Review of The Grudge 3 (2009) by Liz B — 11 Jun 2009

For some reason I like the grudge series, despite my general distaste for the horror genre, but this is a very weak sequel. The psychological tension seems to have been lost from the series and i'd like to say it's fallen back onto jump out of your seat scares but there's precious little of them either. There are theoretically jumpy moments, but the build up to them is so slow and the payoff frequently so brief that you wonder why they even bothered.

There's some potential when the older brother gets possessed by the grudge father and turns a little Jack Nicholson on the family, but it's short lived and could have done with a better tension building rise of insanity rather than a sudden desire to stab women in the neck.

What's also kind of weird is that the grudge spirits seem now capable of causing more physical harm to their victims, throwing a young boy around a room and breaking a womans neck (which causing an unusual amount of bloodflow), and somehow this makes them less scary.

Horror films often don't realise that it's what we don't see that scares us, the unknown, the thing hidden in the dark, and this film slowly falls into the trap of showing us everything until we're bored of hearing about it, and I seem to recall The Ring 3 doing much the same. The more you know the less scary something is.

Anyways the film is all right I suppose, it's just not nearly as good as it's predecessors.