One Missed Call
Horror movies aren’t among my favorites, but horrors in “J-Horror” style (Japanese-horror) can undoubtedly be very appealing to watch. Directed by Eric Valette and produced by Broderick Johnson, Andrew A. Kosove, Scott Kroopf, Jennie Lew Tugend with Lauren C. Weissman, One Missed Call — an American remake of the Japanese horror movie of the same name — was released on DVD last month. The movie stars Shannyn Sossamon, Edward Burns, Ana Claudia Talancon, Ray Wise and Azura Skye.
One Missed Call revolves around a group of people who receive terrifying messages on their cellphones from an unknown number. Even though the messages can be deleted, their numbers are still up. Beth Raymond becomes traumatized when she witnesses the gruesome deaths of two close friends just days apart. Even more disturbingly, Raymond is aware that both of them have received chilling cell phone messages - actual recordings of their own horrifying last moments.
Raymond turns to detective Jack Andrews asking for help. Both Andrews and Raymond manage to get close to revealing the truth. However, even at this moment, her cell phone continues to ring with an eerie tune, and the readout keeps saying, “One Missed Call.”
The New York Times reports that as Beth tries to evade her own telegraphed demise, accompanied by a fantastically irrelevant police detective, the movie crawls with furry millipedes and creepy china dolls.
The latest Japanese knockoff to fetishize death by technology, Eric Valette’s reworking of Takashi Miike’s “Chakushin Ari” is a poker-faced puzzle whose biggest shock is the absence of Sarah Michelle Gellar. Subbing for that remake regular is Shannyn Sossamon as Beth, a dour psychology student whose friends suffer grisly deaths after receiving heads-ups on their cellphones.
According to Pegasus News, the movie has nothing remarkable; it is a pure formula spook show, in which attractive young people are menaced by prophecies of their own doom - a doom which proceeds to be inevitably carried out in various grisly ways.
The twist here is that the doomed ones each receive a voicemail from their future, consisting of a cryptic message followed by “AAAH!” or “AARGH!” or “CRAPOLA!”, exclamations intended to convey that their mortal coils are in the process of being reluctantly shrugged off. As in all these sorts of impending inevitable death amorality tales, different marked characters attempt to remove themselves from Death’s hit list in varying ways, providing the guts of the drama, so to speak.
Here is the official trailer.
(2008) One Missed Call Movie Trailer
Uploaded by EveryTrailer
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