Sarah Michelle Gellar

Writer/director Takashi Shimizu took his Japanese blockbuster “Ju-On: The Grudge” and along with screenwriter Stephen Susco, revamped it for American audiences. The filmmakers cast familiar American actors, fleshed out the English-language version with unneeded extraneous scenes, and in a sense, dumbed it down. Plot points that were left up to your imagination in the original Japanese film are explained in detail in the new version. And while the original was creepy/spooky, the new one offers only a scattering of scary moments surrounded by scenes that only serve to test your patience and kill time. The premise of the story is that when someone dies in the grip of a powerful rage, a curse is left behind. Anyone who encounters the curse is doomed to die. When a violent incident causes a home in Tokyo to act as a repository for this deadly curse, anyone who enters the premise is affected by the psychic remnants of the deadly events.

Sarah Michelle Gellar plays Karen, a foreign exchange student who along with her boyfriend Doug (Jason Behr), chooses to study in Japan. To earn credit in one of her classes, Karen does work for a social services agency that helps people who are homebound. Her first visit to Emma (Grace Zabriskie), an elderly American who lives with her son and daughter-in-law, is anything but ordinary. The woman’s house is in disarray, she’s basically catatonic, and there are weird scratching noises coming from the upstairs bedroom area. Because this is a scary movie and actors in scary movies always investigate spooky noises instead of fleeing the house like a normal person would, Karen creeps upstairs to try and find the source of the noise. Any horror fan could have told her nothing good would come of poking around a stranger’s house. Karen soon finds herself trapped in a nightmare world with no way to escape. A spooky kid and a raven-haired woman with bug eyes keep popping up out of nowhere, people around her are literally being scared to death, and Karen’s choice of Japan quickly becomes the worst decision she’s made in her young life.

In the case of “Ju-On” versus the new “The Grudge,” a bigger budget doesn’t result in a better film. The effects in the original “Ju-On” film were mediocre at best, yet they elicited the right reaction from audiences. With a substantially larger budget and the backing of a major studio, “Ju-On’s” style is expanded on but there seems to be some essential ingredient missing. “Ju-On” scared you more by what was implied while “The Grudge” spells everything out. Yes, the effects in this version are pretty terrifying, but even the best effect can get old if there’s no substance surrounding it.

Sarah Michelle Gellar fails to impress and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” fans may despair to see Gellar play such a wimpy role. She does fine at looking frightened and confused, but a couple of facial expressions repeated over and over do not make for a great performance. Granted, there’s not much to work with in a script that’s meant for scares, not for intelligent dialogue and performances with any depth.

Jason Behr’s undeniably attractive but the chemistry between he and Gellar isn’t there. Behr’s character wasn’t in the original Japanese film and seems to have been added to the American-ized version as window dressing meant to capture the young female audience. There’s really no other valid reason to have added a boyfriend character to the film.

What it all boils down to is "The Grudge" feels flat. There are definitely frightening moments, but a little boy hissing like a cat and a repeated clicking noise didn’t do it for me this time around. “The Grudge” quickly bogs down with too many characters thrown into the mix and not enough scares to sustain a good fright.