Thread by @Linkara19

Welp, time to enter the dark times for my Ring/Grudge marathoning. I'm finally checking out The Grudge 2020, which is apparently a Sidequel. I've heard nothing but bad things, but I'll give it a shot, though no promises on live-tweeting.

Next one after this will be Rings.

Pray for me - I've seen clips of it. DX

Okay, so already I've got a problem. You go to all the trouble of establishing the connection with the American Grudge, even the brief cameo by Kayako... but you screwed up the death groan!

Did they just not have a copy of the .wav file they keep the groan sound on?

I think this finally explains why Kayako is so inconsistent with how long it takes for her to kill people - she has to keep flying from Tokyo to Chicago and then to Pennsylvania and back to kill all the people who keep coming to her house.

"Okay, so this woman entered at this point, so I should go for her next- wait, wait... no, THIS person was in there last! FUCK! I've got to go all the way back to Chicago for this, son of a..."

*TV turns on, static*

"Look, if Sadako's going to steal my shower gimmick in our crossover movie, I'm stealing her TV gimmick, damn it!"

"Hi, I'm NOT Kayako but somehow I have her proper death groan. I stole it from her last time she was in the States!"

PFFFF. HA.

Oh, oh dear, it's sad when something meant to be scary is actually hilarious.

Okay, so John Cho is a realtor who shows up at the new Grudge house because the family needs to sign some papers or something. He finds the daughter (who I guess is our new Toshio?)...

...outside and her nose starts bleeding. He brings her in and tries to call her dad to let him know about this, specifically saying "She's got a bit of a bloody nose..." And then we cut over to her and she's got her hand over her face and blood is GUSHING out.

I don't mean that in an exaggeration - she's lightly coughing as it is flowing out in a massive amount like a friggin' spigot. Maybe that was MEANT to be funny, but that seems like a bad idea for your very moody horror movie to have something horrific be funny.

Holy crap, William Sadler's in this!

...They better not waste William Sadler in this.

...They wasted William Sadler in this.

Unless he comes back later in the movie (Grudge movie, nonlinear storytelling), HE DIDN'T EVEN GET A LINE.

Okay, they only SOMEWHAT wasted William Sadler. The problem is he's caked in injury makeup so his lines are kind of muffled. It's still William Sadler and he's a phenomenal actor (adding a line of his here to my list of horror phrases for Longbox trailers), buuut I think it...

...would have been better without the injury makeup - forgo the failed suicide attempt his character has and just have the reveal that he went mad from investigating and let William Sadler do his thing.

Okay, movie, okay - you're improving on your William Sadler usage by him having made aduio tapes of his investigation - giving us some unmuffled William Sadler performance. You've earned some points.

So what we got some more William Sadler, thankfully, but now I'm just confused since his scenes extended past the audio tapes but he sees the ghost woman (not-Kayako) and that's when our lead takes off the headphones and walks away. Sooo, like, did she know about that sequence?

Did William Sadler just keep the tape recorder going when he and his partner went out to Denny's?

John Cho's plot keeps being unintentionally funny. He goes to answer the door and looks through the peep hole and indeed grudge woman is just standing there, being all wet and dark shape and all. Like... she's just been standing at her own door ringing the doorbell.

Once again, this movie really does prove that Kayako and consequently all grudge ghosts' worst enemy is frickin' DOORS.

BAHAHAHA, STOP IT, JOHN CHO STORYLINE! STOP BEING UNINTENTIONALLY FUNNY!

Okay, so after almost being dragged down into the poop water or whatever in the bathtub by the ghost, John Cho runs downstairs and is confronted by a bad, music video editing-style jump scare of new ghost woman and his reaction to this is... to run into a closet and shut it.

Like, he's still directly in the ghost woman's view. What was he trying to accomplish with that?

In fact, this maneuver is so idiotic that he peers out of the closet and I guess ghost woman was just like "Welp, that was all I had, walking away now."

She made a scary monster face and then just... walked off. Of course, this is setting up for a jump scare in the closet, but like, why not have her vanish entirely? Having her just walk away is goofy.

AND OH MY GOD THAT'S ALSO ANOTHER EXAMPLE OF GRUDGE GHOSTS BEING IMPEDED BY DOORS.

THIS IS HOW YOU END THE CURSE - JUST KEEP SHUTTING A DOOR IN KAYAKO'S FACE AND SHE'S POWERLESS!

The 2005 story with the elderly couple honestly works so much better. It's not GREAT, but it's exploring some stuff not seen before in the franchise and its plot elements work better as a cohesive story.

Conversely, John Cho's 2004 story is "Our unborn child may have ALD. We are conflicted on how we feel about this. Anyway, ghost woman somehow makes me kill my wife instead of just outright killing me for some reason and they keep making it somewhat goofy."

Oh, and John Cho leaves his front door open when he comes home: coincidence... OR DOES HE KNOW THAT GRUDGE GHOSTS CAN'T GET PAST A CLOSED DOOR?!

HA! Okay, in a legit, intentionally funny moment, the elderly man gives a heartwarming speech about how if they die in a place like this, maybe he and his wife can still be together in the hereafter and it's the only hope he has. There's dramatic, heartwarming music...

...aaand we cut to the next morning with the music getting stopped abruptly with the assisted suicide woman who had been advising them zipping up her bag going "Fuck this shit, I'm out." Well played, Grudge 2020. Well played.

Well that sucked.

Yeah, shocking no one - The Grudge (2020) is bad. There are a few things I will give it credit for, but not much.

-Attempting to maintain continuity by connecting it with Kayako at the very beginning and mentioning it again later. It's tacked on, but at least it's TRYING...

...to acknowledge a continuation. And good that it did, because if it didn't? Wow, this story alone does NOT explain why this would otherwise have happened.
-The elderly couple plot was a BIT original. Nothing too groundbreaking, but the acting was solid and had some...

...interesting ideas and dialogue that we hadn't seen before in the franchise from either side of the pond. It largely goes unexplored, but it's unique and this thing needs as much unique points as it can.
-It's not the international version's ending. Yeah, the international...

...ending, according to Wikipedia, had a happy ending. You don't have a happy ending to a Grudge movie. The closest you get is Grudge 3, but that one still hinted that it would continue.
-William Sadler.

That's it. That's all I can really give you.

So, first of all: the ending. Like so many before it, our lead tries to burn the house down. None of these people met Kayako's mom in Grudge 2, who I keep citing in these Twitter threads with one of the few good bits from that movie: "This is not about a house."

She actually succeeds and burns down the house. Shock of all shocks, this doesn't work and the ending is her getting dragged away by the crappy new ghosts (I'll get to them in a bit). But here's something weird - her son seems to enter the house against her instructions...

...and he is unable to remember her repeated "What do we do when we're scared? Close our eyes and count to 5" thing, indicating that it's actually the ghosts trying to trick her, and she lights up the place.

Few problems and weird things about this.

1. Why did she bring her kid along at all? The scene before this has her talking with her partner. Wouldn't it make sense to leave him in his care? What possible reason is there to bring him along?
2. Why doesn't the fake son know the fear thing? These are ghosts that pray on...

...their victims' knowledge all the time. There's no reason, especially since they are haunting her, that they wouldn't know it.
3. Why even go to that trouble? You're fucking superstrong ghosts that attack people. Just attack her. The closest we've ever seen anyone in this...

...franchise stand a chance against these ghosts were: another ghost and people with psychic powers. That's it. The subterfuge is completely pointless.

It's just there for a fake-out ending where we think it's okay, AND APPARENTLY IN INTERNATIONAL RELEASES IT WAS. WHY?!

And then, for reasons that baffle me, the first amount of credits is just over a shot of her house as nothing happens. No additional jump scares, no shots of the ghosts in the house indicating they're haunting this one now or something. It's just a couple minutes static shot...

...of the house while some credits play over it. Like, not even one last crappy jump scare? Criminy.

Oh, yeah, now let's move onto this AS a horror movie: it's not great.

This movie relies on a lot of jump scares - standard ones with harsh music stings. Now, to be fair, this series kind of utilizes jump scares all the time... but they're really bad jump scares choreographed in advance and framed so we know where the scares will come from.

It's by the book, basic-ass scares with nothing unique. And a real big problem? There's a lot of music in this. Ju-On tended to build up tension with a lot of silence, letting the quiet build up the anticipation for the jump scares. This? Not so much.

And it's not helped at all by one simple fact that makes this quite possibly the worst of the series: these ghosts SUCK.

A careworker who was at the Saeki House APPARENTLY (and I say apparently, because I got this from wikipedia) was corrupted by Kayako's influence and...

...murdered her husband and daughter. If we don't have that Wikipedia explanation, all we have is "I want to show you something" and "How could you do this?!" as two lines repeated during a flashback sequence at the end as our explanation. If we DIDN'T have Kayako at the start...

...we would have absolutely NO REASON why she'd murder her family. No backstory, no emotional change, she just up and kills them for no reason.

At least in Grudge 2 and 3 we at least saw a slow deterioration as people were being influenced by the ghosts.

But hey, at least these new ghosts are scary, right?

No. No they're not. They're quick-editing monster faces that go BLEH! and that's it. The new Toshio, Melinda, is especially bad. She's just a little girl in normal clothes. One of the reasons why Toshio is so friggin'...

...creepy is that he's just a little kid whose skin is all pale, in his underwear, who makes cat noises. It's friggin' weird and puts you off right away because of how bizarre it is to see. Even if it's a movie where Toshio doesn't do anything, his presence of watching events...

...is off-putting, especially when it seems like he's all-in on his mom's killing sprees.

And oh, yes, Kayako wins hands down against our new main ghost: Fiona. Fiona has a monster face and wears normal clothes.

That's it. At least Melinda had the blood thing going.

Kayako, in most interpretations, moves and looks like she's been through hell. Her best moments are when she's crawling slowly as if her body is in constant pain and anguish from all the injuries she sustained, bloody and making the death groan. Hell, her one appearance at...

...the start is scarier than the rest of the movie even if it's really just another jump scare. And yet it's also good because her pale appearance contrasts with everything.

The color grading of this movie is WEIRD. A LOT of shots are yellow for some reason and it's...

...unattractive to look at. There's no cool cinematography or real reason WHY these shots are yellow and others aren't. It's like it's trying to go for horror movie griminess, but doesn't want to commit.

The director, Nicolas Pesce, apparently said the movie would be "Darker, grittier, and more realistic."

...What fucking series did he think he was making? "More realistic?" It's about a fricking ghost curse that kills people!

As for "Darker and grittier," this franchise has frequently had people's jaws ripped off and, well, what happened to the teacher's pregnant wife in the original: Ju-On the Curse.

What he meant was "everything looks kinda dirtier sometimes. Also flies keep popping up."

Many of the kills in the original AND the Japanese reboot are far more gruesome than anything in this movie.

It's lame, uninspired, and everyone feels like they're sleepwalking through this. Oh, I suppose that's another positive I can give: they keep the nonlinear storytelling.

However, it feels underutilized and you could EASILY just divide this into three sections without much or any overlap.

The Grudge 2020 is just bad and boring. Even Grudge 2, much as I hate it, was better.