movies! (an actual review)

So I finished watching "The Grudge" recently. I was always kinda interested in the flick, basically because the visuals looked pretty nifty from the trailers I saw. Granted, I was never interested enough to get up off my ass to go to a theater or a video store, but still, it was one of those movies I always kept in the back of my mind to see.

So, why now? Well, it's Halloween season, the sequel just came out, and I can watch the flick on HBO OnDemand for free. Let's roll 'em!

My god, what an utter piece of shit. It's got atmosphere, I'll give it that, but this was one of the biggest, steamiest piles of turds I've ever seen float across my television screen. Well, I think it was a turd. It might have been the flowing hair that seems to come out of dark corners, but I like to think of it as actual turds because it allows me to retain my sanity.

By the way, spoilers ahoy, but believe me, I'm doing you a favor.

Here's my issue with the movie, and it's a big one: The Big Bad, a womanly ghost that kills everybody in the movie, has no rules. By which I mean a given set of parameters that allows the audience to understand the Big Bad's powers, what she can or can't do, to set up how everybody gets killed. In "The Ring," you watch the videotape, and you have a week to show it to somebody else or Cousin It comes out of the TV screen and gets you (of course, you have to figure out yourself you have to show it to somebody else). In "Saw," the Big Bad himself just tells you what you have to do to get out of his traps, even if it usually means losing a body part in the process. Yeah, I get all that. In "The Grudge," the curse is set on you whenever you walk into this house where a mother and a son were killed, and there's really nothing you can do to stop it. Nothing. So why what a movie where the Big Bad is completely unstoppable? That's what I'm asking myself right now.

I'll give you a few examples. A woman, who is the sister of the current occupant of the house and has been over for tea, is working late in her office. She starts getting phone calls and weird vibes from the Big Bad (which I'll keep referring to because I'm not sure she has a name. There's only 15 minutes of dialogue in the whole movie). So she runs home scared and locks the door.

She gets another phone call from her brother (which the audience knows is now dead). Apparently he's outside the door. She opens the door and there's nobody there. The Big Bad gets her a few minutes later in her bed. The impression we're supposed to get is that you have to let the Big Bad in before she can take you. But how does she suddenly show up at the office? Nobody let her in, as far as we've seen. That is what the people in the critic business refer to as a PLOT HOLE.

What's irritating is that this whole movie is full of them. Every five minutes there's a contradiction from what we were previously shown. This can get annoying, because nothing makes any sense. The Big Bad can slowly come after you, or you can turn around and there she is a second later. She'll show up in your bed without warning or slowly stalk down the hall towards you. The Big Bad can do anything and everything! The audience is given no information how to beat her! They do, towards the end, attempt to burn the haunted house down, but we never actually see what fire does to the Big Bad because they cut away a second later. So it's fairly anticlimactic when she shows up three minutes later in the final frame. In other words, THERE IS NO RESOLUTION TO THE MOVIE.

Hell, the Friday the 13th movies and the like are pretty crappy flicks in my opinion, but at least they set up the ground rules. This is one of the worst movies I've ever seen. How does "The Grudge" get a sequel? And why did people get fooled into buying tickets a second time?