THE GRUDGE

CONTAINS SPOILERS YET AGAIN

Again. Never has the line "this is never going to end" been more pointed. This is now the fourth Grudge film in English, never mind the Japanese Ju-On originals (and the Ring/Grudge crossover Sadako Vs Kayako), and there seems less chance of stopping filmmakers returning to the totally scorched earth of Grudge movies than stopping the unstoppable hauntings themselves.

Actually, this latest stab isn't too bad, and gains some points for ambition even if it doesn't entirely succeed. For a start, it's better than the first two English-language films (which original director Takaski Shimizu helmed, under the production hand of Sam Raimi) and certainly better than the dull third one which went straight to video anyway. It looks great, with a solid cast of grownups playing grownups and no teenage halfwits with their shirts off, and the timeline flits back-and-forth between three separate hauntings in the same Pennsylvania house - a house so notoriously evil that the lead investigator (Demian Bichir) won't even set foot inside it when a horribly mangled body is found in a car wreck... Is 44 Reyburn Drive actually possessed by the now overly familiar Ju-On ghosts from the Tokyo-set prologue?

Much of The Grudge 2020 takes place in the dark, with several people wandering round the house in the middle of the night and mysteriously not switching the lights on. Lin Shaye turns up, which is always good news: post-Insidious she's as much a talisman of the B-horror as Robert Englund or Lance Henriksen (and when is someone going to put all three of them in the same film?). Maybe it's because I saw it at about eleven o'clock at night in my local Vue (and then had to walk home to my dark and empty flat) that I found myself looking away from the screen several times so I didn't see the scary faces that lurched, almost randomly, out of the background behind single mother and rookie cop Andrea Riseborough.

It's not great: after all, it is a Grudge movie and the franchise has already established that the ghosts cannot be stopped, so it is just another series of agreeably messy deaths from a permanent and undefeatable menace, peppered with the expected occasional Boo! popcorn jolts. It's clearly trying to be something a little bit better than that, and trying to do something interesting with a frankly knackered horror idea, with its non-chronological structure and attempts at an atmosphere of morbid dread. It's perfectly decent on its reboot-of-a-remake level of unoriginality, and I quite enjoyed it enough even through the mist of seen-this-all-before.

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