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'The Grudge' a victim of studio fears

Sarah Michelle Gellar plays the role of Karen in The Grudge, which has attracted what looks like faint praise for being a horror-type film that is more creepy than scary. PHOTO: AP

The haunted house in The Grudge isn't draped with cobwebs, but every so often, it issues an unsettling creak that sounds like the shifting of delicate old bones. Located in Tokyo up a long driveway where dead leaves skitter like mice, the house has been home to so many victims that it's taken five movies to chronicle their unfortunate demise.

All the films in the series were directed by Takashi Shimizu, who also wrote all but this one; the first four, rather bewilderingly, carry some variation on the Japanese title Ju-On, which has to do with the notion of vengeance.

If that doesn't make your head spin like Linda Blair's, consider that this newest addition to the series is essentially an English-language remake of the third film and was paid for by an American studio owned by a Japanese corporation. Got that?

Chances are that if you can follow that torturous history, the vaguely splintered narrative in The Grudge should prove a breeze. The film nominally pivots on Sarah Michelle Gellar, from television's Buffy the Vampire Slayer, as Karen, an American social-work student living in Tokyo. Along with her boyfriend, Doug (Jason Behr), an American architecture student who reads books titled, yes, "Japanese Architecture," Karen is making a go in a strange new land that only gets stranger when she visits that creaky house on the hill.

Film Notes: The Grudge Directed by: Takashi Shimuzu With: Sarah Michelle Gellar (Karen), Jason Behr (Doug), KaDee Strickland (Susan), Clea DuVall (Jennifer), William Mapother (Matthew), Grace Zabriskie (Emma), Bill Pullman (Peter) and Takako Fuji (Kayako). Running time: 110 minutes Release date: Today

After another health-care worker goes missing, Karen has to walk up that hill to care for a catatonic older woman, Emma (spooky Grace Zabriskie), who seems to have been left home alone. Creak goes the house as something that sounds like a cat goes meo-o-o-ow.

As in Ju-On 2, the only other film I've seen in the series, The Grudge slides between different points in time to follow separate characters, who all fall under the same curse. With Karen looking suitably freaked out in the creaking, shrieking house, the story flashes back to Emma's family and its misfortunes.

Like characters in an Agatha Christie mystery, these three relatives (adequately played by Clea DuVall, William Mapother and KaDee Strickland) are slated for trouble. Each will suffer the murderous wrath of a female demon whose sickly blue-gray pallor and long black tresses give her the aspect of a Butoh dancer gone goth; only Strickland's fate suggests Shimizu's talent at raising goose bumps.

How the demon (Takako Fuji, playing the role for the fifth time) came to haunt the house with her flickering tongue, wildly bulging eyes and an unsettling glottal noise that sounds like a cranked-up Geiger counter, makes for a less than frightening horror-movie denouement. (In the past the director has supplied the franchise's trademark croaking.)

Less scary than creepy, The Grudge may have lost some oomph in the translation from Japanese to English, and the desire for a PG-13 rating probably muted the violence and perhaps the scares. The scenes move faster than those in Ju-On 2, which does nothing to amp the fear factor. The American cast isn't handled well, though Geller, whose pooling eyes water persuasively, and Bill Pullman, who pops in for about 10 minutes of screen time, are pleasant company.

The current Hollywood rage for Asian horror movies like Ringu has yet to yield fully successful results, a failing that's all the more curious in The Grudge. Although Shimizu didn't write the film (that dubious achievement belongs to Stephen Susco), he did enjoy the privilege of having as one of his producers Sam Raimi, who, before bringing Spider-Man to screen life, brought many characters to death in entertainments like The Evil Dead. But Raimi does not run a studio, which is why The Grudge seems like such an unsatisfying hybrid of two very different film cultures.

Shimizu can fill a room with eerie quiet and make your heart race with Grand Guignol flourish, but here he seems cursed by one of the greatest evils known to studio filmmakers: the teenage demographic.
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