Black Shuck wrote:Reiluna wrote:The Ring, The Ring 2, or The Grudge either.
I could probably make a case in defense for
The Ring, but while I certainly wouldn't consider it a bad horror movie, it wasn't good enough either that I feel up to defending it.
I haven't seen
The Ring 2, but it's not hard to point out what was wrong with
The Grudge. The concept itself was simple enough: a man and his family die in such a way that his hatred lingers about the household after his death in the representative embodiment of his murdered wife and son. That might have been a nice plotline five or six years ago, but it's not too far off from the concept of the movie
The Eye in which ghosts are described as (roughly) the remaining energy signatures left by people that were killed without enough warning to be consciously aware of death; that in turn as well was introduced to us before in
The Sixth Sense where ghosts were described, simply put, as people that didn't know they were dead. You could also make an argument that
The Grudge borrows from the concept presented in
The Ring, only it's a husband's anger that's lingering instead of a little girl's desire to be listened to, and clinging to a house instead of a video tape. In other words, the concept of
The Grudge is stale.
That left the movie to be supported by it's plotline, which, in comparrison to it's above-mentioned predecessors, was more in line with traditional 80s format than should be accepted. The protagonist had the detective to give her all the answers about the supernatural, and for the rest of her inquiries, she had Google (which was also used in
The Ring, but while the protagonist in that movie had to do a lot of digging before she even knew what to look for, the prtagonist in
The Grudge just went straight to the Internet). Meanwhile, while she's picking her nose waiting for someone to spoonfeed her the answers, the haunt of the house is apparently killing people at random, including two people that hadn't even been near the house. Susan made a phone call to the place and the specter showed up right there at her workplace to make her disappear, but the protagonist that was
in the house looking right at it when it came for the old woman gets to stick around and have her head messed with.
And even though the detective knew everything about that house and it's history,
including that the haunt sometimes manifested itself in the form of the little boy (the protagonist tells him the kid's name after she saw him on the balcony), he still let the kid lure him in and kill him. If anyone was supposed to have defied the 80s format, it was him.
The concept was stale and the plot was stale. It's like every other freakin' ghost movie we've seen in the last five years.
Has anyone seen
Ju-On (I think that's the name), the film
The Grudge was based on?