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Codex Atanicus
Codex Atanicus is a three story anthology by Spanish director Carlos Atanes. Before watching the movie I never heard of the guy, but the introduction video on the DVD by one of his regular actresses Arantxa Peņa made me realize that I'm in for a hell of a ride. Experimental, bizarre, sick, strange - these are some of the words that describe the stories contained in Codex Atanicus. The anthology is opened by a 20 minute short from 1995 called Metaminds & Metabodies. I am really not into this kind of experimental videos, but I will try to summarize. It opens with a girl singing in the club. Everything looks ultra underground and the girl is connected with some wires to the walls. Strange people are watching her...
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Movie Review: Grudge, The

Story
It's about this girl Karen Davis (played by Buffy) who lives in Japan with her boyfriend played by Jason Behr (ever seen Roswell?) who studies there. Karen is to be a caretaker for a woman who has some kind of sleeping disorder but when she goes to the womans house she starts to get terrorized by images of a boy and a ghostly woman.

Comments
Another remake, another headache. This time it's a remake of the excellent Japanese movie Ju-On: The Grudge, here entitled only The Grudge. When I first heard about that they were gonna make this remake I just wanted to puke.

It's bad enough with all the remakes as it is, but also that this one was gonna star Buffy the Vampire Slayer, so what I was asking myself was how the hell am I supposed to get scared with her in it, there's no chance of that. Only thing she can do is to drag it down and she does an excellent job ruining it for everyone.

Too bad is also that so many people rent this movie and have no idea that it's actually a remake and that there's a so much better original Japanese version out there but that's just the way it is I guess. They should put a sticker on it.

If you've seen the Japanese version there's no point watching this as it's the same story only that everything is a lot lamer and not even half as creepy. So what about the story?

Biggest problem with these American movies compared to the Asian version is that the American movies loses all their mystery that surrounds the Asian flicks and therefore makes them kinda boring or at least pointless to watch.

Weird thing though is that this movie is actually directed by Takashi Shimizu who's also the director of the original movie, and it's hard to see how he first could make such a brilliant film and then make this crap, it's actually a shame.

You think that since he did the orginal movie he should be able to pull this off as he has done it before and knows what it's all about but unfortunately it doesn't happen like that here.

Final Comments
I can't find this either entertaining nor scary, it's better to just watch the original movie again. I guess it works for clueless teens though.

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Grudge, The

ALTERNATIVE TITLE:
MOVIE YEAR: 2004
DIRECTOR: Takashi Shimizu
WRITING CREDITS: Takashi Shimizu, Stephen Susco
GENRE: Horror
CAST: Sarah Michelle Gellar, Jason Behr, William Mapother
COUNTRY: Japan, USA, Germany
RUNTIME: 92 min

RATING: 3/10

Grudge, The Website/IMDB Click here
Grudge, The Trailer Click here

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