Bad DVD of the Month

Alfred Hitchcock. Wes Craven. Takashi Shimizu.

I hope you enjoyed that first sentence, because it’s probably the only time you’ll ever see those three names mentioned together.

February 2005 brought us the DVD release of “The Grudge”, a remake of the 2003 hit “Ju-On”. A huge success in Japan, Shimizu decided to remake it with a mostly American cast. In the spirit of full-disclosure, I’ve never seen the original Japanese version. And in the spirit of honesty, this movie completely sucks. It’s horror-lite, a stripped down, low-carb version of a good horror film. It was also a total waste of 90 minutes of my life, 90 minutes I will never get back. In retrospect, I should have known better. Summer movie trailers boasted that “The Grudge” was brought to us by the makers of “The Ring” (another remade Japanese hit). I thought that movie sucked too.

The plot is fairly straightforward. A young American nurse (Karen, played by Sarah Michelle Gellar) working in Tokyo is assigned to take care of an elderly woman living in a pseudo-vegetative state. On the first day of the assignment she encounters some creepy blue ghosts, and blood-dripped wackiness ensues. A resounding theme of the movie is the supposed belief that when a person dies in a state of fear, an evil curse is placed upon the scene of the death. If that were true I would assume a similar incident had occurred in my bedroom because just making it through this movie was a truly horrific ordeal.

Much to my dismay “The Grudge” was a huge commercial success, taking in $40M on its opening weekend and grossing $110M during its domestic run. There is also an inevitable sequel currently in the works. I implore you not to put any more money in these filmmakers’ pockets, so here are five reasons you shouldn’t rent this movie:

Bad Casting: Even though the producers set out to make a serious horror movie, they didn’t hide their target demographic very well. In two of the starring roles you have Gellar (who will be forever known as “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”) and Jason Behr (instantly recognizable as Max from “Roswell”). Not only are these two heralded as young sex symbols, but they also both starred on popular horror/science-fiction TV series, shows that have loyal if not weirdly obsessive followings. This movie is not aimed at hardcore horror aficionados, but rather the “tweenybopper” set that probably can’t explain how a bill becomes law but can quickly reel off George Clooney’s ever-growing roster of ex-girlfriends.

There’s marketing-driven casting, and then there’s bizarre casting. Popping up as Emma, the dementia-ridden mother who needs 24/7 nursing care is Grace Zabriskie. Don’t recognize the name? OK, but I guarantee you’ve seen her before. Yes, Ms. Zabriskie played Susan Ross’ mother on “Seinfeld”. Never a fan of George Costanza, she watched (always with a glass of wine in hand) her future son-in-law bumble his way through the engagement and eventually kill her daughter with poison envelopes. Here she is much less talkative as she plays a mute who knows there’s something fishy about the house she’s in. Also making a token appearance is Ted Raimi, who film geeks will recognize as the younger brother of director Sam Raimi (“Evil Dead” & “Spider-Man” series). Ted has carved out a nice little niche appearing in small roles in his big brother’s movies (Sam Raimi was a producer of “The Grudge”), and here he appears as Karen’s boss.

Bad Acting: I’m sorry, I just can’t take Sarah Michelle Gellar seriously as an actress. And really, why should I? Other than her well-known stint as Buffy, she has starred in such celluloid gems as “I Know What You Did Last Summer”, “Scream 2”, “Small Soldiers”, “Harvard Man” and two illustrious “Scooby-Doo” films. In this film Gellar sleepwalks through her role, inexplicably believing that staring and looking frightened passes for solid acting. She fails to make the character her own, and doesn’t appear in as much of the movie as her top billing would indicate.

And how could I talk about bad acting without mentioning poor old Bill Pullman. Although he is only on screen for about 10 minutes, he makes his sad presence known like only he can. Now, I have to give Pullman a bit of a pass for playing President Whitmore in “Independence Day”. Say what you will about the realism of that movie, but his speech before Earth retaliates is classic. I saw that movie opening night, and when he finished by saying, “Today we celebrate our Independence Day!”, my heart was racing. I clapped, I cheered and I was ready to kick some alien butt. But since then, I’ve linked him with Bill Paxton as Hollywood’s go-to pair for punchless performances.

Bad Production: I’ve always thought some of the scariest scenes are those where you can’t see the danger. The chill of the unknown. Creaking floorboards, gravel moving under someone’s shoe or the labored breathing of an oncoming assailant. These are the moments that scare me, because some of the most frightening scenarios are usually generated by human imagination. Good moviemakers use this to their benefit. Unfortunately, these producers don’t seem to subscribe to that theory. Every scene is so overly contrived that they evoke chuckles instead of shrieks. Never have I seen such gross misuse of “What’s Around The Corner?” and “Should I Open The Closet Door?” moments.

Christopher Young’s musical score is equally as distracting and annoying. During every other scene, strings and brass seem to strain into crashing crescendos. The score is painfully overused on moments that lack any real tension: “Buffy’s wondering where she left her iPod charger, cue the horns!” Good movies build tension with smooth cinematography and realistic acting. In a movie lacking both of these qualities, the music gets in the way of the story instead of enhancing it.

Bad Special Effects: There’s nothing special about them. One of the problems with recent horror films is that they overuse effects. These days, even the most casual customer can detect Computer Generated Imagery (CGI) from a thousand miles away. I give the producers a little credit for not bombarding us with special effects, like in such other forgettable movies as “The Haunting” and “Final Destination”. Although the producers don’t overuse effects here, the ones that do show up make it obvious the budget was only $10M (a certifiably paltry amount in today’s Hollywood). The special effects here seem rushed and completely unbelievable.

A CGI-made dark apparition makes two forgettable appearances in the film. Once menacing Emma in the empty house and again chasing the sister of Gellar’s character through a cavernous office building. The other featured effects show the living-dead former occupants of the house. When they do pop up they’re frail, blue walking corpses that bleed from every visible orifice. Gross, yes. Scary, not so much. In most instances the camera is shoved so close to their face it recalls the helmet-cams from MTV’s “Real World/Road Rules Challenge”. It gives the scenes an awkward, goofy feel that had me reaching for the fast forward button. But the least chilling element here just might be “Cat Boy”. As seen in every preview of the movie, he’s your basic Japanese boy morphed with the common household cat. I won’t give away how he came to be, but his visual appearance is laughable at best. So this now passes for scary in Hollywood? A little boy meowing?

No Violence: I wouldn’t consider myself a bloodthirsty heathen, but come on Mr. Shimizu, give me something to work with here. Although the body count is significant for a 90-minute movie, there is no actual violence. Each time a victim is claimed, they simply disappear in a different fashion. No gouged eyeballs, no torn limbs and no impaled torsos. And why is that? Because these gutless producers released a PG-13 horror film, that’s why. An R-rating would have meant that teenagers, who lie right in Hollywood’s cash-laden wheelhouse, would not be able to see it. “The Grudge” is a great example of a movie studio selling out the form in the name of the almighty dollar.

Somewhere, Tom Savini is crying fake blood.