Soon Beth gets her call, of course, and it’s a race against time as she and Jack follow the cell phone chain of victims back to the curse’s sorrowful source. But the pair doesn’t have long to compare notes before another one of Beth’s friends receives a call … then a visit from a murderous spirit … right on time.
When Beth witnesses Leann’s death at the exact moment the cell phone message predicted, she’s forced to admit that what’s happening is more than freak coincidence or paranoia-even if the police write her off as an unstable lunatic.ĭetective Jack Andrews isn’t writing her off, though, largely because his sister recently died under strange circumstances. And the time stamp on the message indicates that it’s from a few days in the future. The voice on the other end-and a frantic one at that-is her own. Was it a suicide? Even as they deliberate, however, Leann gets a call … from the deceased woman’s cell phone. Several days after her tragic death, Beth and best bud Leann are talking about how agitated and off-balance their friend seemed in the days leading up to her death. It all starts when a young woman mysteriously drowns in her family’s fish pond. More specifically, they’re getting calls from themselves … that end up as voice mail messages recording their last words before they die. You've got somewhere in the vicinity of 75 from which to choose.Beth Raymond is a psychology grad student with a serious problem: Her friends keep getting nasty phone calls. Do yourself a favor and go rent any Miike film other than this one. Apart from some borderline-clever cinematography courtesy of Glen MacPherson, there's precious little to make anyone want to answer this doleful call. It's a puzzler, all right, and since Burns is on board as a stodgy, tired-looking detective who has lost his sister to the ring tones o' woe, female lead Sossamon has someone to furrow brows with and mull over the unmullable.
Go figure.) Here and now, Valette's Americanization, which deals with cell-phone calls from the soon-to-be-deceased to their predemised selves, is significantly less engaging than the original, although that may have to do with the lack of subtitles.
Miike's original promptly spawned two dud sequels. Except, of course, for One Missed Call, which found Miike attempting to create his own spin on the already mortally wounded J-horror tropes by ripping off Ringu and its Korean rip-off, Phone, to no great success. Anyone who has ever (intentionally or otherwise) subjected themselves to the triple-mindscraping of Audition, Ichi the Killer, and The Happiness of the Katakuris is the stronger for it, although Miike's sprawling, tentacular oeuvre defies easy anything. The original One Missed Call was itself a lame departure from the legendarily prolific Miike's exhilarating, apparently lifelong mission to be the directorial equivalent of the Videodrome signal. For every solid attempt to translate the maddeningly intricate cultural psychoses of Asian cult horror into boffo American box office ( The Ring, Dark Water) there are an equal number of hideous misfires: Pulse, The Grudge 2, and now this. The J-horror trend initiated by Hideo Nakata's 1998 viral freakout Ringu, which along with nearly every other film in the genre has been remade multiple times throughout Asia and the U.S., is way past its expired-by date, asphyxiated on soggy tendrils of lank, black hair and kabuki-doomy, fright-faced shock cuts. Genre fans will need no heads-up on this ill-advised stateside remake of Takashi Miike's 2003 foray into technophobic Japanese horror – they're avoiding it in droves, and, judging by the nonexistent audience I caught it with over the weekend, so is everyone else.
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