Sam Rami has made some of the most incredible movies of our time. That being said, his particular niche was horror and the Evil Dead series truly made him a master of very cheap and sometimes hilarious horror. Thankfully the Spiderman movies have launched him big. Michelle Gellar has a career in film due to the amazingly well written series Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Together they have lent their names to some good projects. The Grudge is not one of them.
Gellar plays Karen, an exchange student in Tokyo. As part of her social work program, she visits an elderly American woman suffering from dementia. When she arrives at the house, Karen finds the woman alone and the place in disarray. All the classic signs of a hunted house are there. Faulty plumbing clogged with body parts, spooky noises, cats and other unimaginative things.
Actually The Grudge is yet another remake of a Japanese hit dumbed down for the American audience. Shall We Dance was last week's offering. Granted, this is billed as a haunted house story, so you immediately give up any right to yell "Just get out of the house! Ugh, you deserve to die." However in an interesting twist this ghost-entity- grudge-whatever it was, it could leave the house and kill you at your home, office, what have you. The ending is connect-the-dot obvious and if it weren't for the superior directing one's time might be better spent watching paint dry.
