movie review - The Grudge
the journal of Michael Werneburg
twenty-seven years and one million words
This movie is actually pretty terrifying. It's hard to make a decent horror movie now, with crowds being so hard to impress. The cinema in which we saw this was quite full, and very noisy. Some nutjob in the Canadian movie censor outfit decided it rated a PG rating, so the cinema was particularly full of kiddies. In addition to serving as a source of amusing projectiles, they proved the level of audience jadedness (jaditude?) by laughing aloud at the opening suicide scene, and in other places in the first half of the film.
But the jeers gave way pretty quickly. This movie manages the same kind of intensity and sense of inevitable despair that permeated The Ring (the US film was a remake of a film by the same director who made this one). When the ghost advances on the security camera, or when the elevator window shows that the same kid is on each passing floor of the apartment building, you know what's coming. And you know it ain't good.
Don't let the PG rating throw you off. It's PG because when the ghost gets its victims, there's no gore at all. No violence, nothing on stage. One minute they're alive, the next they're:
a) a nasty corpse
b) a mutilated victim (or possible ghost) plus spare body parts
c) simply gone
By the time the movie was nearing its horrible finally, the once jeering kids had become somewhat hysterical in their shrieks. By the end, some of them were demanding aloud, "Why was this PG? No way that's PG!". They gathered together in knots, hanging on to each other. One of them was hyperventilating and wouldn't let her friends let go of her.
As I write this, [ex-Catholic girlfriend] is trying to calm down - she's completely over-wrought. I guess it won't help that at least one of the characters - an adult woman - met her end in bed, trying to hide from the ghost under the covers like a small child.
Recommended.