The GrudgeBy: Ambika Prem Kumar
 We all know that Gellar has acted in Scream 2, and has also appeared in both the Scooby - Doo movies. The starlet's signature role had her slaying vampires as Buffy Summers.
The movie takes off with Karen (Sarah Michelle Gellar) an exchange student studying social work in Japan who innocently agrees to cover for a nurse who didn't show up for work. When she enters the assigned home, she discovers an elderly American woman, Emma (Grace Zabriskie), who is lost in a catatonic state while the rest of the house appears deserted and disheveled.
Karen passes time between classes working for a Tokyo-based hospital care center. As she is tending to the stricken old woman, Karen hears scratching sounds from upstairs. When she investigates, she is faced with a supernatural horror more frightening than she could ever imagine
After a harrowing night facing terrifying sights around every corner, a policeman tells Karen about a legend. When a person dies in the grip of a violent rage, a curse is formed and anybody who encounters the cursed soul becomes cursed themselves and spreads the rage like a disease before they die -- even beyond the confines of the original place where the violence began.
We go back and forth in time and sometimes one person in one time period is observing past events as though they were happening at that very moment. It is not easy to explain The Grudge.
The movie is not as involving The Ring -- a remake of another Japanese horror movie -- but it has many freaky and jump-out-of-your-seat moments. The one thing that never really was clear was a pattern of when the ghosts and creatures would appear and why.
Predictable things make us jump in The Grudge. We see a tub full of water or an attic filled with cobwebs, and we know scares are coming, but Shimizu startles us all the same. The acting is bland but Gellar should have put in more, the decent effects serve the story well. The Grudge even tells its haunted house story in reverse, which keeps us engaged when things start moving too slow. Shimizu's deliberate pacing is off for a 97-minute movie. But there's more than enough mood to drip down and fill the gaps created by the film's non-linear story telling method.
It really doesn't matter if you don't totally understand what is happening. Within this house, a chain of terror has been set in motion resulting from a terrifying evil that was born years before. As more people die, Karen is pulled into the cycle of horror and learns the secret of the vengeful curse that has taken root in this house.
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