‘The Grudge’ and ‘Feng Shui’: horror movies for the teenage crowd

There are two new movies at Hollywood Theater this week, The Grudge and Feng Shui, and they have a few similarities. They’re both horror movies with teenage-friendly ratings: “PG-13” for The Grudge, and “PG” for Feng Shui. They’re both Asian imports, The Grudge an American remake of a Japanese movie, and Feng Shui a Filipino movie with English subtitles. Actually, The Grudge is sort of a remake, sort of a sequel. I guess it’s a requel. And finally, neither one of them ever really scared me. At least Feng Shui is occasionally funny.

Even though neither one of them worked for me, however, I can’t really say either one is a “bad” movie, because they both should appeal to their pimple-faced target audience just fine. Last year’s The Ring is a perfect example–I didn’t think it even slightly scary, but quite a few people did, especially teens, coughing up more than 128 million of their parents’ hard-earned dollars.

I don’t have an aversion to all horror movies, but it’s a rare one that actually scares me. The only horror movies I’ve enjoyed have been the ones that take the time to develop their characters. A touch of genuine emotion helps. Maybe I’m a little “desensitized to violence”. Maybe my babysitter shouldn’t have let me watch Friday the 13th when I was eight years old (true story–I wet my pants). Similarly, the toddler sitting a couple rows behind me during Feng Shui burst into tears every time a ghost popped onscreen, making me wonder if his boneheaded parents knew they were plaguing him with years of nightmares.

The Grudge

Starring Sarah Michelle Gellar (Buffy the Vampire Slayer), The Grudge is a remake/sequel to a wildly popular Japanese series of movies, and is essentially a haunted house story. Gellar plays a grad student, on exchange, in Tokyo, volunteering as a caregiver for the elderly to get social work credit. Her first assignment, as misfortune would have it, is to care for a near-catatonic woman who happens to live in a haunted house.

So far, Gellar’s biggest role in movies has been as Daphne in Scooby Doo and Scooby Doo 2. While watching The Grudge, I kept thinking the case would be a whole lot easier to solve if Scoob and the gang were there. If Gellar could’ve had a couple more meddling kids by her side, they surely would’ve unmasked the ghosts to discover that it’s really just some old dude trying to scare everyone away from the treasure buried beneath the house. No such luck. The house, it turns out, is actually haunted. With a myriad of flashbacks, the history of the house, and how it came to be cursed, is explained. That’s a big waste of time, if you ask me. It would’ve been simpler to just tell us that it was built on top of an old Indian burial ground.

Sam Raimi (Spiderman director) produced The Grudge, and retained director Takeshi Shimizu, from the Japanese original. The Grudge is extremely similar to The Ring, stylistically, since it isn’t so much “scary” as it is “creepy”. The ghosts are pale-faced kids with black eyes, and they have an annoying tendency to call people on their phones before killing them. Maybe you’ll like The Grudge, but the only time it scared me was when the obligatory cat leaped onscreen.

Feng Shui
The oddly titled Feng Shui doesn’t really have anything to do with Feng Shui, other than the fact that the deaths in the movie all come at the hands of a cursed Chinese antique, believed to bring good fortune. Starring Kris Aquino, former Philippine first-daughter and self-proclaimed Oprah of the Philippines, Feng Shui gets its scares courtesy of a bunch of zombie-like ghosts with really bad makeup. Okay, maybe it’s a little scary the first time you see a strange face just outside the bedroom window, but it kind of loses its effect by the 30th time.

Unlike The Grudge, which had nothing but cardboard cutout characters, Feng Shui does make an attempt to inject itself with an authentic story of family hardship. Director Chito Rono, in fact, proudly boasts that Feng Shui is a drama first, and a horror movie second. I can see what he was going for, but the drama in Feng Shui is melodramatic schmaltz, better suited for daytime soaps.

To his credit, Rono does have a flair for comedy. The jokes in Feng Shui are all perfectly timed, and every single one of them works. Rono is also able to get a couple terrific performances from the child-actors—no small feat, judging by the innumerable past failures of other directors.

Feng Shui has been a smash success in the Philippines, selling out theaters everywhere. On Filipino internet message boards, all the reviews I could find have been very positive. Then again, the biggest users of internet message boards are teenagers. Ten or 15 years ago, I might’ve really liked Feng Shui. I, too, was once young, dumb, and…uhh, never mind. (Joe Weindl)