Summary:
A house is haunted by a vengeful ghost.
My Thoughts:
Side Note: This film is a soft reboot of the Japanese film “Ju-On: The Grudge”. It takes place in the same universe as that film, but you don’t need to see it in order to understand what’s going on with this film. Honestly, you don’t need to see this either; it’s pretty stupid.
If you’ve followed this blog for any amount of time at all then you’ll know I’m an enormous horror flick fan. Horror films, are, in my opinion, some of the most entertaining films out there (not necessarily the best), because if horror films are done correctly, they scare you, intrigue you, and make you second guess your own nature, and when they’re done poorly they typically provide quite a few laughs. So, whether it be a good or a bad horror flick, it really doesn’t matter to me, if it claims it’s creepy and if I’ve heard anything about it, I’ll usually give it a shot. The worst thing that can happen is I loose an hour and a half of my time on a crappy film.
I was somewhat interested in this movie before I even saw a trailer for it (and, now that I’m thinking about it, I don’t actually know if I ever did see a trailer for this particular film), primarily because Sam Raimi (director of “The Evil Dead”), Nicolas Pesce (director of “Piercing”), and rising star Andrea Riseborough (“Mandy” and “The Death of Stalin”) were involved. Raimi is a man who, in terms of horror films, I’d follow to the ends of the earth; he made the pinnacle of cabin in the woods/ splatter flicks in his first outing in moviemaking, so he’s more or less horror royalty in my book; he’s also produced a few horror film in recent years that weren’t terrible (the “Evil Dead” remake), so I held out hope that this film wouldn’t be terrible.
And so, on a dreary Saturday morning in January, one of my roommates asked if I wanted to see something, and, without even glancing at the less-than-favorable reviews, we settled on seeing this, and subjected ourselves too an hour-and-a-half of mind-numbing boredom. This film fails at many, many things, but the worst thing it does is fail to provide even a modicum of entertainment for its meager runtime; it’s just a hodge-podge of rehashed creepy images thrown at you sporadically without any sort of work put in that’s needed to give the images gravity. A rotted corpse is just a rotted corpse unless there’s a story behind it, unless there’s some kind of tension or spooky reason for it to be there. Likewise, a little girl with black hair is just a little girl with black hair.
I’m honestly searching for something positive to say about how the film looked and felt, but I can’t; if this movie would’ve been made in the mid-2000s, the tone would’ve made a lot of sense, because this movie feels exactly like dozens of films from that era (including the 2004 American remake of “The Grudge”). Horror flicks in the mid 2000s were full of spooky atmospheric music; shadowy, gross and gritty images; and they wouldn’t be complete without dozens and dozens of JUMP SCARES! AH! SPOOKY! Jump scares require very little work from the filmmakers, and they also provide very little for the audience to hold on to; you build up to the scare and then, poof, it’s gone. This film has more jump scares than it does any kind of atmosphere or actual scary moments, and now, after a decade of much better horror films like “Hereditary”, “The Witch”, and “Suspria”, those jump scares feel infinitely more juvenile and disposable.
To make matters worse, the acting in this movie wasn’t all that great either. Even from veteran actors like Jackie Weaver (“Widows”) seemed unsure of how to approach this film. Characters walk through shadowy hallways while we the viewers are shown ‘creepy’ images of things just beyond our characters’ POV. Oftentimes, we know that there is something there, but the characters don’t; the characters never react to the things they don’t seen and often seem unaware that they’re in any sort of danger. In the end, this movie feels tensionless and dull.
Verdict:
Don’t see this movie. Please, I’m begging you. I know that, because of the reviews this film has received, this film is doomed to fail, and I’m very glad for it. Horror movies have taken great leaps in the last ten years; let’s not devolve back to films that feature stupid premises and stupid characters and are completely devoid of thrills. Skip this one, and try to forget it was made.
Review Written By: