One Bore You Should Miss! (One Missed Call [2008] (DVD))

Member Name: shaneo632

Product:	One Missed Call [2008] (DVD)
Date:	04/05/09 (48 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: None

Disadvantages: Dreadful, laughable plot, poor acting...

Note: written for my film review website, ShaunMunro.co.uk, thanks!

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I commend One Missed Call for managing to survive an entire six minutes in my retina before I began to lose interest. Given the negative publicity, I expected worse (albeit not much worse), yet that is not to give much credit this film - it is, without doubt, complete schlock, and even as the first release of 2008, is a weighty contender for the worst film of the year (although Meet the Spartans may provide some deft competition).

Of the few things that the film does right, it starts slaying the attractive teenagers and moving the hokey plot forward pretty quickly. The plot? People begin receiving strange phone calls, they then witness stranger things occurring around them (such as people's faces becoming contorted), and then later, they are killed, and a red sweet is left in their mouth. Subsequently, the phone is used to pass the "spirit", curse, or quite whatever this is, on to the next poor sap.

The plot is essentially an amalgam of The Ring and Final Destination, yet given the lack of emotional depth on the part of Sossamon and her cohorts, it is not a tenth as entertaining, taut or well-acted as either of those films. We are talking zero acting range, and even by contemporary horror standards, it is soul-destroyingly poor, through and through. Furthermore, what is one of the film's more cardinal sins is that even gore hounds will be left yawning. One death involves a girl being eviscerated by a train, and in another, a man is impaled with a pole, yet neither are shown in any great detail; blood is largely not sprayed, and so One Missed Call, as it happens, has little going for it, and not in the "so bad it's good" way, either.

What screenwriter Andrew Klavan appears to have understood from Screenwriting 101 better than anything else is how to move a plot along. The usual "we are all linked somehow" shtick is introduced about twenty minutes into the film, and whilst it takes a fair while longer to actually materalise, at least these characters aren't entire caricatures of the idiotic youngsters cinema has hurled at us for years. Instead, they are victims of improbable, incorporeal incidents of which they have little to no control. Still, in that respect, the deaths are even more convoluted than those in the Final Destination series.

One Missed Call is worse than a simply poorly-constructed film, pigeon-holed with plot mistakes - instead, it seems so insistent on inundating the viewer with the most clichéd attempts at horror imaginable. In one instance, Sossamon's character walks into a cupboard, and a doll flings out, with a loud crescendo blasting out; it's more laughable than scary, and even then, it's not that funny.

The real tragedy of this film is that Ray Wise of Twin Peaks fame is anywhere near it. The one actor worth a damn in the production outshines everyone by a country mile, yet it is a shame that he is so starved for work to stoop to this, or perhaps more tragically, that productions such as this actually pay enough money to convince competent actors to sign on.

It is about the time that an exorcism is attempted on a mobile phone that the film well and truly hits the bottom of the well. It is laughable, but not so much that it removes at all from the absurd idiocy of the scene. I should add that once Laura Harring appeared in an incongruent flashback, I was just about ready to break down and lament for all the talented, starving actors out there. One Missed Call is an exhausting watch, and if you're still half-way conscious by the hour mark, I don't know whether to commend you, fear you, or laugh at you.

There are shameless plot divergences which just pile on the confusion, although if you were actually able to sit through and pay attention to this dreck, they might make just a tad more sense. Unfortunately, not a single frame of this mess inspires us to care, and by the half-way mark, all I wished for was it to end. As with far too many horror films, the plot is over-complicated, when the greatest and most profound scares of cinema have always derived from tales of the utmost simplicity. If those involved in this film really believe the narrative to resemble a guise of intellect, then Hollywood horror is well and truly brain dead.

Am I being harsh on One Missed Call? When you have seen as much horror schlock as I, and have become as disenfranchised with the horror garb that generally hits cinemas in the "graveyard months" of January and February, this review is, in fact, considerably forgiving. One Missed Call is a near-useless mix of bump-in-the-night clichés, bland, flat characters, and dialogue that is in no way memorable. The film even ends on an unsatisfactory, frustrating note, bungling together deus-ex-machina along with a laughable sense of dread that establishes the inevitable sequel. Director Eric Valette reportedly has not seen the original Japanese film, and urged the rest of the cast not to. Thus, the joyless, soulless, scareless bore that he created was an inevitable, foregone conclusion.

Summary: A horrendous horror film - AVOID!