DVD Review: Ju-on (The Grudge)

POP! Goes the Dead Kid

I’ve seen nearly all the famous Asian horror films. And by ‘famous’, I mean the ones that Hollywood tried to remake: The Eye, The Ring, A Tale of Two Sisters, Pulse, Dark Water. There was just one I’d missed: Ju-on, aka The Grudge. That’s been rectified.

The movie begins, as all good movies do, with a murder. More than one murder, actually. We don’t know who or why, but you do know where- so it’s hardly a surprise when Social Welfare Office volunteer Rika shows up on the doorway of the House’o’Murders to check up on the joint’s inhabitant, a really old lady who has let the place go to hell. Like all the idiots in Pulse, when Rika finds a door that’s sealed shut with packing tape, she just has to open it. She finds a cat. Oh, and a little dead ghost kid.

The film then jumps to some unspecified time (but the same bat-location), when the old lady’s son and daughter-in-law are complaining to each other about the mess and ruckus the old lady’s making at night. The daughter-in-law, Kazumi, finally seems to get a clue when little-dead-ghost-kid handprints show up on the doors, and a random cat appears in the house. The son (who has a truly wretched haircut) comes home from work to find his wife all comatose with terror, just before she becomes an ex-parrot. Then Kazumi’s sister comes over for dinner, barges in without knocking, and is promptly treated to the son acting fucking crazy. He kicks her out.

Then we get the sister’s POV- she’s called Hitomi, and we also get our first clue toward placing these sections in some kind of chronological order. She sees some creepy shit in the big, weirdly depopulated building where she works. In her predictably deserted apartment complex, there’s elevator scariness, and her freak-ass brother shows up. So she logically hides under the covers, because if she can’t see him, he can’t see her, right? Then there’s creepy TV stuff and creepy dead people under the covers stuff.

And then it jumps to a Social Welfare Office employee, who goes to the Death House. He finds Rika, comatose with terror, and calls the cops. The old lady has kicked the bucket with the help of a blackish misty spirit ghost thing. The cops show up and find Kazumi and her husband, who have become living-challenged. Rika finds her voice and tells the cops all about the little dead ghost kid, only to learn that some time back this dude went nuts and got all stabby with his wife and their son disappeared, and since then all the people who lived in that house have turned into worm food Welfare Office guy buys the farm and the cops get the old detective who worked on the original murder case to help them. Toyama has some serious PTSD from that case, and it just gets worse.

Meanwhile, dead people keep dogging Hitomi. Toyama wisely decides to burn the haunted place to the ground, but the other cops stop him and are treated to some creepy long-haired dead chick action. Toyama joins the Choir Invisible, and then we’re off again, to the point of view of Izumi, Toyama’s daughter, four years after Toyama dies. She brilliantly goes into the house with some friends on a dare, and all her friends immediately go the way of all flesh like it’s some mass schoolgirl extinction event. Izumi loses her shit. Izumi then takes a dirt nap.

Finally the movie jumps to Kayoko, the perforated housewife, except even though the title says “Kayako” it actually just goes back to Rika, who’s awakened at night by a chorus of cats wailing (like I am, because my neighbors lets her damned felines roam around outside and use my yard for a litter box) and is generally all touchy and shit. Her friend (also a Welfare Office person) calls to say she is at some house where a kid hasn’t shown up to school, and the kid is there, but the parents aren’t, and three guesses as to which house it is and which kid it is and the first two don’t count. Though why the hell Rika’s friend doesn’t know where the Cursed House is and all about it is a mystery to me. Seems like information you might want to tell your friends/co-workers, you know? So Rika books it back to the Evil Abode to save her stupid friend, only to meet her maker when the ghost of the stabby husband pops in to murder her. The end.

In Ju-on, the curse given by the dead housewife is far-ranging and pretty damn random. Anyone associated with the dead ghost people or the house or people who know other people who were in the house, will die. You’ll probably die if you walk past the house or see it in a real estate ad, too. Apparently we’re just meant to assume that every single character in this movie will eventually die, and from there everyone in Japan, because this curse is like the bird flu. Because of this pervasiveness, there’s no resolution: Rika’s dead, along with about a hundred other people, and none of it matters a bit because the stabbed housewife is so incredibly pissed off that she will never be sated, at least not for several more movies.

Ju-on isn’t scary in the least, mainly because every horror convention it whips out has been done to death before and since. Dead kids in kabuki makeup. Dead women creeping down the stairs on all fours. Dead people in the mirror behind someone. Dead women with their faces hidden by hair, lurking in a bathroom, or under the covers, or under the stairs, or in the attic. TV reception going bonkers, creepy static voices on the phone.  The horror bits are really just bloody housewife/little dead ghost kid’s oil-painted faces repetitively popping up into the frame like some kind of weirdo jack-in-the-box. Yawn.

The POV-hopping is interesting enough, but overdone- we never really feel like we get to know any of these characters enough to actually care what happens to them (I mean, they’re all going to die obviously, but I really didn’t give a shit).  The way the movie plays with chronology is cool; the curse apparently even gets to time-travel, for poor old freaked-out Toyama gets to see his daughter Izumi in the house, in some kind of future vision, right before he croaks.

Now, I am a big baby. One time I watched a (totally, obviously fake) alien abduction video while my husband wasn’t home, and I didn’t turn off the lights for two days. I sit up nights because if I fall asleep, the Mothman might get me. If I ever actually saw a ghost, I’d run screaming like a little girl. So if I say Ju-on doesn’t do it for me, it honestly doesn’t do it for me, and It definitely won’t do it if you are more skeptical than me-  and I believe in damn near everything.

The Verdict: I am holding a grudge against all the people who claim this is the “scariest horror film ever OMG”.