Scary and genuinely unsettling, presenting the latest cult Asian horror to get a Hollywood makeover…
Rika (Megumi Okina) believes she’s just doing a colleague a favour when she makes a house visit to an elderly mother living with a young couple, but she gets a lot more than she bargained for.
The house itself is under a curse, unleashed when a jealous husband murdered his wife and son. Based on the ancient Japanese legend of the ‘Ju-on’, a vengeful spirit that affects everyone who comes in to contact with the house (and anyone else unlucky enough to get in the way for that matter).
Pretty soon folk are dropping like flies, and there doesn’t seem to be anything that can stop it…
Director Takashi Shimizu has a real knack for making us feel unpleasant right from the start. You can almost smell the rotting matter, feel the hairs on your neck stand up. And that’s before anything unnatural has happened! There’s only one word for it, ‘icky’. Plain icky, that’s what it is. From the beginning, we know something horrible is going to happen, and it’s gonna be real soon.
We meet the victims one by one, each heralded by a title card. Presenting each of their stories in a wonderfully circuitous manner, events overlap and we see the events leading up to previous stories. Yet this device soon seems to lose steam as it stays with the characters a little too long without progressing them, or any hint of enlightenment.
Director Shimizu then drops the mother of all ‘mulligans’, as ex-police investigator Yuji Toyama (Yoji Tanaka, Kill Bill vol. 1) sees his daughter Izumi (Misa Uehara) from some ten years in future when he tries to destroy the house once and for all. The film then follows Izumi at that age, picking up some of the characters from before, but with little or no explanation as to what happened in the years between. Since Donnie Darko we might all be a little more accepting of films that try their hardest to confuse the audience, but this near David Lynch sort of device will almost definitely lost lose them completely. (NO, I do not need everything explained - but sometimes I do like things to make sense, at least sort of…
Shimizu’s weakness is his script. It lacks the strong, structural narrative of Hideo Nakata’s Ringu and Dark Water. The powers of the Ju-on seem to change for no other reason than as and when the director starts getting bored filming the same thing.
Like most of viewers of this film, am at something of a disadvantage - I haven’t seen the first two films in this series. Most will not be aware that Shimizu originally shot two films based on the Ju-on in 2000 for Japanese TV. Though he obviously intended Ju-on: The Grudge to stand alone as a big budget remake cum sequel - rather like Sam Raimi did with Evil Dead 2 - he rather too freely glosses over the history of the house and how the curse works. Which doesn’t exactly help the audience keep up with all the goings on. Would seeing these earlier versions of the story would help? I doubt it, but currently getting hold of them is nigh on impossible.
Of course, Shimizu has gotten to direct his OWN remake starring ex-Buffy Sarah Michelle Gellar, produced by Sam Raimi. Almost an identikit version of the original, he’s not only used the same sets, but also cast Takako Fuji in the role of the vengeful spirit - She’s played the part since the first Ju-on TV movie! It would be interesting to see what concessions, if any, he’s made to an American audience.
Yes, Ju-On: The Grudge IS really scary and unsettling, but if you prefer a stronger plot see Hideo Nakata’s far superior Dark Water… before the Hollywood remake comes out!
DVD details
Distributor: IVL Films (Hong Kong)
A good transfer for picture and sound, and solid subtitles, but NOTHING in the way of extras - if you're gonna get this film your money might be better spent with the UK or Korean 2 disc sets.
