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Old 22-October-2006, 03:37 PM
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Paul Beardsley Paul Beardsley is offline
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Default Grudge 2. Worst film ever? ... Spoilers

Probably not, but I think the storyline is possibly the worst to make it into a film.

In the original Grudge (itself a remake of a Japanese film, with the same director, some of the same cast, and some of the same sets), we see Sarah Michelle Geller get caught up in a curse when she visits Tokyo. What it amounts to is that anyone who so much as sets foot in a particular house will get pursued either by the ghost of a skinny child who miaows and croaks, or else the ghost of a woman with very long black hair who bears an uncanny resemblance to Sadako/Samara from the Ring films. (I think the two ghosts are meant to be the same.) At first the ghosts just unnerve you, but after a bit they kill you, or drag you into a hellish dimension, or (in one instance) rip your lower jaw off.

The first film is sort-of okayish, but is dissatisfying for some very fundamental reasons. For one, the ghost does not have an interesting motivation. We're told she died in a state of rage, and wants her victims to suffer as she suffered, but the victims have nothing to do with her death, nor does her modus operandi. For another, she has limitless powers. Ring worked because there was a pleasingly clever solution to the problem of the killer videotape, but in Grudge there is absolutely NOTHING you can do. If you run away she will still find you. She can appear absolutely anywhere. She cannot be placated or fought. There is no defence against her. It's basically a Bambi versus Godzilla fight, in which Godzilla doesn't kill Bambi straight away because he'd rather drag it out for a couple of hours.

The first film partly gets away with this because you don't KNOW that there's nothing the characters can do until near the end. I assumed that in the second film some characters would discover her weakness, and there would be some suspense as to whether or not they would be able to use it to defeat her. But it didn't happen. Instead, we have three separate storylines, confusingly linked, in which three lots of people helplessly face the monotonous hauntings before she finally decides to kill them. It turns out that Sarah Michelle Geller survived the first film, but ended up in a mental hospital; very early on in the second film, the ghost kills her by throwing her off the hospital roof. The rest of the film consists of waiting for each of the other characters to get done in - which they all do in due course. This time the victims don't even have to have been in her house - they merely have to live near someone who has.

The actual production values of the film, the acting, and so on, are all fine. In other words, on the surface it is a much better film than Plan 9 From Outer Space. But in story terms it stinks.
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