The Grudge

Much like his Ju-on (2003), before this 2004 version director Shimizu also helmed, equipped with Hollywood money this time but getting to set his new film in Tokyo, The Grudge incorporates alternating stories/characters within the narrative of a house cursed by a tragic massacre as a father drowns his son and cat, pummelling his wife to death. Anyone who happens to find themselves unfortunately in the house this took place are also cursed by the restless spirits without peace due to how they died. 

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The characters involved:
1) Sarah Michelle Gellar is exchange student and Jason Behr is university student beau. Behr is in limited capacity here, more of a sympathetic love to Gellar, while she gets plenty of star treatment.
2) Ted Raimi is American care center administrator who damn near begs Gellar to go to the cursed house to check on a family's senile matriarch. Yoko Maki is a social worker sent to the cursed house before Gellar, investigating a noise in the attic of a closet...yep, never a good idea.
3) William Mopather crunches numbers for a company after newly transplanting to Tokyo with wife, Clea Duvall, and mom, Grace Zabriskie. Grace is the dementia-plagued mom both Yoko and Gellar are assigned by Raimi to assist. KaDee Strickland is Mopather's sister, herself an employee of a Tokyo conglomerate.
4) Bill Pullman is a Tokyo professor eventually becoming inadvertently involved in the family's demise.
5) Takako Fuji is the iconic onryu ghoul, Kayako, Yuya Ozeki, the iconic little ghoul boy, Toshio, and Takashi Matsuyama is the husband/father who ended both of them out of a maddening psychopathic rage that resulted in the curse that infiltrates the lives of anyone who enters their place of murder-suicide.
6) Ryo Ishibashi is lead detective of two separate cases involving the cursed house.

With the synopsis out of the way, this is about special effects and paranormal set pieces. Plot doesn't hold up to much scrutiny. Lots of hair and white eyes, the iconic vocal droning that you hear across a phone or as an announcement that *she's arrived*, Toshio interacting or encountering those he meets with him seemingly involved in killing folks, a lower jaw removed, Kayako creeping down stairs with her crippled and disfigured bodily frame telling us of how horrible she died, Gellar actually experiencing Pullman's time in the house prior to his jumping from the balcony, including his encounter with injured Toshio, and eerie photos of Kayako's presence behind Pullman's professor (she was a student, obsessed with him, including detailing her feelings in a diary her husband finds, soon enraging him) are key moments that defined perhaps the popularity and performance of this hit remake.

I prefer the inclusion of the teen girls in the Japanese version and just felt its use of the family and their tragedy seemed better detailed in Shimizu's previous version. He would use the sequel to try and include parts of his 2003 film in it. The elevator scene where Strickland is just trying to get home as we see Toshio on each floor looking at her returns, as does caseworker looking in the taped shut closet with an attic containing spectral danger. The KaDee Strickland scene, where she leaves her job for home, believes she is safe, gets a call from her brother, with him showing up at her door, and the phone soon revealing that this is all a ruse is almost identical to the Japanese version. Slight alterations to the family who take the house not long after the deaths in it, and the detective case trying to solve all of the lives taken once the grudge does its deeds are in the remake.

Looking at the film Saturday night, I thought Shimizu gave us enough phantoms for a spook show, and he used his loose back-and-forth timeline to try and surprise us. Well, if anything, these remakes inspire us to look back at their earlier incarnations and see how they compare. Gellar was still a hot ticket in 2004, her ties to Buffy, I Know What You Did Last Summer, and Scream 2 securing her place in cultdom. Her role in The Grudge isn't flashy or anything, with her character greeted by Kayako, leaving her somewhat haunted by the experience, investigating what caused the curse, much in the same way many an onryu film did during the late 90s/early 2000s. She tries to end the curse by burning down the house, but it just spreads like a plague, as we see in the next two sequels.

There are some good actors with little meat on the bone. Not one really knocks it out of the park. Gellar gets on first, but this film concerns itself with how to involve the specters as much as possible. Interestingly, I saw this in the theater back in 2004, the same year that brought us Saw. What made the film interesting was the moment that got the loudest pop... Kayako's face appearing in a reflection on the bus window Gellar sees. Simple and unexpected if a bit campy.