Oofy. That’s the best way I can explain how this movie made me feel when it finally finished.

The Grudge is a remake of a remake that ties in some previous lore from the other films and I had no urge to see this movie. Unfortunately I’m trying to see as many movies as I can this year so I had to suck it up and give it a shot. January for the most part is known as the dumping ground for new movies of the year. Typically there are a handful of horror movies scheduled here that all end up being absolute garbage. With that in mind, forgive me a little if I went into this movie expecting the worst.

Expecting the worst still isn’t enough to prepare you for how big of a dumpster fire this movie is. Honestly I don’t even understand why any studio thought remaking this was a good idea. I’m not saying that movies shouldn’t be remade because it happens all the time, but a property like this was something that nobody was wanting and nobody could get excited for. I’m sure there’s someone out there who was extremely excited to go see this movie but generally speaking I don’t think anyone was. On top of that, I don’t think anybody knew it was being released.

I keep up with movie news on a daily basis and I don’t even remember seeing trailers for this movie or hearing much about it. I was aware that it was being made, but when I looked to see what new releases were coming out I thought “oh…I guess that movie is coming out”. It had no buzz surrounding it and no level of anticipation. All of this points to bad signs for any film being released and this movie was no special case.

This is truly an awfully made movie with so many mistakes from the atrocious writing to the poor direction and pacing. Throughout the movie we get our main lead who is investigating a series of murders that are all connected to one house. With that we get flashbacks of all the people that were murdered there as it leads up to our finale. The bouncing back and forth between everything was a real pain and I didn’t have any care in the world.

The problem is that this is a short movie to start with, but having the flashbacks felt like they were trying to tell shortened versions of three different “Grudge” stories. The only reason I can think of why they would do this is because they didn’t have enough story for just our main character to tell a full length movie. Honestly I was caring more about the flashbacks than I was with anything she was doing. It’s so frustrating because it really does feel like they couldn’t come up with a complete singular story for one set of characters and again makes me wonder why they even made this movie to begin with.

My biggest gripe though is something that pissed me off so much that I wanted to just stop watching. One of the flashbacks includes a husband and wife played by John Cho and Betty Gilpin. Okay…so…if you aren’t aware of John Cho, he’s actually a really great actor known for the new Star Trek series and plenty of other great movies. And if you don’t know Betty Gilpin, she’s an Emmy nominated actress for her work on the Netflix show Glow. My absolute biggest gripe that made me want to pull my hair out was that these two actors were used in such a small role.

I can’t even comprehend how anybody in their right mind could bring on these two for a project like this and not figure out some way to use them as their leads. Instead, you have a bunch of actors that you don’t recognize because I sure as hell didn’t. It’s such a wasted opportunity for what could’ve been for this movie that it just about bugs me more than anything else going on. When I saw them come on screen I just shook my head and swore.

Getting back to the movie though, the story is boring and uninteresting. The scares are not scary and it did nothing new to the franchise to make itself any different or give us any reason to care about it. There’s just nothing good about this movie unless you sit back, watch it, and laugh at how absolutely stupid everything is in it.

Bottom line is that this is a dumpster fire that should never have been made. It’s a remake that seems to have just been made for a quick buck. It had an opportunity by including two actors that are absolutely loaded with talent, but failed by using them in such a small role. You will not have fun in this movie, you will not be scared of this movie. It’s a waste of an hour and a half and I highly recommend you deter people from seeing it. Hopefully enough people won’t go see this to the point that they stop trying to give us half baked crap turds of movies. January could be a good time to go to the movies, but so far the year has kicked off with a big waste of time.

Oofy.

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