The Grudge -- 2004 -- PG-13

Wow. This movie tops my list of creepy movies. It has now been several months since I've seen it and I still refuse to watch the Japanese version: Ju-On. It had a good range of scares, which in this case, were nearly always true scares (not the false ones we get a lot). The explanation of why this is going was good enough to suspend disbelief and roll with wht's going on. The scares are what drives the film constantly. The characters, while not really well rounded, serve their purposes decently.

When it comes to execution, I gauge how well it does by the numbers of times I feel like yelling at the movie based on its stupidity. This film does have two shortcomings in this category. In order to acheive the scares, it makes three rather unbelievable moves by its characters.

First, why can't anyone turn on a dang light? We've got characters going into rooms and halls and never once reaching for a light switch. Only in one room did a character reach for a switch and it not work. The others times when the light switch was flipped, let there be light. Granted this would spoil the whole "what's hiding in the dark" feeling, but it would have been better if the character tried to flip the switch and it not work instead of constantly wanting to go in blind.

The second has to do with people entering other people's houses without being invited. This film has to do with one house that has this grudge thing on it, and yet two characters entered this dwelling and felt free to look around at whatever they wanted to. One even rifled through pictures and read a diary. 

The last one has a character entering the house to destroy it. He has gasoline and he's ready to torch the place. Does he do it? No. No, he hears some noise in the house and has to check it out. My thoughts while I was watching? You idiot! You're in what amounts to a haunted house, and you hear a noise and you want to check it out EVEN THOUGH YOU JUST SAID that the house kills everything it touches. How annoying.

These things aside, the creep factor was through the roof, and I jumped more than once at the scares it provided. It gave even some psychological creepiness and its form of telling the story was very good jumping from one person's story to another in order to tell the story in the best manner possible. It has enough positives to outweigh the irriations, so if you want to be completely freaked out, give it a viewing and leave some time afterward for a comedy.