Sadako Vs Kayako is so disappointing, I’ll rather watch Sushi Vs Kimchi

Sadako from The Ring is one of the most iconic characters in horror movies—it then showed the world that a horror movie doesn’t necessarily need excessive jump scares to be good. All it takes is a good old formula: the appearance of a woman with long hair who moves so slow, you’ll wonder how she could survive in Singapore.

As for Kayako, if you’re not familiar with her, you’re not alone: she’s the creepy woman from The Grudge, and the one who doesn’t leave as much impression as her son, a spooky ghostly boy who is somewhat both adorable and scary.

Both the movie franchise, The Ring and The Grudge, were adapted from Japan because they were just so successful domestically, and then internationally. So what’s next now, since most movies nowadays are either reboots, sequels or adaptions?

You put the two most popular characters for a fight.

If that sounds familiar, it is. Hollywood started the trend with Batman V Superman and then Captain America: Civil War. While the former receive lukewarm responses, Captain America: Civil War delivers: primarily because there’s a realistic story that shows why they have to fight against each other.

Sadako Vs Kayako falls into the former: both characters are in the movie to milk out more money from fans of each character.

Giving credit where it’s due, the beginning of the movie is pretty interesting: we’re given expositions of Sadako and Kayako, and how technology has evolved to make them irrelevant is pretty cool. I mean, for the Sadako’s curse to occur, how do you make a copy? By doing a copy and paste? What if it’s posted on YouTube?

However, the suspense, tension and good storyline slowly become a mess when Sadako is needed to fight Kayako. While the meeting may seem clever, there’s a fine line between being clever and trying too hard to be clever—this, unfortunately, belongs to the latter. In fact, a diplomatic arrangement might be even more feasible.

Watching the movie is more like an anticipation of the jump scares instead of immersing in the plot. Fans of the franchises would have been used to Sadako crawling out of the television and Kayato’s death rattle, but the movie once again used them to scare the audience—and no one was scared.

But what really irks me is how unrealistic everything is: people die and police didn’t come. People die and no one cares. Heck, even when a character’s parents just die, she could just wake up the next day without a single tear. And I’m not going to talk about the ending whereby you’ll wonder whether you’re watching Sadako Vs Kayako or playing a 1990s PlayStation RPG.

My verdict? Unless you’re a hardcore fan of The Ring or The Grudge, you’ll be better off re-watching all the old movies. At least they’ve got a story.

This article was first published on goodyfeed.com