2020 MOVIE #1:

THE GRUDGE (2020)

Wow is all I can say. I never thought they'd make a horror flick worse than The Grudge 2 (2006). Well I was wrong, consider me blown away for all the wrong reasons. This movie is absolute garbage. It's not even bad enough to be good it's inexcusably boring bad. What's wrong you might ask. Well the movie has a great cast and is filled with solid performances. The screenplay isn't too bad and has some interesting touches concerning the mythology and its pretty gory mostly unnecessary but still appreciated. The big problem here is the abysmal direction. Set between the first 2 American films it concerns a woman who brought the curse home with him from Japan and than ends up murdering her family which curses her house. During the film we are introduced to a group of characters who come into contact with that house and are killed one by one. Nicolas Pesce director of the acclaimed Eyes of my mother doesn't know how to execute a single scare in the entire 93 minute run time. Theres no real atmosphere. The film is clunky, sloppy and boring. And because of the amateur cut you can't really experience any engagement with the stories or the characters. What a way to start the year. I can pretty much say that I may stop watching movies if I see anything worse than this, this year. Just atrocious and embarrassing and I'm talking to you Sam Raimi for having a hand in this.

RATING= .75/5

Good photography and direction but the script makes no sense. From the beginning to the end I asked myself: why this is happening? What's going on here? I was a fan of the original one, the original story and the turn at the end made a great movie. So why this?

THE GRUDGE is the latest addition to a franchise that stalled with the third instalment back in 2009. It's been a long time since then but I can report that only the first of these, the remake with Sarah Michelle Gellar, is any good; the rest have been pitiful and this is no exception. Of course, if you want true greatness then you need look no further than the first two Japanese movies in this series which are stand-outs in the field of J-horror. This one's a badly-written and sprawling mess of a movie with no true leading characters, only various minor ones and sub-plots that weave in and out of each other endlessly. It's slowly-paced and devoid of scares, merely repeating what's come before. There's talent here - and actors like John Cho, Lin Shaye and William Sadler are particularly welcome - but it's entirely wasted.