Starring: Shannyn Sossamon, Edward Burns, Azura Skye, Ray Wise
Directed by: Eric Valette
Written by: Andrew Klavan (Novel by Yasushi Akimoto)
Studio: Alcon Entertainment
The Japanese have been known to scare a mafucker or two with their movies. As embarrassing as it is, I admit to almost wet myself once during Ringu. Yep, for whatever reason (it's post-WWII fixation with THE BOMB has something to do with it), Japan is full of people that know how to make us flip-a-shit.
It didn't take long for Hollywood to recognize the potential for introducing J-Horror (as the subgenre is known as now) to Western market. Of course, something needed to be done about the "packaging" of the product. For, you see, we Towering Americans cannot stand to deal with subtitles and completely Asian casts, so the studios just had to remake these movies in our own image. And of course, something is !LoSt iN tRaNsLaTiOn! - something big. But while the American version of the Ring was so-so, the bastardization of an already shitty film called One Missed Call - like the American counterpart, the Japanese film industry isn't afraid to clone successes - just makes me wonder if Westernization is all it's cut out to be.
Shannyn Sossamon (she so purdy) plays a college student whose friends keep dying and then booty calling random friends from the grave and letting them know when they too will meet their demise. It's like the game Telephone mixed with a Ouija board, but even more retarded somehow. With the help of a bulky, blockheaded detective whose sister he believes was killed by the same force going around fucking up (mostly) co-eds, the two play detective for a while and then I got bored and hit the Bacardi.
There really is no substance to this film, that is to say there's no message, theme or intense character study - fuck, even Pulse had some social commentary. Here, unfortunately, we're subjected to protagonists we couldn't care less about, an antagonist (who wasn't the person you expected it to be! oh wait, I never felt the need to form an expectation in the first place) that perpetrates because she's just evil, and victims we hardly get enough time to learn about before they're dispatched.
Which leads me to my next complaint: One Missed Call wasn't scary in the slightest. The ways people were offed by the demon child, rather than gruesome or chilling, were downright boring and contrived. Hit by a train, dragged into the water, impaled by pipe - all done a dozen times before. I suspect developing this film with a PG-13 rating in mind was the primary culprit for the snoozer gore, but even then, I Know What You Did Last Summer pulled off some brutal hookings without entering R-land. In addition, the demon child's minions (I guess that's what they were), based off ugly dolls the demon child had when she was alive, kind of hang around the entire time and try to look menacing. Instead, they look like puffy-faced Cabbage Patch dolls.
As a side note, I can't imagine why Boost mobile decided to have their product integrated into almost every scene of One Missed Call. First of all, I guess no one at HQ bothered to read the fucking thing when it slid across their desks like a turd on bowl water - where your brains at? Second of all, even if you didn't read the script, you know it's about some demon or whatever kiling bitches while using a cell phone the entire time. "Oh man, it's the phone from that movie with the crazy 6 yeard old bitch murdering college students from someone's stored contact list!" - is that the kind of recognition you're looking for? And finally, there is a short scene where the lead consults a Boost Mobile representative about how to cancel a plan and rep informs them, smugly of course, that they can't and instead have to use up the phone's minutes to get it to suspend the account. Good to know that BM's all about customer service.
The fact that I just wrote a paragraph about Boost Mobile's poor marketing decision behind this flick that is longer than any of the other paragraphs in this review is a testament to the shittiness that is One Missed Called.
Boo! Rundown:
Writing: The dialog captures what I imagine the conversations of lobotomy patients sound like. No rhyme or reason is given as to why the antagonist randomly kills people from stored contact lists on cell phones beyond she was a SADISTIC CHILD (boy oh boy screenwriters don't seem to mind milking that trope till its tits fall off). Characters pop up and talk as if we should know who they are in terms of the muddled and circuitous story but frankly I couldn't give less of a fuck to know.
Direction: Surprisingly, Valette treats us to some decent shots that show a modicum of creativity - for example, there's a scene of a heated argument between the female lead and the head of the Psychology department that is shown from outside of office and thus has no (heard) dialog. That being said, Valette couldn't cook up a scare that my mother would jump over - and she gets scared by abrupt changes in conversation topics.
Acting: Mz. Sossaman can act, this I know for a fact - just check out the movie Wristcutters. But here she managed to show us just how well she can sleepwalk through a scene despite being, you know, the lead. Also, Ray Wise's talent was horribly misused for the few scenes that features him. SHAME. But all was not lost - we did get to see an aging Margaret Cho ham it up, which is always amusing.
Editing: I cannot fathom why so much of the second act is left to the lead playing Nancy Drew with Officer Witless despite the scenes' collective level of tension hovering around Absolute Zero; why not just show us more gruesome deaths and scary doll people with mouths for eyes? No one watching this was looking for a gumshoe story, guys; the market is clearly thirteen year olds looking to get into their first SCAAAAAAARY movie, not Veronica Mars fans.
Sound: If one more horror film takes an nursery rhyme or a sweet chord or a song from the Thirties and tries to turn it into the next Jason Voorhee's murder theme, I'm going to cry razors and use them to murder the innocent.
Soundtrack/Score: Generic.
Self-Awareness: Everyone behind this must have known the movie was intended as nothing other than another shitty knock-off - but I guess it didn't bother any of them enough to do something, at the very least, fun or self-reflexive.
Overall rating: 1/2
~Ian
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