The Grudge Review (2020) Worth Watching?

It's about a couple of cops who investigate the newest batch of grudge curses.

The Grudge was directed by Nicolas Pesce (who also directed Piercing and The Eyes of My Mother) and stars Andrea Riseborough (from Mandy and Hidden), Demián Bichir (from The Nun and Alien: Covenant) and John Cho (from Total Recall and Earth Vs The Spider).

It'll never let you go

This Grudge is the 3rd Grudge, the 2nd remake and the 13th part in this long running franchise. The original Ju-on: The Grudge came out in 2002, 18 years ago. The first American remake came out, and took place, in 2004. This newest remake takes place in 2006.

So, to catch you up, in the previous Grudge, part 3, an american girl at an international school in Tokyo gets tricked into checking out the grudge house, catches the curse, goes back home to Chicago, spreads the curse to her neighbors and the neighbors kid goes crazy and find himself locked up in a padded room. He gets killed by Kayako (the grudge ghost) and the last woman to talk to the kid takes the curse back home to her house, starting the cycle all over again. Then there's this woman in Tokyo who catches wind of the curse in Chicago and immediately up and moves there, right next door to the curse stricken family. So, the dad catches the curse and kills the Japanese woman, who turns out to be Kayako's sister, who then becomes the new grudge ghost and kills the dad.

Now, take all that information and just throw it away.

This new Grudge doesn't use any of that, it's as if Kayako's sister being the new grudge ghost never even happened. I just wasted a minute and a half of your time, same way this movie wasted an hour and a half of mine.

This new Grudge takes place not in Tokyo or Chicago, but in some small town in Pennsylvania for whatever reason. It doesn't look like a Grudge movie, doesn't feel like a Grudge movie and it doesn't follow much if any of the Grudge storyline. It's a lot like the latest Child's Play remake in that it's basically connected to the franchise by name only.

So, now we know what this Grudge wasn't.

What this Grudge was was a January horror release. January release movies in general, and horror movies in particular, are often disappointing.. There's a lot of January cash grabs and this new Grudge was no exception.

This Grudge was basic, generic and propped up entirely on obnoxious jump scares. The scares were painfully predictable, the effects were cheesy and it felt strangely dated for being a modern horror. It was nearly identical in style to The Haunting in Connecticut 2: Ghosts of Georgia. That movie was predictable, generic and cliche seven years ago and this Grudge was exactly the same.

I could go into the plot details of this movie but don't really want to. I'll probably forget everything about this new Grudge remake by tomorrow so what's the point. It numbed my brain for 90 long minutes that I'll never get back and I just want to forget everything about it and pretend it never happened.