“When someone dies in the grip of a powerful rage, a curse is born. The curse gathers in the place of death and all those who encounter it will be consumed by its fury.”

Sounds easy enough, right?

Wrong.

“The Grudge” is a remake of the Japanese film “JU-ON: The Grudge.” This remake tries to follow in the footsteps of the Japanese film “Ringu,” better known as “The Ring.” The only exception is that “The Ring” had a plot and was good.

Karen (Sarah Michelle Gellar) is an exchange student in Japan who does social work and has agreed to cover for a nurse who has failed to show up for her shift. When she gets to the trashed house, she finds Emma, an older woman in a constant catatonic state, barely uttering a word. Within minutes, hair creeps out of the ceiling and Karen is curled up and shaking in the corner.

For one reason or another, there is a large abundance of hair in the film.

Other laughable hauntings of this house include a small Japanese boy and his black cat that run out at all the right points to make the audience jump, images in mirrors that no one notices, arms coming out of bathtubs full of water and, of course, the always fun bloody lower half of a jaw.

As the story develops, there is a constant shift in time held together loosely through phone calls and newspaper articles. The film starts out three years earlier with Peter (Bill Pullman) killing himself. The film fast-forwards to present day, jumps back a few weeks, forward to today, jumps back two days, returns to today and so on.

The whole idea of a plot goes out the window and all that is left are short, miniature stories that all tie together over time.

So why exactly is the “grudge” mentioned in the film? It’s hard to explain without ruining the movie. What can be said is that anyone who steps inside the house dies. You walk in the front door, and sooner or later; you’re dead. Even leaving the house does you no good; the grudge will find you.

Gellar’s alter-ego “Buffy The Vampire Slayer” would have been proud because Karen does some footwork and finds out what exactly happened in the house and why it’s haunted.

Everything comes together in the last five minutes. Black-and-white flashbacks piece together what happened in the house and the film ends on a rather odd note, leaving questions that remain unanswered.

Even Buffy wouldn’t have wasted an hour and a half of our time on this. No, Buffy would have figured everything out in under an hour – and that’s including commercial breaks.

The tag line says “It never forgives. It never forgets.”

Forget this one, folks.