It wouldn’t be early January without a lousy horror film.

Carrying on the tradition set by the likes of Escape Room, The Forest, and The Woman in Black 2: Angel of Death, the latest remake of The Grudge — a story already rejiggered for the subtitle-averse in 2004 by the 2001 original’s writer/director Takashi Shimizu — is a puzzling creation in practically all regards.

Written and directed by Nicolas Pesce — he of the cruel, empty, and overrated B&W indie The Eyes of My Mother (2016) — the new take on the malevolent curse that’s passed, chain letter style, to unlucky individuals who enter its host house somehow attracted an appealing C-list cast, including John Cho, Andrea Riseborough, Demián Bichir, Lin Shaye, Frankie Faison, Betty Gilpin, and Jacki Weaver.

The film also nicely delivers in the creepy imagery department, especially the mangled corpse division. The frequently spooky atmosphere yields a decent number of chilling jump scares, punctuated by eerie, sharp noises and occasionally the evil entity’s textbook nightmarish dry gurgle, which sounds like a broken Jack in the Box crank. And, on the whole, it’s generally well-made, though Pesce could stand to hire a few more lighting technicians for the interior shots.

Where this Grudge struggles, however, is in its narrative structure. The idea of laying out the story in the manner of a police case file is somewhat creative, but the initiation of Det. Muldoon (Riseborough) into the central haunted house and the many nasty things that have occurred within its walls play out as overlong detours and often lose track of characters, namely Cho’s realtor and Muldoon’s inconsequential son.

Though the horrors that befall these unlucky people are technically fresh, each new human’s inevitable encounters with the murderous ghosts lends the film a repetitive nature.

The truly awful performances also don’t help. No one comes off well, especially the trio of Shaye, Faison, and Weaver, who appear to have filmed their shared scenes when Pesce was on vacation.

Despite the degree of freaky things that happen to these folks and the frequency with which they occur, The Grudge is yet another scary movie where no one seems all that bothered by supernatural nuisances and threats until it’s too late, dismissing the sensation of fingers in one’s hair, being held underwater by a phantom force, and actual sightings of the phantasms as if they were but a pesky fly in need of shooing. If any horror film characters deserve to die gruesome deaths, it’s these idiots.

Grade: D. Rated R. Now playing at AMC Classic, Biltmore Grande, and Carolina Cinemark

(Photo by Allen Fraser)