One Missed Call (2003)
Review by Noel
In January 2008, one of the first major studio releases of the year was the not-so-eagerly awaited, much lambasted remake of One Missed Call. If like me, you were one of the 13 people nationwide that out of sheer boredom and a lack of other new releases to watch shelled out your hard-earned cash to see this, well you truly know the meaning of the word regret…
So for whatever reason, I decided to watch Takeshi Miike’s original again, to see why American producers would even want to make another version. I’d seen it in 2004, but only remembered a basic outline of it and thought it would do me well to redial, if you will (sorry, that was bad) and make sure I didn’t miss a moment of…One Missed Call.
Japanese teenagers are getting “one missed call” displays on their cell phones. What do they hear? Calls from the future of course. Specifically…the last words they will ever speak…in their own voices. As sure as most remakes suck, the kids die…EXACTLY as the messages foretell. Ain’t that a bitch?
But our intrepid heroine Yumi (Kou Shibasaki) and a soon to be ex-cop Hiroshi (Shin’Chi Tsutsumi) will not let this aggression stand and get their investigation on when Yumi gets her own missed call.
Will they find the supernatural cell-phone killer in time?
Will I misspell some of these names?
Will there be a creepy, yet extremely pliable, almost Gumby-like ghost kid with long stringy black hair behind this nefarious scheme (apparently J-Horror films take these terrible tykes off an assembly line…kind of like Transformers)?
Will there be, since this is Japanese, be an extra 10-20 minutes tacked on in the middle that you don’t really need?
The answer to all these questions and more will NOT be found in this review.
Because…I’m just reviewing it. If you wanna find out said answers, you have to watch the movie. If you’ve seen the movie and don’t remember, you have to see it again. If you haven’t seen the movie and are looking for someone else’s opinion to possibly be a factor in whether or not you might rent this…then keep reading.
What works in One Missed Call:
1.) A really bad case of sibling rivalry (“She always gave me candy”)
2.) The dialing of a cell phone. That in itself isn’t all that cool except…it’s done by a severed arm. I mean, you don’t see that every day…
3.) The staging of a potential victim on a reality show that works well as parody…until it offers 2 bone-rattling scares that catch you off-guard.
4.) The image on the phone is scarier than jaded horror fans might expect.
5.) Little Dead Kid- Ewww…you’ve got skin falling off…ewww…and you look like a Boy Scout marshmallow taken out of the fire…
6.) A jolt-scare involving an opened crate that’ll knock you off balance because it’ll happen long after you’ve let your guard down.
7.) Where does it get all that candy? In bulk?
8.) The Ending- As it should be, the last 5 minutes of the movie are the best.
What doesn’t work:
1.) Like I mentioned, the middle drags as Yumi and Hiroshi go all exposition trying to find the why behind all the cell-phone deaths. Yawn…
2.) How does she have shampoo in one shot…and be perfectly clean in the next?
3.) A conveniently placed nannycam for all your backstory needs
4.) One of the things I like about foreign horror films in general is that they don’t feel the need to explain everything and just leave some things for you to question. American films tend to over explain because apparently we want no loose ends. Having said that…I do think it rather convenient that our villain can…rather arbitrarily a.) Go back in time b.) Go forward into time c.) Hack into cell-phone frequencies d.) Create force fields to make invisible walls for certain characters and e.) Possess whoever they want
5.) Now maybe it’s just me…but if I knew my last words would be “Shit. I forgot” and I was going to die in 2 minutes…maybe I would do my darndest to NOT say “Shit. I forgot.” And I’d stay away from elevator shafts. But that’s just me.
Honestly, this movie speaks for itself, as I’m sure many of you who’ve seen it know and I don’t have to cell, I mean, sell it. Watch One Missed Call because it’s worth a ring…as in a phone call, not as in the movie The Ring involving yet another creepy dead kid…
One Missed Call Original Japanese Trailer:
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