Review of One Missed Call (2008) by Ryan A — 12 Sep 2014

"One Missed Call" is a complete mess of a horror film. It starts with a ridiculous premise: what if your mobile phone killed you? (an idea that has already become the subject of several parodies) and proceeds to run it into the ground. Basically, people receive a strange phone call where the sender leaves a message for them on their voice mail and it is dated from the future (for instance, if it was Thursday, they might get a call listed as Friday, 4:00 pm). Once you listen to the phone call, you realize that it's the sound of your upcoming death, which, despite your best efforts happens at the exact time of your voice mail. Your only hope to evade this fate is to go back to the beginning, using the hallucinations you receive as clues to figure out where the chain of deadly phone calls began.

The characters in the story react so casually to the events that are happening that you can't get invested in them or sucked into the story. You get some small glimpses of creepy distorted faces and there are a good amount of dead bodies in the end but if the victim's friends don't care, why should you? Like most movies based on Asian horror films, the story here is a mystery where the main character has to find the source of the curse in order to end the chain of events that threatens her. The idea with this type of tale is that as our main character Beth (Shannyn Sossamon) gets closer to the solution, the number of possible victims keeps getting smaller and smaller until she is trying to save herself or a few key characters by finally exposing some hidden truth or unleashing some kind of trapped spirit or something. Basically it gives us an explanation for why everything has been going on and she saves herself in the process. In this story the explanations for why phones are killing people are very loose and don't really make any sense. It actually gets downright silly when you see a dead body dialing a cell phone and the movie never makes its main characters act logically. There is one scene where we see a potential victim smash her phone and throw it away, which would be a logical thing to do, but everyone else feels like they're too attached to their phone contacts to actually try and intervene in the deadly chain of events. How stupid are these people?! We have established that the chain of deaths happens because the names of future victims are inside the phone of the previous ones... at least TRY and stop the murders by deleting numbers from your address book!

The film feels like a desperate attempt to make a concept that no matter how hard you tried, could never really be scary. There is a death at the very beginning of the film where someone dies, and they pet gets killed right after by the ghost and it makes absolutely no sense. Not only that the animal itself dies, but the way that it dies doesn't not match the explanation we get at the end of the movie at all. Well, unless it was one of those cats who likes to text people on their cellphones, I see those all the time in real life. The movie is PG-13 so even horror fans that can accept the thinnest of plots as long as they get their blood and nudity will be disappointed. With these limitations, you would think that this rating would direct the film into more suspense and unsettling imagery but there is only a tiny bit of those horror elements in the film. There are some great makeup effects towards the end of the story and this is where pretty much all of the excitement is concentrated. The more you think about the movie, the more it starts to fall apart and it becomes a ridiculous attempt at making a ghost horror movie. There's no reason to see "One Missed Call" instead of the many other superior Japanese horror ghost films that have emerged unless you really will get scared by anything and want an extremely tame horror film. (On Dvd, October 12, 2012).