International Center for Ethereal Containment and Control

I didn't expect much from the Grudge. Whenever a trailer has difficulty in explaining the plot, I lower my expectations. "When someone dies in the grip of a powerful rage, a curse is born" seems a bit awkward. The "grip" of a "powerful" rage? Not a really bad rage? What exactly is a rage's grip anyway?

This challenge, the failure to explain exactly the plot behind the horror, saps the terror from the movie. I should warn readers now that I'm going to make a lot of comparisons to The Ring, a movie that scared the living crap out of me, because the two have a lot of similarities. We are venturing into Spoilerland.

So let's talk about similarities. Although The Grudge is most certainly not a copy of The Ring, there are enough similarities to make comparisons inevitable. Besides the simplistic titles ("The NOUN, a new Japanese horror, coming to a theater near you!"), both films feature crawling girls with long hair covering their faces, a viral curse, and ghosts that defy the traditional boundary of staying in their respective haunted houses. The climax is even similar: both heroines struggle to save the male love interest before he too becomes infected.

The primary difference between the two films is style. Where The Ring creates a set of rules and then systematically breaks them (or, depending on your perspective, doesn't break them at all but stops reminding you about them), The Grudge isn't encumbered by such rules, to its detriment. This makes the movie hard to follow. In addition, the scenes unfold out of order, explaining what happened to each victim and thereby illustrating the original murder, Memento style.

Here's what I was able to piece together from the deleted scenes: Kayako (Takako Fuji) and Takeo (Takashi Matsuyama) Saeki move into a new home with their son, Toshio (Yuya Ozeki) and his pet cat. While attending school, Kayako becomes infatuated with Peter Kirk (Bill Pullman), her professor. When Takeo discovers her many love notes to the professor, he goes on a berserk rage, murdering Kayako, Toshio, and the cat. Then he kills himself.

The curse kicks in pretty quickly after that. Peter discovers something is wrong and visits the house, only to be infected by the curse, which eventually causes him to throw himself off a rooftop.

Three years later, Karen Davis (Sarah Michelle Gellar) and her pretty-boy boyfriend Doug (Jason Behr) move to Japan as part of an exchange program. Karen is a healthcare worker who specializes in taking care of the elderly. A house now inhabited by the Williams family, including Matthew (William Mapother), his wife Jennifer (Clea DuVall), and Matthew's elderly mother Emma (Grace Zabriskie). When the regular healthcare worker doesn't show up for work one day, Karen is called in to pick up the slack. She's got a new assignment that just happens to be in that Saeki house...

The beauty of The Ring was the development of its characters. It established people who, when faced with spreading evil or the death of their family, gladly chose the greater evil. It dove into the complicated relationship between two parents in a modern age who don't know how to be adults, much less parents. And it peeled away at the voyeuristic core in every one of us, who engages in peeping merely by sitting in a movie theater or watching television...and then punished us for it.

The Grudge is not nearly so high-minded. The curse spreads quickly; so quickly, in fact, that I had a vision of the Japanese National Guard being finally called in to stop the madness when two hundred people are found dead at the Sakei house. Ghosts change form, appear on camera, make weird cat noises, show up seemingly at random, and kill some people quickly but take longer to murder others.

I've never been a fan of Gellar, and her performance didn't change my mind. Karen has no spark with Doug on screen, and their relationship is barely fleshed out. Culture shock is briefly explored in Jennifer's struggle with understanding the Japanese world, but not enough to make us really feel her pain. Not even Jennifer's relationship with Matthew has any real depth. And Gellar seems way too old to be a giddy exchange student.

The only characters that are actually fleshed out are the members of the Sakei family. The deleted scenes make it clear that we're not witnessing one traditional American ghost haunting, but a ghost house of sorts, which utilizes all four bodies (yes, even the cat), to kill its victims. And we come to realize that they are all reenacting their deaths over and over, from the croak of Kayako's severed vocal chords to the shriek of Toshio's poor cat. Unfortunately, critical plot points connecting the first murders with the subsequent deaths were cut, seriously undermining the shuffled scenes. Half the fun is piecing together why the curse took place and connecting the murders to the original event; when you can't make those connections, the film just becomes incoherent.

And that's the problem. With a ghost that can invade your office building, your home, or your bed, we lose all hope that the heroine can even defeat it. The final solution, that the house must be burned to the ground, doesn't seem like a solution at all. When the ghost(s) can look like people you know and call you on your cell phone, the evil seems to have such power that we never believe the heroine has a realistic chance of surviving.

The movie is still creepy. After all, Sam Raimi executive produced. The film is beautifully shot with minimal special effects. The same creepy-crawly stumbling that made Samara so horrifying is in evidence here. The Grudge also makes use of a multitude of horrible sounds, including the aforementioned caterwauling and death-rattling.

Unfortunately, that's not enough to really make The Grudge a scary movie for Western audiences.

Labels: Ghost Reviews

The Ring is one of the scariest movies I've ever seen. It was a decidedly modern twist on an old horror trope: after viewing a weird black-and-white video tape, the viewer receives a phone call explaining he will die seven days later.

What made the Ring so enthralling is that what could have been a cheesy horror movie became an exploration of psychological terror. Instead of just treating the bizarre tape as a typical horror film foil, the protagonist (Rachel Keller, played by the lovely Naomi Watts) uses all her journalist skills to get to the bottom of the mystery. She investigates the background of tape, has it analyzed and basically does everything a logical adult would do when faced with what's basically a killer tape. Rachel discovers that the tape is actually the psychic death knell of a demonic little girl named Samara Morgan (Daveigh Chase) who longs to escape her physical and spiritual imprisonment at the bottom of a well.

In a rare twist, the more Rachel poked at the tape's mysterious origins, the weirder things got. More importantly, the film kept relentless pace with the tape's countdown of seven days. All of the scares were achieved without blood; water and wet hair have never been so horrifying. When we finally do see Samara crawl out of the television, it's to the film's credit that her appearance is as horrifying as we imagined. At the end of the film, Rachel discovered that her son Aiden (David Dorfman) had watched the tape and that the only way to save herself and the life of her son was by making a copy.

No happy ending. Rachel passed the horrible curse on to someone else. And that was the end of the film. Daring, innovative, and just plain creepy, The Ring made you want to move your TV out of your bedroom. Viewers haven't felt that way since Poltergeist.

Then we have Ring Two.

Studios are beginning to encounter a real conundrum in moviemaking. The Ring had a multitude of web sites supporting it that expanded upon the mythology in the movie, including one on the Moesko Island Lighthouse, whatscaresme, anopenletter, and sevendaystolive. Most of them have since been taken down, but they can all be found with the help of the Wayback Machine (look it up). With the advent of the Blair Witch Project, fans expect a supporting mythology and use it to flesh out the rest of the film's backstory.

All these web sites add up to a lot of detail about what happened to create this monstrous ghost known as Samara. With all this backstory, you would expect the filmmakers to further explore the questions around Samara's birth and death. We know only that Samara's mother, Anna, was incapable of having a child of her own and so she left for Europe, only to return with a child who "never sleeps." Samara's psychic abilities were evil...so evil that eventually Anna felt she had to kill her.

But that's not the story we're told in Ring Two. In fact, Ring Two seems to be hell bent on ignoring the rules that were set up in the first movie. We never see the tape again, although a brief introduction explains what happens if you don't make a copy of it. When that copy shows up in a new town that Rachel moved Aidan to, she burns the tape. And that releases Samara. Mind you, Rachel burned the tape in the first film and Samara was not released.

Samara then decides that she's going to live the life she always wanted, with a mommy and everything. Since Rachel and her son don't exactly have a close relationship (he always calls her "Rachel"), Aidan's possession by Samara takes on a kind of cheerful creepiness. Where Aidan is cold and distant, Samara is clingy and demanding. To Dorfman's credit, the child actor does a suitable job of switching between the two personality types.

Rachel searches for a solution to defeating Samara, only to suddenly stumble upon Samara's real mother (Evelyn, played for five minutes by Sissy Spacek). This fact somehow eluded Rachel in the first movie but is easily discovered in the sequel. Evelyn doesn't provide much insight anyway other than that, "Samara is listening...except when you're asleep."

It seems Aidan has psychic powers too and when he's not possessed by Samara, with a body temperature below 95 degrees, he can communicate with his mother. This bizarre plot device gives Rachel an advantage and she soon discovers that Samara's weakness is water. Which is odd, since that was never mentioned in the first film.

Along the way, there's a particularly creepy scene involving deer that is the high point of the film. Some reviewers have questioned the relevance of the scene, but in a rare nod to the original movie, animals can sense Samara and either run away from her or try to destroy her. In this film it's the latter. Unfortunately, the deer are entirely CGI (they couldn't digitally insert deer into the film?) and it's very obvious.

There's a glimpse of the original film in the finale, where Rachel gets sucked into the well and races to escape the weird, spider-like Samara. It's completely ruined by Rachel's catchphrase, "I'm not your F***ING MOTHER!"

And that's what's wrong with Ring Two. It's not a bad horror film, but it's not of the same quality of the first movie. Characters are introduced with the obvious purpose of killing them off, horrible deaths are telegraphed way in advance, and the heroine turns from a tortured, conflicted soul to a rock-climbing, foul-mouthed superhero straight out of Aliens and Terminator.

With none of the pacing, none of the innovation, and very little of the original plot, Ring Two is torn between staying true to the original and appealing to a general audience. In attempting to generalize the fear and horror, the film loses the spirit (forgive the pun) of what made the first movie so appealing.

Oh yeah. If a ghost popped out of your television, wouldn't YOU get rid of every TV in your house?

Labels: Ghost Reviews