When someone dies in the grip of a powerful rage, a curse is born.  The curse gathers in that place of death.  Those who encounter it will be consumed by its fury.  Those who survive will carry the curse with them…until it is reborn.

If that sounds familiar, especially to horror buffs, there’s a good reason—it’s pretty much the plotline of the last two Grudge titles, and now, thanks to Sam Raimi and the crew at Ghost House, there’s a third.  I bucked convention with this series, with the belief that the second was, in a limited way, just as good as the first one.  I felt it was a lot more authentic, and not having Sarah Michelle Gellar around for long to Buffy her way through really perked things up, making them a whole lot less “action hero”.

This time around, we’ll be back in the apartment complex we left in the second installment.  The young survivor of the last installment managed to get locked up in an insane asylum, where he was promptly and messily killed by unknown forces. Of course, we know EXACTLY what those forces were—homicidal wackjob ghost extraordinaire Kayako and her squatting harbinger, son Toshio.

Meanwhile, the young survivor’s doctor (played halfassedly by Shawnee Smith) has gone to Chicago in search of answers, and that’s when the killing starts up again.

Frankly, watching this thing was a disaster.  They took all the worst parts of the first two—shoddy explanations, some for-no-clear-reason style killing, plot elements they clearly just pulled out of their asses—and introduced them all into one.  The Grudge 3 isn’t as atmospherically scary as the first one, nor is it as implicitly scary as the second.  All The Grudge 3 can do is do a whole lot of killing of characters we really don’t care about because we barely know who they are.

There will be so many elements of this movie that don’t even try to make sense that listing them all would require me to describe roughly a quarter of the movie.  And even worse, there are elements of the movie that make sense, but only because they’ve been doing them since the beginning.   For instance, I’m getting abundantly tired of Toshio showing up at random intervals and yowling.  Okay, I get it, you died just before your cat so you scream like one at every given opportunity.  And I’m also getting sick of Kayako stumbling around in that weird boneless fashion of hers and killing whatever happens to get in front of her for absolutely no reason at all.  Okay, I get that TOO, you’re a ghost and you’re just plain old enraged, but for crying out loud, absolutely none of these people you’re killing did ANYTHING to you.  Most of them weren’t even in the same TIME ZONE as you when your husband killed you.  Just lay off the random strangers, huh?

Perhaps the worst part about the whole thing is that they weren’t content to just let this misery pass by unchallenged and let the whole thing fade away into trilogy status.  The ending makes it crystalline-clear that there will be, at some point, a Grudge 4, and frankly, after this wreck of a movie I’m not looking forward to it.  At ALL.

I can’t imagine future sequels managing to save this wreck—though I have been wrong before—at this point, I’m not even cautiously optimistic.  I EXPECT this to continue to be a wreck.  If The Grudge 3 is any indication, look for this one to suck hard for years to come.