One Missed Call

Silly, ridiculous and ultimately harmless, One Missed Call is a throwaway horror flick that provides nothing by way of scares and quite a few unintentional laughs. It is a completely harmless motion picture, save for that the fact that it was made and cost money in the first place, so it’s a little hard to get too steamed about its lack of coherence and decent chills.

As yet another American remake of a Japanese horror film, One Missed Call takes many of the elements from Takashi Miike’s 2004 version and creates a palatable softcore horror movie that relies on creepy visuals and a cell phone ringtone that is supposed to signify impending doom. The usual trappings of American remakes of J-Horror are all here, including creepy children, strange sounds, funny-looking eyeballs and strange objects coming out of peoples’ mouths.

Directed by Eric Valette (who?), One Missed Call stars Shannyn Sossamon as Beth Raymond. Beth is a girl who is disturbed by the deaths of four friends after learning that they’d each received cell phone calls from themselves in the future prior to their untimely deaths. In each case, the victim sees strange apparitions shortly before they die. Beth reports the problem to the cops, who essentially treat her like some kind of nut.

The heroic and dashing Detective Jack Andrews (Edward “What Am I Doing In This Movie?” Burns) is the only one to believe her and he takes Beth at her word. Jack’s sister died in similar fashion, so he’s got a vested interest in the case. The two of them take to solving the case, only to discover that Beth’s cell phone soon delivers that same eerie ringtone and that she might be next. It’s a race against time and awful special effects as Beth and Jack must discover who is placing these death calls and why.

To say that One Missed Call was disliked by critics would be an understatement. It scooped a whopping 0% on Rotten Tomatoes, which I think is slightly too low but may have a lot to do with the fact that it wasn’t screened for critics ahead of time. That’s never a good sign. One Missed Call is a bad movie, don’t get me wrong, and there’s no way I can recommend it to people who actually enjoy good horror or good films, but it wasn’t the most terrible movie of 2008.

It’s actually a fair shade better then this year’s brutally awful The Haunting in Connecticut, as it doesn’t waste time setting up any characters or giving us stupid moments of development or overly dramatic nonsense. One Missed Call is silly the whole way through and its payoff is about on par for how Valette has set the whole thing up. Sure, it’s a ludicrous mess of a movie with uninteresting acting and bad effects, but it’s relatively undisruptive and doesn’t take too much attention to get through.

Like most American remakes of J-Horror, One Missed Call is an exercise in “dark” atmospherics and not plot and character development. These characters are essentially worthless objects, with no spark and no energy whatsoever. There’s nothing to them and the performers behind them do nothing to bring any sort of force or significance to their existence. They seemingly exist just as observers of the smoggy sort of world Valette wants us to find creepy.

Of course, I was at least grateful that the film didn’t contain countless time-wasting meanderings about the significance of this person or that person. I was relieved that the silliness didn’t seem to get in the way of something and I was glad that Valette didn’t force-feed the audience a ridiculously long runtime or an overabundance of “meaning.” One Missed Call is ultimately meaningless, a waste of time and money entirely but far from the worst horror movie in recent years.

Trailer: