An American nurse living and working in Tokyo is exposed to a mysterious supernatural curse, one that locks a person in a powerful rage before claiming their life and spreading to another victim.
Director:
Takashi Shimizu
Stars:
Sarah Michelle Gellar,
Jason Behr,
Clea DuVall
Three interwoven stories about a terrible curse. A young woman encounters a malevolent supernatural force while searching for her missing sister in Tokyo; a mean high school prank goes horribly wrong; a woman with a deadly secret moves into a Chicago apartment building.
A young Japanese woman who holds the key to stopping the evil spirit of Kayako, travels to the haunted Chicago apartment from the sequel, to stop the curse of Kayako once and for all.
A school teacher visits the home of a boy who's been absent from school for a long period of time, unaware of the horrific tragedy which occurred in the boy's household many years ago.
In Japan, when the volunteer social assistant Rika Nishina is assigned to visit a family, she is cursed and chased by two revengeful fiends: Kayako, a woman brutally murdered by her husband and her son Toshio. Each person that lives in or visits the haunted house is murdered or disappears.Written by
Claudio Carvalho, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
This film is the third installment of the Ju-on series. The film was preceded by two low budget films from 2000 known as (Ju-on: The Curse (2000) and Ju-on: The Curse 2 (2000)), whose storylines are continued in this sequel. See more »
Goofs
The curse spreads like a virus as established by the film series. Anybody who enters the house is now cursed, and so is anybody who meets that person, and someone who met that person, and so on and so forth. Although Miyuki never entered the house, she is friends with Izumi who did enter the house and even unintentionally got her friends killed as a result by making them go inside with her. Miyuki should not have survived the events of the film if going by the rules that are established. See more »
"Ju-On, The Grudge" is not an easy movie to find in America (or at least it wasn't when I first wrote this review) , and after hearing it hyped to the heavens in magazines such as Fangoria and Rue Morgue, and by word of mouth as well, I knew I had to see it. I finally tracked it down in LA and watched it the very first chance I got to do so.
Ju-On is a chapter story about a haunted house in a Tokyo suburb. The film begins when an inexperienced social worker shows up at the house and comes face to face with the horror within. The story jumps around from past to present, its chapters focusing on one character at a time until it has come full circle. Everyone unwise enough to enter the cursed house winds up dead, the haunting spreading like a virus. It seems that a terrible murder once took place in this house and the rage surrounding the act of violence has spawned its own evil curse. To enter the house is to be immediately infected and the haunting follows people home, driving them to near madness before dragging them away, never to be seen again.
Ju-On bears more than a passing resemblance to its popular predecessor "Ringu" and is nowhere near as frightening, but it's not a bad film by any means. Butchered mother-ghost Kayako is very Sadako-like, crawling around with her long black hair in her face and moving with unearthly jerkiness. Her blue-white face is quite startling with its huge staring eyes and occasional splashes of blood. Her ghost son, Toshio, is both sad and frightening, appearing both as a normal boy and a pale, wide-eyed ghost. Many of the films most frightening sequences feature the murdered woman Kayako: her head full of black hair peeking around a corner, her shadow moving down a corridor and filling a security camera, a head-on shot of her crawling through an attic at night with only the beam of a flashlight illuminating her. The sound effects are quite disturbing as well and the performances are convincingly well done.
I wasn't as scared by this movie as had been promised I would be, but that's what happens when you buy into the hype. I was simply expecting too much, and I got a pretty good ghost story instead. Ju-On is good. It's not great, but it's a decent, straightforward ghost story with more than enough scary moments to please most horror fans. Ringu was scarier, but Ju-On is a noble effort. Like most Asian horror stories, it remains ambiguous and open-ended, leaving room for both a sequel and the chance for you to decide for yourself what the curse of The Grudge really is.
7 out of 10 stars.
51 of 69 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful to you?
| Report this
"Ju-On, The Grudge" is not an easy movie to find in America (or at least it wasn't when I first wrote this review) , and after hearing it hyped to the heavens in magazines such as Fangoria and Rue Morgue, and by word of mouth as well, I knew I had to see it. I finally tracked it down in LA and watched it the very first chance I got to do so.
Ju-On is a chapter story about a haunted house in a Tokyo suburb. The film begins when an inexperienced social worker shows up at the house and comes face to face with the horror within. The story jumps around from past to present, its chapters focusing on one character at a time until it has come full circle. Everyone unwise enough to enter the cursed house winds up dead, the haunting spreading like a virus. It seems that a terrible murder once took place in this house and the rage surrounding the act of violence has spawned its own evil curse. To enter the house is to be immediately infected and the haunting follows people home, driving them to near madness before dragging them away, never to be seen again.
Ju-On bears more than a passing resemblance to its popular predecessor "Ringu" and is nowhere near as frightening, but it's not a bad film by any means. Butchered mother-ghost Kayako is very Sadako-like, crawling around with her long black hair in her face and moving with unearthly jerkiness. Her blue-white face is quite startling with its huge staring eyes and occasional splashes of blood. Her ghost son, Toshio, is both sad and frightening, appearing both as a normal boy and a pale, wide-eyed ghost. Many of the films most frightening sequences feature the murdered woman Kayako: her head full of black hair peeking around a corner, her shadow moving down a corridor and filling a security camera, a head-on shot of her crawling through an attic at night with only the beam of a flashlight illuminating her. The sound effects are quite disturbing as well and the performances are convincingly well done.
I wasn't as scared by this movie as had been promised I would be, but that's what happens when you buy into the hype. I was simply expecting too much, and I got a pretty good ghost story instead. Ju-On is good. It's not great, but it's a decent, straightforward ghost story with more than enough scary moments to please most horror fans. Ringu was scarier, but Ju-On is a noble effort. Like most Asian horror stories, it remains ambiguous and open-ended, leaving room for both a sequel and the chance for you to decide for yourself what the curse of The Grudge really is.
7 out of 10 stars.