Worth seeing: | as the latest Japanese horror to get the Hollywood treatment, resulting in an incoherent mess with few real scares |

Director: | Takashi Shimizu |
Featuring: | Sarah Michelle Gellar, Bill Pullman, Clea DuVall, Grace Zabriskie, Jason Behr, KaDee Strickland, Ryo Ishibashi, Ted Raimi, William Mapother |
Length: | 92 minutes |
Certificate: | 15 |
Country: | Japan, US |
Released: | 5th November 2004 |
WHAT’S IT ABOUT?
Karen (Sarah Michelle Gellar) moves to Japan to live with her student boyfriend, Doug (Jason Behr).
She gets work as a carer with an agency.
When a colleague fails to turn up for work, the agency sends Karen to help an elderly woman, in her big spooky house.
It’s spooky for good reason: since the violent deaths of its former residents, everyone who’s been there has died.
Will Karen be able to break the curse?
WHAT’S IT LIKE?
Letting a foreign director helm his own Hollywood remake doesn’t have a happy precedent: George Sluizer’s Vanishing is a case in point. Now we have another.
The difference with this one is that it’s hard to see how such an incoherent mess was ever deemed worthy of a remake.
It thinks it’s much scarier than it is, but more shocks come from the violinist dropping his bow than anything else.
The only real scares are rip-offs from better films like Ring and Dark Water.