"The Grudge" is a creep-fest that doesn't make a whole lot of sense. It's not that the movie is complex, the opposite is true. It just takes a pedestrian ghost story involving vengeance and anger and surrounds it with jolts and more jolts. Takashi Shimizu doesn't seem concerned with originality or substance as long as he can make creepy ghosts jarringly jump out at characters. While this is scary at times after a while you just stop caring. Sarah Michelle Gellar does the best she can with a thin role that requires her to just skulk around, look scared and ask questions. And when the answers come they prove to be unsurprisingly and unoriginal. "The Grudge" is forgettable and mindless.

The rule of thumb for watching any Japanese horror film that is remade in Hollywood is to go for the original, subtitles be damned. The one exception is The Ring. The Grudge remake, made by the exact same director of the original, is a series of confusing, disconnected creepy scenes until the end where you kinda-sorta get an explanation. No plot. Just typical stupid horror movie characters doing stupid things. "Oh, let's go check out that really creepy sound all by myself after I found my wife/mother/girlfriend/pet dead/catatonic/." Having seen nearly all the Japanese horror flicks, there is a clear culture of fear of long black hair, water and eyeballs or mouths that are stretched/blacked out via photoshop/CGI. When you experience it for the first time, it's scary. The second time, it's interesting. For the third, fourth, ...., it's yaaawwwwwnnnn.