As I held the DVD in my hand, looking at it's cover, "ripoff" was the first thought to cross my mind. The photo was of an eerie eyeball peering towards you from under dark hair parted in the middle of presumably a ghoul's face. I recall seeing that exact image near the end of Ringu, the original Japanese version of The Ring. While the special effects in The Ring were indeed superior to Ringu's lower budgeted attempts, one scene I felt Ringu effectively produced was the eerie eye shot through parted hair. This image coupled with a slow moving, almost electronically jittery female who wore her hair down over her face was part of an overall style both movies implemented to convey a sense of slow, impending doom. All of which was repackaged and ripped off in The Grudge.

The DVD's back cover boasted this movie to be even scarier than The Ring. Odd they should single this movie out of a perverbial plethora of horror titles. I guess it was simply convenient to do so as I'm sure several copies of The Ring must have been laying around the set of The Grudge, as "inspirational reference". I once saw a cartoon where two people are looking at an ad in a magazine and one of them comments on how the ad's design looks like something else he had seen recently. The other states that he believes that at any given time there are really only six truly creative people in the world. Five live in Germany, the other in France and it is these six individuals who actually produce the bulk of the world's latest trends and newest ideas. Everyone else merely regurgitates these ideas and tries to take their slice of the credit, thinking they've either improved upon something or given you something new.

Like The Ring before it, The Grudge is a remake of a Japanese movie, one called Ju-On. Hiring Takashi Shimizu, the director of Ju-On, to direct the North American version of this film may have been an attempt by Hollywood to preserve the essence of the film but like so many other Americanized interpretations before it, something is lost in translation.

The Grudge's opening scene sets a rule which states that when someone dies in a fit of fury, something nasty is left behind and inhabits (basically haunts) this place. I took this definition literally and expected to see a story unfold which observed this restriction and was going to be about an exact, particular place where bad things happen. The movie starts out this way but eventually greys this line by including the ability for the spooks to travel across town and visit office towers after hours to show off for security cameras while chasing the sister of a man who recently bought the house where the spook died three years earlier. I found myself wondering why a disembodied poltergeist with the ability to travel anywhere it wanted to would be able to find the exact office tower the sister worked in but then manage to miss her intended target by at least five floors. Thus setting up a rather long and drawn out attempt at suspense as the ghoul slowly crawls up the five flights of stairs on it's hands and knees no less. Thankfully, some disjointed and abrupt editing allowed the sister to escape certain death. Personally, if I was this ghoul and I wanted to kill somebody, I would stand outside the bathroom stall door waiting for my victim to emerge. What better time to catch someone off guard and with their pants down?

The Grudge's plot is really not anything new. Someone dies a horrible death and unsuspecting new home owners, who are unaware of the house's history, get more than they bargained for with their new mortgage. That's it in a nutshell. We're even treated to the obligatory scene where the real estate salesperson who unloads the house on the poor unsuspecting couple witnesses strange happenings and narrowly escapes his own death at the hands of the enraged spirits. It's fun to think that since other area locals are aware of the house's history that maybe when he returns to his office he should find another agent moving into his desk, assuming that the sales agent was a goner for sure. Or perhaps he would boast of his success to the other real estate agents and state that the next time the house is up for sale (which will no doubt be inside of the week at the rate the ghouls are killing people) that they're going to draw straws to see who has to take the listing.

All too often when movies are remade for North American audiences, the people making the remakes understimate the intelligence of their audience. They must think they'll lose their viewer without a car chase every fifteen minutes or bedazzling special effects. When really, all we need is a good story. Frankly, if the story is well written, the villian could be running around with a flashlight under it's chin for all I care.