(Review originally written at 23 July 2005)
This movie is very good looking. The 'ghosts' are extremely creepy looking and the sound effects are horrifying. Everything a good horror movie needs you might say. Well, not exactly, unfortunately the movie also suffers from some bad storytelling and a 'scare' overdose that take away a lot of the movie its tension and scary moments. It makes "The Grudge" a good looking but lacking horror movie, that perhaps still has more goods as bads but still remains a bit of a disappointing movie with lots of missed opportunities.
Problem is that they basically tried to put a scary moment in literally almost every scene. I don't know why but after a while some of the scene's loose their power to scare you. Maybe its because you get used to the atmosphere and the scare moments of the movie, or something like that. Instead of making the movie scary it made the movie predictable and too much of the same the whole time.
The movie its story is told in a completely illogically way. the time-line is very messy, it jumps from the present to what happened a few hours or days or years before to some totally different characters. It's not that it becomes difficult to follow but it's just that it feels pointless and unneeded that the story is told in that particular way. It also distracts from the main story line and the main character played by the boring and untalented acting Sarah Michelle Gellar. As a matter of fact, the story is told in such a way that the main character is perhaps only on screen for 50% of its running time, at the most.
Big plus of me was Ted Raimi in a typical Ted Raimi role. His more famous brother Sam was one of the producers of the movie. Too bad Sam Raimi didn't directed this, I'm sure he would had made something more of this movie.
It's all too bad, cause "The Grudge" is a well made movie that had lots of potential to become just as good as the other Japenese horror movie remake "The Ring". The movie however heavily suffers from the makers ambition to make this the ultimate scary movie. You might say that this movie died of a scare overdose.
Still of course the movie still remain perfectly watchable thanks to the visual look of it and some nice sequences.
6/10
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