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stop trying to remake these Asian horror classics. With "The Ring" I was almost half willing to forgive Hollywood b/c at least they got Naomi Watts.With "The Grudge," I now know the Hollywood machine is simply incapable of preserving the essence of such Asian classics. The creeepy, chalk-board-scraping, campy essence of the original movie is completely missing. The element of mystery, dread, and actual "horror" are gone, too.
Instead, Hollywood keeps trying to explain away every little facet of the story and wants to explicitly spell out every cause-and-effect, which simply kills the mood and mystery. Hollywood, we the audience are not that dumb!
Follow Ups:
Ebert: "The Grudge" has a great opening scene, I'll grant you that. Bill Pullman wakes up next to his wife, greets the day from the balcony of their bedroom, and then -- well, I, for one, was gob-smacked. I'm not sure how this scene fits into the rest of the movie, but then I'm not sure how most of the scenes fit into the movie. I do, however, understand the underlying premise: There is a haunted house, and everybody who enters it will have unspeakable things happen to them.These are not just any old unspeakable things. They rigidly follow the age-old formula of horror movies, in which characters who hear alarming sounds go to investigate, unwisely sticking their heads/hands/body parts into places where they quickly become forensic evidence. Something attacks them in a shot so brief and murky it could be a fearsome beast, a savage ghost -- or, of course, Only a Cat.
The movie, set in Japan but starring mostly American actors, has been remade by Takashi Shimizu from his original Japanese version. It loses intriguing opportunities to contrast American and Japanese cultures, alas, by allowing everyone to speak English; I was hoping it would exploit its locations, and become "Lost, Eviscerated and Devoured in Translation."
An opening title informs us that when an event causes violent rage, a curse is born that inhabits that place, and is visited on others who come there. We are eventually given a murky, b&w, tilt-shot flashback glimpse of the original violent rage, during which we can indistinctly spot some of the presences who haunt the house, including a small child with a big mouth and a catlike scream.
The house shelters, at various times, the mother of one of the characters, who spends most of her time in bed or staring vacantly into space; a young couple who move in, and an estate agent who sees that the bathtub is filled up, sticks his hand into the water to pull the plug and is attacked by a woman with long hair who leaps out of the water. This woman's hair, which sometimes looks like seaweed, appears in many scenes, hanging down into the frame as if it dreams of becoming a boom mike.
Various cops and social workers enter the house, some never to emerge, but the news of its malevolence doesn't get around. You'd think that after a house has been associated with gruesome calamities on a daily basis, the neighbors could at least post an old-timer outside to opine that some mighty strange things have been a-happening in there.
I eventually lost all patience. The movie may have some subterranean level on which the story strands connect and make sense, but it eluded me. The fragmented time structure is a nuisance, not a style. The house is not particularly creepy from an architectural point of view, and if it didn't have a crawl space under the eaves, the ghosts would have to jump out from behind sofas.
Sarah Michelle Gellar, the nominal star, has been in her share of horror movies, and all by herself could have written and directed a better one than this. As for Bill Pullman, the more I think about his opening scene, the more I think it represents his state of mind after he signed up for the movie, flew all the way to Japan and read the screenplay."
Well, it did have sum cool special effects over my Definitive Technology surround speakers.
yeah Sarah Michele Gellar was lousy, as usual, and some of the original story line was cut but they were essentially very similar movies in terms of content and style. They were directed by the same guy and it showed. The gags were very much the same in both movies. The American version was a little less amatuerish looking but IMO they were both second rate horror films with nothing new to say.
Agreed. Hope they don't get their mitts on the Tomie series. The Ring did have some good special effects, but didn't really capture the creep factor of Ringu. Ring Virus (Korean version) probably spelled out the story best, but in such slow painful detail that it was like a long "director's cut" version of the Hollywood film minus the special effects. Still, it is interesting to compare all three of them.The Grudge wasn't bad and had some nice visuals here and there, but Ju-on was definitely creepier. Think I'm becoming a fan of Japanese horror flicks... even the really fun, odd-ball frollicks like Moon over Tao (samura, aliens, monsters and wizards all rolled into one film).
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They need to stop redoing them. They got lucky with the The Ring, but The Grudge sucked, and I didn't bother with Dark Water. I *dread* the remake of Kairo/Pulse.
Jack
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