The Grudge (2004) (PG-13) ★★★½

Written and directed by Takashi Shimizu, The Grudge is an English-language remake of the Japanese video horror Ju-On and the sequel it spawned in 2000. But the terror is hardly lost in translation as this big-screen adaptation is guaranteed to make you scream, gasp and recoil in horror.

Story

In the congested Japanese capitol of Tokyo, Karen (Sarah Michelle Gellar) is an American exchange student living with her boyfriend, Doug (Jason Behr). Karen volunteers as a home-care worker to meet some required college credits and accepts an assignment to care for an elderly American woman after her regular nurse fails to show up for work. She finds the home in a total state of disarray and while cleaning up, discovers a ghastly little boy inside a closet sealed with duct tape--and it gets worst. Her bedridden patient suddenly sits up and begins to talk to someone, or something, in the room, and soon Karen witnesses something she has never seen before: The angry Ju-On spirit, or ''the curse of the grudge.'' Shocked by what she has seen, Karen is briefly hospitalized and interrogated by police who try to make sense of what she saw inside the house. The police investigation reveals a gory murder-suicide took place inside the home barely one year ago, and everyone who has entered the home has since gone missing--with the exception of Karen.

Acting

Gellar's come a long way since playing Erica Kane's daughter on the ABC soap opera All My Children. And while her stint on Buffy the Vampire Slayer proved she can obliterate any blood-sucking creature, her starring role as the heroine in this petrifying thriller demonstrates she has the soul to carry a flick of this magnitude solo. Gellar's character Karen is sharp and likeable; as a student living in Tokyo, nothing much fazes her as she blends into this reverse culture with unassuming ease. It's precisely Gellar's depth that adds intellect to a film genre highfalutin pundits often consider mindless and ingenuous. The Grudge costars Behr as Karen's appreciative boyfriend and Bill Pullman as a college professor, but one of the most chilling performances comes from Grace Zabriskie as Emma, the woman Karen is sent to care for. Her deterioration from a normal family matriarch to a woman lost in a catatonic state is extremely unnerving. Also pulling off a stellar performance is Yuya Ozeki as Toshio, the ghost boy found in the closet.

Direction

The Grudge is based on Japanese director Takashi Shimizu's two horror videos, Ju-On and Ju-On 2, which were released in 2000 and instantly gained a cult following. The franchise also netted the attention of Spider-Man helmer Sam Raimi, who gained critical success more than 20 years ago with the bloodcurdling slasher pic The Evil Dead, and decided to serve as executive producer on the film's Hollywood version. Shimizu perfectly combines M. Night Shyamalan's mastery of suspense and The Ring scribe Hiroshi Takahashi's fear-generating skill to craft the most hair-raising horror movie to come along in decades. The crossover is effectively scary mostly because many of the original elements remained unchanged, including Shimizu, the supporting cast and, most importantly, the setting. The film's Tokyo locale plays a vital role in the film's unyielding creepiness; it's one thing to follow a character investigating a scratching sound coming from a closet in strange house, but it's a whole other thing when it's a heroine isolated in a foreign country.

Bottom Line

Although he uses age-old scare tactics, director Takashi Shimizu's skin-crawling horror film will still make your heart palpitate because he always manages to cap one scare with an even more petrifying one.