The Onion AV Club's Keith Phipps compared "The Grudge" to a "spectral roller coaster," but it's more like a seasonal haunted house. For an $8 entrance fee, visitors experience a few frights and anticipate the jolts, both of which, to be fair, are plentiful.
Though it avoids comprehension and reasonability at any cost, the film is effective in this respect. Gasp at the dead-eyed children who meow! Witness a limp-limbed, bloodied dead girl!
Tremble at gothic Japanese lore, foreboding black cats and rickety attics! Plus, ogle over Sarah Michelle Gellar, scream queen for the "Buffy" generation and Neve Campbell's heir apparent.
After a humdinger opener involving a disheveled, muted Bill Pullman, we find Gellar and her boyfriend enjoying a lazy morning before school in bed. They're studying abroad in Japan, soaking up the culture and each other's company.
Gellar volunteers as a care assistant for shut-ins, and she's assigned to an elderly woman whose last caretaker turned up missing, along with — ready that narrative spackling for plot holes — her son and daughter-in-law.
Does the Japanese boy locked in the upstairs closet, the phantasmagorical ghost with billowing, snaky hair and the successive deaths of everyone connected to the ostensibly quaint home have anything to do with it?
If there's any doubt, Gellar doubles as an amateur detective in addition to a horror movie heroine clad in tight sweaters.
Some cursory research reveals that the former occupants sullied the house with a troubling, murderous history and an ensuing curse.
The non-chronological structure flashes back to related subplots — the vengeful ghosts haunt numerous other characters, including a professor played by Pullman and even Gellar's employer at the care center — which add up to nothing, really.
The threadbare story may hold the mystery of a third-grade crossword puzzle. However, it delivers terrifically frightening set pieces by placing actors and their specter pursuers within sterile domiciles whose placidity inspires menace and occasional jumps from one's seat.
Producer Sam Raimi and production house Columbia were wise to enlist Takashi Shimizu — the director of "Ju-On: The Grudge," the Japanese original — to helm the picture. Shimizu, like other recent Asian horror maestros, expertly wrings teeth-clenching suspense from placid environments. But that same crop of directors (such as Kiyoshi Kurosawa and Takashi Miike) also smuggle sociological tow into their work, making "The Grudge's" scares perfunctory and pathos-less by comparison.
Even "The Ring" predicated its terrors on Westernized mass consumerism.
An erudite might extrapolate such meaning — for instance, most of the victims are Caucasian, so could it be a commentary on jingoistic, cultural appropriation? "Lost in Translation" meets "The Amityville Horror?" Not likely. It would be difficult to convince anyone that Shimizu's remake is something more than a well-oiled scare machine.
Grade: BC