The Grudge 3 (2009) Review
Spoiler-free so you can read before you watch
Horrorific content by Yo Adrian on April 21st, 2020 | Movie Review | Cursed, Supernatural, Haunted House, The Grudge Series
It's about yet another family that catches yet another grudge curse.
The Grudge 3 was directed by Toby Wilkins (who also directed Splinter) and stars Johanna Braddy (from The Levenger Tapes and The Collection), Beau Mirchoff (from Flatliners) and Matthew Knight (from My Babysitter's A Vampire).
You can't escape the curse.
Every movie in The Grudge series starts with this ominous introduction: "When someone dies in the grip of a powerful rage, a curse is born".
So here's the thing about the grudge curse. Kayako was a woman who got killed by her husband and subsequently turned into the grudge ghost. Her husband was the one who raged out and killed her (along with their son and the family cat), but she's the one who gets cursed and has the seemingly eternal obligation to spread her curse. So one by one she has to work to stalk, haunt and kill every single person she comes across. Tenants, housekeepers, friends, family, cops, film crews, students and even people they come across. In The Grudge 2 a cursed student hops the pond from Tokyo to Chicago and guess who has to get to work haunting everyone in Chicago that student knows? That's right, Kayako. This poor woman gets killed by her husband and she's the one who gets the never ending full-time haunting job. Uncool to say the least.
The Grudge 3 starts with Jake, the sole survivor from The Grudge 2, locked up in a padded room with full-blown grudge PTSD. Kayako only recently finished killing everyone Jake knew. Now she's back in Chicago, worlds away from everything she knows and loves, having to work to kill one more kid. And what happens after she does? You guessed it, she has to move onto Jake's shrink and everyone she knows.
No rest for the wicked.
Kayako's life is redundant, having to do the same thing over and over for eternity. And my life as a Grudge viewer is no different. I feel like I've been watching The Grudge series over and over for eternity. This is the 5th movie in the series I've watched so far and still have one more to go, the second remake. By this point I've easily watched Kayako go through the same stalk-haunt-kill cycle like 8,000 times.
The Grudge 3 is more of the same. Only worse.
This is the first movie in the series not directed by Takashi Shimizu and it shows. Everything about this movie sucks. The characters are paper thin, the story feels forced, the jump scares are amateur, the special effects are cheesy and the kills are anticlimactic. The ending was decent, probably the only redeeming part of the entire thing. If the movie overall was styled more like the ending it might have been OK. But it wasn't, and it's not.
Worth Watching?
No. No way. So, at one point a woman is walking through the hallway of her apartment building, looks up and sees Toshio squatting next to the rails looking all pale and creepy. He's very clearly a ghost. But she just starts talking to him like he's not clearly a ghost. Then she gets confused when he ups and disappears, actually starts looking for the creepy kid thinking he's lost or something. It's that kind of movie.
"When someone dies in the grip of a powerful rage, a curse is born."The Grudge 3 (2009) Review is part 5 of 6 in the Grudge series
Grudge franchise ranked First to Worst
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