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December 07, 2004
Cause: ‘The Grudge.’ Effect: sleeplessness
To start this review the correct way, I offer this disclaimer: Almost all scary movies scare me, at least a little bit. Some scare me so much that I don’t sleep for days.
So I was worried about going to see The Grudge, because I really like sleep and I didn’t feel like losing any more, especially as the semester comes to a close.
And, sure enough, The Grudge scared me as much as I expected it to.
The Grudge takes place in Tokyo, Japan, in present time. Sarah Michelle Gellar plays the part of a typical college student who goes to Japan to study abroad with her boyfriend.
While there, she is working at a care center to help people who are physically or mentally unable to live on their own.
On one particular day she needs to cover for her coworker Yoko at a home where the woman is lethargic and refuses to speak.
While at the home, Gellar feels like something isn’t quite right. After some investigating, she discovers some disturbing things. There is a little boy crying and beaten in the upstairs closet, and no one is sure where he came from.
The “grudge” is an old Japanese belief that if a person dies with sadness and anger in their heart, they are doomed to repeat the circumstance of their death to anyone who enters their space.
What separates this horror movie from others is that there are very few of what I call “quick” scary moments, those instances where I jump once and quickly recover.
Rather, the parts of the film intended to truly terrify viewers succeed because they are drawn out across several scenes.
In most horror films, viewers are able to quickly look away or cover their eyes, and the scene is done before they know it, but not in this one.
The gruesome images stay on screen for so long that a viewer can’t simply look away, and the images from the film are still crystal clear to me, even a week later.
The “monsters” are graphic enough to cause most viewers discomfort. These few “monsters” are a family who died in a murder/suicide and are haunting the house where Gellar works.
One of the worst parts is when we get to see Yoko with her jaw ripped out, stumbling around, half-dead.
And then there are the noises. There’s screeching children, rattling, growling noises coming from behind walls, and the thumping. Anyone who has already seen this film knows all too well about the noises that are heard from beginning to end of The Grudge.
The only thing that really bothered me about this film was Sarah Michelle Gellar’s picture-perfect hair at the end of the movie. No one could have survived what she went through, yet her hair persevered, looking in the final scene as if she had stepped from an upscale beauty salon. That, and there was barely a scratch on her. But then again, I didn’t say this film is realistic.
Posted by msveum at December 7, 2004 01:05 PM