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JU-ON: The Grudge Review/Verbal Slaying
About 10:30pm. Dark out obviously. Few friends over, roommates home. I tell everyone I’m going to play The Grudge game. They all seem fairly interested and excited to see how it’s going to be. Everyone gathers around the t.v., we turn the lights off to set the mood, and start. The game starts out in an old factory. No story line at all told, you just dive right in.
Read the rest after the break…… I plug in the nunchuck assuming that I’ll need it to walk around. Wrong. To walk, you aim where you want to go with your flashlight, and you hold the B button down. It’s very touchy, and if you go outside the intended virtual walking/aiming circle you completely lose control and the flashlight aims at the ceiling and you spin slowly. Now the flashlight batteries are basically your health bar. Once you run out of battery power, your light flickers out and you get attacked by a creepy teenage girl and you lose.
The walking. The walking is painfully slow. There is no running. No walking faster. It becomes very annoying when you have to check out an area. You find a door that’s locked, and you have to find a key, then go back to the door. It takes forever. I feel as if they made the walking so slow to build the suspense, but it just becomes very annoying. At this point in the game, none of us are impressed, no one is scared, and I am yelling about how slow I’m walking.
The scares. Are very planned. You’ll hear some horrible music, and it completely cuts away from you and shows you some once scurry past, or stick their head out. You’ll hear something fall, and you feel like you should turn around to check it out, but the controls are too slow to let you.
The 2nd level is a hospital. From the start you hear a phone ringing. It doesn’t stop. It annoys the shit out of you. You find it, walk up to it, and it stops ringing. God damn it. Then you hear some other phone ringing, annoying. After that the fire alarm goes off, ANNOYING. In this level you see a lot of the naked underage meowing boy running quickly past you. We thought we shouldn’t be watching this because we could get arrested for Haunted House Simulator child porn maybe.
In the next level you are in some creepy apartment building. You hear a door bell ringing for a while. ANNOYING. Game over. No more. As quickly as I could have finished the game, we stopped playing.
A second player can join in and aid in scaring the 1st player. The issue with that is, the controller vibrates when you are supposed to click the button to scare player 1. That would be cool if maybe the 1st player didn’t know that was an option and you hid the 2nd controller and clicked it when they weren’t paying attention.
On the box is says “JU-ON The Grudge Haunted House Simulator”. I feel they added Haunted House Simulator last second as to try to stray from the fact that the game is so terrible. The only “gore” you see are some dead rats, and bloody hand or foot prints. Don’t get me wrong, the level design is creepy, and it takes place in places I wouldn’t dare venture into alone. But that isn’t going to make the game.
If you do want the game you can pick it up now for 30 bucks. If you think it’s worth it. If you tear ass through this game, you could probably be done in less than 2 hours. If you could actually walk at a respectable speed, you could beat this game in under an hour. I honestly had decent hopes for this game. I only saw the 1st 2 movies, and I liked them, but this game really did nothing for me. I was never scared, never surprised, every level has basically the same scares. You spend your time wondering back and forth in the same area looking for batteries and keys. Oh here is a door I can’t open, better go into that room I missed and grab the key and slowly walk back to the door. Grabbed again by the creepy teenage girl, shake the Wiimote, and she’s gone. When I played this game, the whole time I’m just thinking about how I’d rather be shooting something.
Sam Neill, the New Zealand actor best known for his role in 1993’s Jurassic Park, has passed away this week at 78 years old. In a statement shared on Neill’s Instagram page this morning, the actor’s family said that his passing was “sudden and unexpected.”
Neill had been diagnosed with a rare blood cancer in 2022, but stated the following year that he was in remission. The family notes that he “remained cancer free” at the time of his passing.
The family statement reads, “It is with immense sadness that the whānau of Sam Neill share the news of his passing on Monday 13th July, in Sydney Australia. Sam was surrounded by family and passed with the dignity that has characterised his whole life. The loss was sudden and unexpected but blessed by the fact that Sam remained cancer free.
“They would like to express their deepest gratitude to the staff at St Vincent’s Private Hospital for their incredible care. More details will be shared later, but for now, on behalf of the family, we ask that you respect their privacy as they navigate this immeasurable loss.”
In addition to his iconic role as Dr. Alan Grant in the original Jurassic Park and the sequels Jurassic Park III and Jurassic World: Dominion, Sam Neill left an indelible mark on the horror genre with memorable roles in Andrzej Żuławski’s Possession, The Omen: The Final Conflict, John Carpenter’s In the Mouth of Madness, and sci-fi horror favorite Event Horizon.
Sam Neill’s vast resume in film and television began in the early 1970s and also includes the films Sleeping Dogs, Enigma, The Good Wife, A Cry in the Dark, Dead Calm, The Hunt for Red October, Memoirs of an Invisible Man, Hostage, The Jungle Book, Snow White: A Tale of Terror, The Horse Whisperer, Bicentennial Man, Daybreakers, Escape Plan, and Thor: Ragnarok.
Sam Neill is survived by his four children and eight grandchildren.
Steven Spielberg said in a statement to Variety, “I owe a debt of gratitude to Roger Donaldson, Gilliam Armstrong, Graham Baker and Phillip Noyce for casting Sam Neill in the roles in which he was so brilliant that brought him to my attention and led to his playing Dr. Alan Grant in Jurassic Park. Sam was exceptionally collaborative. It was a stretch for him to play a character who acted as though children were messy and smelly because this was the opposite of the loving father he was to his children. I adored making all the Jurassic movies with him.”
Spielberg adds, “Along with Laura Dern and Jeff Goldblum, we will always have our Jurassic family and Sam will never be forgotten by us or his many millions of fans around the world.”
Sam Neill in ‘Event Horizon’
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