Grade:  D+

The original Japanese version of Takashi Shimizu’s “The Grudge” (released in this country as “Ju-On: The Grudge” earlier this year) was a haunted house story told out of chronological sequence, in fractured narrative form and without any apparent rules to link its scattered shock moments into even a reasonably intelligible whole.

This mostly English-language remake, which Shimizu has directed from a script by Stephen Susco, is a curious hybrid. Rather than transferring the action to the western hemisphere, as might have been expected after the pattern of “The Ring,” it retains the Tokyo setting of the earlier picture as well as a good many of its images and episodes, adding a few American characters to serve as people U.S. viewers can identify with while excising some elements of the original (a longish plot thread involving a schoolgirl, for instance) and adding others (a wraparound tale involving Bill Pullman as a teacher). (The doctored American release of “Godzilla” back in the fifties, which added English dubbing as well as footage with Raymond Burr, may come to mind, though here all the visuals are new.)

This “Grudge” also tries to make the spooky plot clearer through the use of extensive flashbacks and verbal exposition. But in truth the picture isn’t much more coherent in English than it was in Japanese, and if you’ve seen the original, the retread isn’t even as scary from the perspective of a mere fright machine. If you haven’t, you may respond to it with a few mild shudders, but overall you’re likely to find it a pretty torpid and pointless exhibition of horror movie cliches.

The premise of the story, outlined at the start, is that places where horrible experiences have occurred can carry the rage or anger they involved like an infection and inflict it upon those who visit the locale later. In this case the place is a Tokyo house where an older American woman (Grace Zabriski), apparently abandoned by Matthew and Jennifer (William Mapother and Clea DuVall), her son and daughter-in-law, is found living in squalor by health care workers sent to check on her. The first of them (Yoko Maki) disappears after being attacked when she investigates strange noises in the attic; the second, an American girl named Karen (Sarah Michelle Gellar), who’s come to Japan along with her boyfriend Doug (Jason Behr), an architecture student, finds a strange, near-mute boy named Toshio (Yuya Ozeki) locked in a closet. Before long the police get involved in the person of Inspector Nakagawa (Ryo Ishibashi), who becomes especially concerned when Matthew’s sister Susan (KaDee Strickland) disappears mysteriously from her apartment, shortly after encountering gruesome apparitions in her office building.

Eventually it’s revealed that the cycle of violence and terror was initiated when the man who lived in the house years earlier killed his son and wife after discovering that she was enamored of the teacher (Pullman), who later jumped off balcony to his death, an apparent suicide. The restless spirits of that family inhabit the house, it seems, and bring doom upon all who make the mistake of entering it in the future. Karen is soon troubled by threatening phantasms and visions, and in the end Doug, who goes to the house in search of her, is as well.

This complicated, intricate storyline is actually simpler than it was in the Japanese version, and Susco has actually done a pretty good job of laying it out so that the parts are fairly clear, despite the elaborate structure. The problem isn’t in understanding what’s going on; it’s in caring, or feeling any pleasurable fright in watching as the none-too-surprising secrets are torturously revealed. “The Grudge” is actually a very simple spook story, gussied up with tricky shifts of time and perspective that merely slow things down and prove more frustrating than fun, and with visual effects that don’t carry much punch.

Particularly irritating is that the script never sets any limits to what the nasty ghosts can or can’t do; usually the power of such spirits is confined to a single locale, like the house, but here they can apparently prowl long distances to do their dirty work, take any form they wish (one of them assumes the shape of a deceased member of the cast, it would seem), and physically assault the living. None of this makes much sense, and indeed the ghosts seem to be able to do whatever is required by Shimizu’s latest idea for a quick scare effect.

The lack of the rudimentary logic even so outlandish a genre requires ultimately sinks “The Grudge,” and the visuals aren’t nearly enough to compensate, though Shimizu and Hideo Yamamotor work hard to generate some eerie touches and Christopher Young adds a busy score to the mix, with plenty of the loud screeches that have to accompany “gotcha!” moments in material like this.

The cast is almost completely at a loss. Pullman looks benumbed throughout, as if he weren’t sure of what’s going on even after reading the script, and Zabriskie is pallid; Strickland is amateurish, and her big bedroom death scene comes across as a dull copy of the one Johnny Depp endured years back in the first “Nightmare on Elm Street.” The Japanese performers seem quite out of place, with some (like Ishibashi) reciting the English dialogue so flatly that they seem to be mouthing the words phonetically. And Behr is so nondescript, and given so little to do anyway, that you practically forget he’s there. As for Gellar, she spends the entire film walking around looking dazed, uncomfortable and befuddled. In that respect, at least, she’s certainly a good audience surrogate.

“The Grudge” makes a point of leaving room for a sequel, and there have been a series of Japanese spinoffs from “Ju-On.” There’s not much chance that this curiously dull Hollywood version will find a similar degree of success on this side of the Pacific. Your neighborhood Halloween haunted house is probably scarier than this one.