Dial M for Murky
There's no need to pick up 'One Missed Call'
By Andy Klein
The rights to Japanese horror films must be pretty cheap. Why else would Hollywood keep remaking them? I love a J-horror opus now and again, but the genre has grown excessively formulaic. Toshiharu Ikeda’s 1988 Evil Dead Trap pretty much set the pattern: plucky female protagonist runs afoul of some supernatural evil that manifests itself through technology. Back then it was videotape; in Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Pulse it was computers; in The Ring it was videotape and telephones.
In director Eric Valette’s new One Missed Call, it’s voicemail. Shannyn Sossamon plays Beth, a student whose friend Leann (Azura Skye) receives an impossible voicemail message, announced by an ominous ringtone that she never downloaded. The message is from a recently deceased acquaintance, yet the time/date stamp says it’s coming from two days in the future. What’s on the message is Leann’s own voice, her harmless chatting suddenly interrupted by a scream and the sound of her own death.
Beth seems more unsettled by this than Leann, who, two nights later, doesn’t even appear to remember the message as she’s speaking its exact words at just the right moment. Whomp! She buys the farm. In death, however, her severed arm is smart enough to remember the phone number of Taylor (Ana Claudia Talancón), another friend. How thoughtful to pass along this ghostly killer virus!
Of course, eventually it will make its way to Beth’s phone, but not before she’s hooked up with police detective Jack Andrews (Edward Burns), whose sister appears to have been the very first victim in the chain. Jack can’t convince his boss (Margaret Cho) that there’s anything … unusual … going on, even after one of the deaths happens in front of a couple dozen witnesses during a live TV reality show broadcast.
When the mystery appears to have been solved and the supernatural vanquished, any viewer with a watch will realize that there’s still 18 minutes left in this mercifully short (87 minutes) film, and that another twist is coming. It doesn’t even require a watch: The false ending and extra twist format is as ingrained in the genre as the spooky sound effects and shock cuts. (It must be said that The Ring – both the Japanese original and the American hit remake – still takes the honors for the best implementation of this cliché.)
One Missed Call follows the story of its Japanese source more closely than most, replicating many scenes and making mostly minor adjus ments to the plot. The original is a minor entry in the overstuffed filmography of Takashi
Miike – more than 70 features in roughly 17 years and still counting. It would be unfair to say that Miike was slumming, but the 2004 release feels more like a generic J-horror than a Miike-
branded project and was unsurprisingly more commercially successful than such distinctive
Miike works as Audition (1999) and Gozu (2003).
The plot is overly convoluted, and Miike’s ending was utterly incomprehensible; as in all of the American J-horror adaptations, the remake tries to be a little clearer and more logical. Sometimes, as in Pulse, this weakens the film’s effect; but, in this case, it’s an improvement.
Still, two things are lost in the translation. The subplot about the reality TV show is much more satirically pointed in Miike’s film; and Valette adds ghoul images, reminiscent of Carnival of Souls or Jacob’s Ladder, which don’t really make sense and are used way too frequently.
One Missed Call is the first studio release of the New Year, and its 0 percent Rotten Tomatoes rating is harsh enough to almost make me want to defend it. Almost.
One Missed Call. Directed by Eric Valette. Screenplay by Andrew Klavan; based on the screenplay by Yasushi Akimoto and the novel by Minako Daira. With Shannyn Sossamon, Edward Burns, Ana Claudia Talancón, Ray Wise, and Azura Skye. Citywide.
Published: 01/09/2008
DIGG | del.icio.us | REDDIT
