I hadn’t heard good things about this new Grudge. The first three US versions were all good with the first being the best and the third not that bad for a straight to DVD movie. This version however does have a cheek calling itself the Grudge because it bears very little connection to the previous trilogy. The set up exactly the same but they spent about 90 seconds in Japan and spend the rest of the film flipping between 2004 and 2006.
The film has some good performances. I was surprised that Lin Shaye was in this film because its not a Blumhouse production so I am assuming that she was loaned out like they use to do in the old Hollywood studio system days. It does seem to be written into law that if you need an old woman to play a role in a horror film then Lin Shaye gets first refusal. She is actually the best thing in the movie even though she’s only in it for about 10 minutes if that. Betty Gilpin was in The Hunt which is one of my favourite films of the year and now she’s been in one of the worst films of the year. It’s a shame really because she does well with whats she given and her character is married to Sulu or John Cho’s character Peter. The performances are good but they are sadly let down by a script that does everything it possibly can to separate itself from the series that made it so good.
The film has one of the worst endings I think I have seen to a horror film in quite sometime. The film ends with Muldoon being taken away after hugging what she thought was her son. Then the credits roll over silence and that is the movie. I thought that The Nun was one of the dullest films of 2019 and I think that The Grudge 2020 is this years The Nun. There were some ok moments but its lacked any of the tension and drama of the originals. Even the third one has more atmosphere than this one. This is actually worse because at least The Nun has some atmosphere but this is just lazy and misses the point by quite some margin.
