- Critic Score
- Most active
- Publication
- Most clicked
-
75A master of atmosphere, Japanese director Takashi Shimizu leads his audience along on a celluloid leash to his pitch-black attic of horror, inviting each hair on the back of your neck to stand up.
-
75The only character with any personality in The Grudge is a Tokyo house, but not to worry - it's got enough mean in it to keep any horror movie afloat.
-
75There is no "why" in The Grudge, at least not an explanation that provides comfort or cure. It simply is. That's what makes it really scary.
-
Slightly less frightening than the original, but it's still a scary psycho-horror that effectively replicates its bleak and crisp shocks.
-
70One of the flat-out creepiest films ever released by a major American studio.
-
70It's enough to send you home with jiggly knees and a tummy ache.
-
63This is an eerie, inventively mounted movie: It's a shivery fun time, filled with dark corners, deserted hallways and sudden apparitions. But it never manages to genuinely rattle you.
-
60A lean, atmospheric and acutely creepy little horror pic - nothing more, nothing less.
-
60It's effectively frightening. It's just not the kind of frightening that stays with you very long, unless of course someone decides to make the same movie . . . yet again.
-
58A horror film that consists of virtually nothing but don't-go-in-the-attic suspense scenes strung together with a reasonable degree of brooding mood and a minimum of logic.
-
In the hands of a less-skilled director, this Hollywood-mandated need to impose order could have ended in disaster.
-
50Like a good horror movie, the images, jolts and artistically directed disorientation will keep your stomach clenched...Like a bad one, it doesn't make a lick of sense.
-
50The Grudge offers a bit more exposition than did "Ju-On," but the plot is still wispy.
-
50It isn't frightening. Sometimes, in fact, it's laughable.
-
Shimizu can't quite pull everything together, trying to get off easy with a bargain-bin twist ending that most of the audience will see coming by the time the pile of corpses reaches double digits.
-
50At least the horror premise here has a hook - a house can spread its curse like a plague to adversely affect all who enter.
-
50Takes a leaf from the "Psycho" handbook and abandons its star for stretches here and there.
-
50Pretty much a one-trick pony, and, after a while, that trick loses its ability to impress.
-
50American audiences have seen Ju-On. And The Grudge just goes to show why remaking it is such a frivolous idea: What's the use in wasting so much energy if the filmmakers aren't going to fix what was wrong with the movie in the first place?
-
50There are so many events here but no real story. Perhaps that is what's making the drowned kabuki ghost so irate: She's desperate to find a coherent script.
-
50The cast is drab and lifeless, the characterization non-existent, the ending simply impossible. Between our jumps of fright come lumps of time that take forever to pass.
-
50The benchmark for any horror movie, of course, is how well it frightens you, and The Grudge is pretty satisfactory in that regard.
-
50It’s not a disaster by any stretch, but purists will ache to show newcomers the horrific genius of "Ju-on" over The Grudge as soon as they exit the theatre.
-
50Less a film than a terror delivery system, The Grudge repeatedly shows off Shimizu's technical chops, but never gives viewers a reason to care about or identify with the victims.
-
50The overdetermined approach preempts character shadings or social subtext-just compare Hideo Nakata's original "Ring," which tapped its dread from viral-replicant mass culture and its pathos from a broken home, or Nakata's "Dark Water," which channeled the sorrow, guilt, and paranoia felt by a young divorcée mired in a custody battle.
-
50Less scary than creepy, The Grudge may have lost some oomph in the translation from Japanese to English, and the desire for a PG-13 rating probably muted the violence and perhaps the scares.
-
50Most of the chills have been faithfully re-created, though first-time screenwriter Stephen Susco hasn't done much to straighten out the muddled narrative.
-
40Isn't art, but as date-night fright flicks go, it's effective.
-
40Despite the tighter rewrite and the slicker production, it's obvious that Shimizu is still searching for what scares him, and until he finds it, he doesn't stand--ahem--a ghost of a chance of frightening us.
-
40More than anything, The Grudge suggests that it's time for Shimizu to move on.
-
30Viewers of this Sam Raimi-produced, sub-"Amityville" scarefest are likely to hold the real grudge.
-
25Sarah Michelle Gellar, the nominal star, has been in her share of horror movies, and all by herself could have written and directed a better one than this.
prev
next
Page:
- 1
User score distribution:
-
Positive: 45 out of 81
-
Mixed: 9 out of 81
-
Negative: 27 out of 81
-
10
-
3