DVD Release
Beth’s friends are dying left and right and the only possible connection the tragedies have to one another are mysterious missed phone calls the victims receive, sent from their own phones…in the future! As the body count rises, the trail of phone calls lead Beth and police detective Jack Andrews to an old burned out hospital and a possible suspect that may or may not be dead. The race is on and the pressure is high because Beth has just received a missed call of her own!
HELL. I really tried to remain as open minded as possible when I popped this film in because I kept hoping it would end up being better than Takashi Miike’s mediocre mess, how hard could it be right? I mean when Hollywood remakes fantastic films fans can pretty much expect the worst but in this particular case they had the opportunity to only improve things.
Unfortunately, yet another J-Horror remake was flubbed. No big surprise really. One Missed Call delivers insulting product placement (Boost Mobile) aimed at children with disposable income, absolutely moronic characters that commit senseless acts of unimaginable stupidity, a criminally underutilized Ray Wise and a finale that ends up being a jumbled, convoluted mess. Sossamon and Burns’ one-dimensional characters were hard to connect with (even with Sossamon’s lame back story) and when all was said and done I found myself enjoying only two sequences, one involving a pissed off Jesus & Mary and the other involving a gross corpse crawling about in a ventilation shaft.
Two nifty sequences do not make a movie though. I was incredibly disappointed with this film and it’s just another disappointment in what seems to be a very long line of disappointments when it comes to Hollywood remakes of superior Japanese filmmaking. Isn’t it funny that Miike’s blow off cinema is still better than the big budget remake shit Hollywood drops? There’s just nothing here worth seeing folks, I wouldn’t lie to ya. If I thought this was a good film, I’d say so. Now, I won’t exaggerate and insist this is the worst piece of trash I’ve ever seen but it is most definitely the stupidest film I’ve seen in a good many months.
If the untimely, and often violent, deaths of your friends were linked to cellphone calls they received from the future, would you pick your phone up when you received that call? Would you listen to that missed call and the voicemail that followed it? No? SO WHY DID DAMN NEAR EVERYBODY IN THIS MOVIE? Well, that’s because without stupid victims that do stupid things it would have been over before it had started, right? Really, there were so many question marks and “WTF’s” attached to this flick I was left with a bad taste in my mouth. The writing was bad, the direction from Eric Valette was very disappointing and the performances were barely comatose. Avoid if possible.
