Should i watch the grudge

An American exchange student Sarah Michelle Gellar as Karen in Japan is sent out as a substitute for the caregiver of a woman suffering from some dementia. The woman is an American, living with her son and daughter-in-law, and with a daughter living nearby. It turns out that the house was once the site of great rage and anguish, giving rise to a curse that attacks anyone who enters.

Shimizu makes good use of shifts in time to pull us into what little story there is. The usual ghost activities messing up the house, stalking people are updated a little bit. These ghosts can call a cell phone and get from the lobby to the 16th floor very quickly. There are some creepy images and gotcha scares, but nothing can disguise the fact that this is just a "who gets it next and how does he get it" movie.

Too much of it is familiar, though, from the mysteriously feral child to the backwards-crab-crawling guy looking horrified at some looming presence. You know if a bloody jaw with teeth shows up, eventually we're going to have to find out where it came from. Indeed, the biggest problem with the film is that, like many American remakes, it feels it has to explain too much. We get a helpful little ghost re-enactment of the whole story.

Horror movies are much more horrifying when they leave the explanation to that part of our imagination where our own deepest fears lie, so that each of us can feel personally unsettled right where we live. Families can talk about the enduring appeal of ghost stories and their own views on whether strong emotions can continue to "occupy" a place.

They might also want to find out more about efforts to investigate real-life reports of ghosts and curses. This was a remake of a Japanese film, made by the same director. Why do you think the movie was remade, and what would be the challenges in not only remaking a movie, but also remaking a movie that you, the director, have already made?

A trope of the "haunted house" horror movie is that the characters, unlike anyone else with the least bit of common sense, don't flee the house posthaste after the first scary moment, but instead choose to investigate further. Why do horror movie writers allow their characters to have such poor judgment? Common Sense Media's unbiased ratings are created by expert reviewers and aren't influenced by the product's creators or by any of our funders, affiliates, or partners.

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The Grudge. Grisly ghost story has lots of violence, scares. PG 96 minutes. Rate movie. Watch or buy. Based on 26 reviews. Based on 78 reviews. I also happened to really like The Ring, so it was a good time for horror in my opinion. The original Saw came out the same year. What's not to love? I definitely think so. The Grudge was a staple horror during that time and is a really good J-horror crossover.

Maybe it's not scary by today's standards, but back then it was and might even be today if you're new to the genre. It's actually one of the few horror remakes that I think is better than the original.

The Grudge Review Worth Watching? It's unhealthy, really. All Horror - Discover new horror movies, create and share your own horror movie lists and curate watchlists from thousands of titles, new and old. Would it Kill You to Subscribe? Get horror news, reviews and movie recommendations every Friday! We respect your email privacy. Seriously, signup for our newsletter or Freddy will hunt you in your dreams. Horror News. Horror Reviews.

Toggle navigation. It never forgives. It never forgets. Grudge franchise ranked Worst to First "When someone dies in the grip of a powerful rage, a curse is born. Yo Adrian. Support adrian. The Brain that Wouldn't Die Review. Ad — content continues below. The two central characters from the Ju-On franchise first appear in these two short films from Takashi Shimizu.

Butoh is a mysterious type of avant-garde theatre from postwar Japan that uses contortion, body paint and expressive, uncanny movements to create intense performances, often relating to taboo subject matter. Ju-On: The Curse finds Shimizu experimenting with the unusual chronology and fragmented storytelling that would define the franchise, introducing us to the backstory of his two ghosts through a series of six linked segments.

We are introduced to a house in Tokyo and the horrible event that kicks the story off, as artist Takeo Saeki murders his wife Kayako, son Toshio and cat Mar in a jealous rage. Now, anyone who enters the house becomes cursed and dies at the hands of their vengeful spirits. The scares from the original shorts are both recycled here but, given the additional context, take on a deeper meaning. Ju-On: The Curse is by no means a perfect film.

Get the best of Den of Geek delivered right to your inbox! The Curse 2 is a short and curious sequel that was shot back-to-back with The Curse. That said, this one re-edits some of those original vignettes and arguably makes them more effective. Both Curse films were very successful in Japan, so Shimizu was asked to bring Kayako and Toshio out of the video world and onto the big screen, which he did with style. If you only watch one Ju-On film, make it this one. The Grudge has the indefinable cinematic alchemy of a classic.

Something just works. There are so many iconic moments and you can feel his glee at scaring the audience. It all builds to the most effective climax in the franchise, the infamous scene in which Kayako descends the staircase.

The over-arching plot is less abstract than usual and focuses on a film crew who enter the Saeki house to investigate all the deaths that have occurred there. With the series now becoming something of a worldwide cult phenomenon, the US remake was inevitable.

Ring and, to a lesser extent, Pulse had already done great numbers, so Sam Raimi and Ghost House produced this English-language reworking of Ju-On: The Grudge without much fear of it failing. To their credit, they brought in Takashi Shimizu to direct and this helped preserve the purity of his vision, making it one of the less blasphemous remakes.

This initially mirrors the Rika storyline from the original Ju-On film but is soon wrestled into a more conventional storyline, sacrificing the pervading surrealism of the originals for a straight-ahead ghost story. In terms of the scares, this is like a Greatest Hits compilation as Shimizu takes all the best moments from the preceding films and recreates them within the new plot.