few horror films produced by Raimi, most notably the U.S. version of The Grudge made by the film's Japanese director.
Watching the film is almost enough to erase the memory of slogging through all of those rotten “Saw” movies, their bloody knock-offs and the glut of Japanese horror remakes whose entrails we’ve been wading through since “The Grudge” (which Raimi produced) hit the scene in 2004.
In a month where high profile horror remakes have fallen flat ( The Grudge , Fantasy Island ), it’s a shame that The Lodge wasn’t given the same wide release.