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ONE MISSED CALL
(Review)
Eric Vallete’s English-language remake of Takashi Miike’s Chakushin Ari (which was itself Miwako Daira’s adaptation of the novel by Yasushi Akimoto) was originally scheduled for an August 24 2007 US release.
That soon changed to a January 4 2008 release. Now, a release date change of this sort is more often than not a bad sign. Coupled with its ultimate release falling in the early—or as defined in the Hollywood dictionary, “dead”—months of the year (another bad sign), where studios have perennially tossed their less than desirable product, a stigma began to taint One Missed Call even before it opened.
Still, I hoped for the best, and bolstered by that creepy-a$$ one-sheet, gave it a fair look-see.
With a handful of variations here and there, the set-up is pretty much that of Miike’s Chakushin Ari: Beth Raymond (Shannyn Sossamon) bears witness to a number of her friends falling prey to prophetic cell phone calls—signaled by an eerie ringtone—that serve as harbingers of their doom, before she gets her own call, and must solve the mystery lest she end up facing her own apparently impending death.
What Vallete and One Missed Call screenwriter Andrew Klavan so clearly fail to capture though is the air of dread and tense anticipation evident in Miike’s take. Nowhere is this sad—and ultimately fatal—shortcoming so painfully evident as in One Missed Call’s redux of a bravura setpiece from Chakushin Ari, which involves a victim’s death on live TV.
Here, we have American Miracles, run by Ted Summers (genre powerhouse Ray Wise), who has exorcist Ray Purvis (Jason Beghe, who incidentally recently walked away from Scientology in a big stink) attempt to eradicate the cell phone curse.
With its Christian iconography, non-existent suspense, and fairly ludicrous “body of Christ compels you to leave this cell phone” blather, this sequence turns out to be the most disappointing in the entire film.
When you’ve got Ray Wise and this is all you have him do, it’s a waste of everyone’s time.
There are attempts to introduce elements not present in Miike’s version though, particularly in having the intended victims begin seeing disturbing presences all around them (which is where the one-sheet image comes in), but this really isn’t anything new in a horror film; as I recall, this was also done in The Exorcism of Emily Rose.
In One Missed Call, these moments happen so often that they quickly feel like desperate attempts to continually scare the audience, when all they really do is get pretty boring, pretty quickly.
And while the “abuse as a cycle” theme is still here, it sadly also feels muted somehow, certainly less potent than in Miike’s Chakushin Ari.
Admittedly, the idea behind One Missed Call’s climax—which avoids that ludicrously monstrous cheat in Chakushin Ari’s final moments and that ambiguous last shot—makes more sense than the Japanese version’s.
Tragically, it isn’t executed very well, and plays out as horribly anti-climactic, with one of those annoying “Yes, we can have a sequel if we so choose” last shots, that I’d rather take Miike’s ending, flaws and all, than this mess.
And yes, Miike had some questionable funhouse scares in the hospital sequence, but none as laughably ridiculous as One Missed Call’s baby with a cell phone bit. (Of course, if I were to see that in real life, in the burnt-out shell of an abandoned hospital, I probably wouldn’t be laughing. On the screen though, it’s a golden MST3K moment…)
Oh, and why the vengeful ghost bothered with Luna—when the poor cat clearly didn’t have a cell phone—was just a bad decision to try and get a cheap scare. Is it worth it though when you could end up pissing PETA off?
And yes, Dave Stewart wrote and performed One Missed Call’s ringtone, and I love Stewart, and his work with Annie Lennox, as well as the Spiritual Cowboys, but I must say, Chakushin Ari’s ringtone is still far more disturbing… (Incidentally, Stewart is the founding member of Nokia’s recently established Artist Advisory Council. Presumably, he will do more in this illustrious position than compose murderous ringtones...)
In the end, as much as I thought Miike aimed ambitiously high with Chakushin Ari and didn’t quite hit the mark, Valette’s One Missed Call just kind of lies there, listless and droning, like an unanswered cell phone on mute, its battery winding down, just begging you to shut it off.
Parting shot: A review of Chakushin Ari can be found in the Archive.
(One Missed Call OS courtesy of impawards.com [design by Art Machine, A Trailer Park Company]; images courtesy of bloody-disgusting.com.)
(Review)
Eric Vallete’s English-language remake of Takashi Miike’s Chakushin Ari (which was itself Miwako Daira’s adaptation of the novel by Yasushi Akimoto) was originally scheduled for an August 24 2007 US release.
That soon changed to a January 4 2008 release. Now, a release date change of this sort is more often than not a bad sign. Coupled with its ultimate release falling in the early—or as defined in the Hollywood dictionary, “dead”—months of the year (another bad sign), where studios have perennially tossed their less than desirable product, a stigma began to taint One Missed Call even before it opened.
Still, I hoped for the best, and bolstered by that creepy-a$$ one-sheet, gave it a fair look-see.
With a handful of variations here and there, the set-up is pretty much that of Miike’s Chakushin Ari: Beth Raymond (Shannyn Sossamon) bears witness to a number of her friends falling prey to prophetic cell phone calls—signaled by an eerie ringtone—that serve as harbingers of their doom, before she gets her own call, and must solve the mystery lest she end up facing her own apparently impending death.
What Vallete and One Missed Call screenwriter Andrew Klavan so clearly fail to capture though is the air of dread and tense anticipation evident in Miike’s take. Nowhere is this sad—and ultimately fatal—shortcoming so painfully evident as in One Missed Call’s redux of a bravura setpiece from Chakushin Ari, which involves a victim’s death on live TV.
Here, we have American Miracles, run by Ted Summers (genre powerhouse Ray Wise), who has exorcist Ray Purvis (Jason Beghe, who incidentally recently walked away from Scientology in a big stink) attempt to eradicate the cell phone curse.
With its Christian iconography, non-existent suspense, and fairly ludicrous “body of Christ compels you to leave this cell phone” blather, this sequence turns out to be the most disappointing in the entire film.
When you’ve got Ray Wise and this is all you have him do, it’s a waste of everyone’s time.
There are attempts to introduce elements not present in Miike’s version though, particularly in having the intended victims begin seeing disturbing presences all around them (which is where the one-sheet image comes in), but this really isn’t anything new in a horror film; as I recall, this was also done in The Exorcism of Emily Rose.
In One Missed Call, these moments happen so often that they quickly feel like desperate attempts to continually scare the audience, when all they really do is get pretty boring, pretty quickly.
And while the “abuse as a cycle” theme is still here, it sadly also feels muted somehow, certainly less potent than in Miike’s Chakushin Ari.
Admittedly, the idea behind One Missed Call’s climax—which avoids that ludicrously monstrous cheat in Chakushin Ari’s final moments and that ambiguous last shot—makes more sense than the Japanese version’s.
Tragically, it isn’t executed very well, and plays out as horribly anti-climactic, with one of those annoying “Yes, we can have a sequel if we so choose” last shots, that I’d rather take Miike’s ending, flaws and all, than this mess.
And yes, Miike had some questionable funhouse scares in the hospital sequence, but none as laughably ridiculous as One Missed Call’s baby with a cell phone bit. (Of course, if I were to see that in real life, in the burnt-out shell of an abandoned hospital, I probably wouldn’t be laughing. On the screen though, it’s a golden MST3K moment…)
Oh, and why the vengeful ghost bothered with Luna—when the poor cat clearly didn’t have a cell phone—was just a bad decision to try and get a cheap scare. Is it worth it though when you could end up pissing PETA off?
And yes, Dave Stewart wrote and performed One Missed Call’s ringtone, and I love Stewart, and his work with Annie Lennox, as well as the Spiritual Cowboys, but I must say, Chakushin Ari’s ringtone is still far more disturbing… (Incidentally, Stewart is the founding member of Nokia’s recently established Artist Advisory Council. Presumably, he will do more in this illustrious position than compose murderous ringtones...)
In the end, as much as I thought Miike aimed ambitiously high with Chakushin Ari and didn’t quite hit the mark, Valette’s One Missed Call just kind of lies there, listless and droning, like an unanswered cell phone on mute, its battery winding down, just begging you to shut it off.
Parting shot: A review of Chakushin Ari can be found in the Archive.
(One Missed Call OS courtesy of impawards.com [design by Art Machine, A Trailer Park Company]; images courtesy of bloody-disgusting.com.)
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