One Missed Call (2003)

ONE MISSED CALL
2003
Directed by Takashi Miike
Starring Kou Shibasaki, Shinici Tsutsumi, Kazue Fukiishi, Anna Nagata and Renji Ishibashi

I remember sitting in the theater sometime back in 2008 watching the American remake of One Missed Call.  It really did seem like a more innocent time back then.  I was still working my crappy fast-food job, hadn't become completely destroyed by the endless stream of explosions-over-emotion dumbass Hollywood blockbusters quite yet, and still went to just about every horror offering to hit the multiplex.  Coming out of One Missed Call, I believe my exact words were "man, that was a piece of shit."  So there's your big epic conclusion to that story. 

I didn't see the original version until 2012.  By that point, I'd already absorbed all of the big stalwarts of the J-horror genre, and quite a few of the anciliary flicks that the highly ghost-centric culture had to offer.  At the time, it really did feel like more of the same, and I'm not surprised to find out that the critical reception to this movie agreed with me, as the similarities to the many like-styled movies to hit Japanese cinemas in the previous years had grown a little stale by 2003.  It's a little surprising, considering that Takashi Miike is the director here.  For those that aren't familiar, this guy directed Audition, one of the two or three best horror movies ANYWHERE released during the last 20 years.  That movie is anything but conventional.  This flick, while definitely better than its American counterpart, is conventional to a fault.

Stripped down to the bare essentials, what we've got here is a group of college students who all find themselves under the kind of death curse that J-horror is so find of.  The twist this time is that it's strongly technology-centric.  Remember the conversation in Forgetting Sarah Marshall (a.k.a. the only time that Russell Brand has ever been remotely funny or likable) about the killer cell phone movie?  Yeah, it was inspired by this.  To be fair to the movie, it has a pretty impressive opening thirty minutes, as we get a good rendition of the Psycho-style false heroine.  Yoko (Nagata) is your Janet Leigh in this flick, as her character gets a voicemail that plays an eerie jingle before ending with the sound of screams.  As the first quarter of the movie unfolds, her friend Yumi (Shibasaki) realizes that several of the sounds on the message are being replayed through the following days until...surprise...Yoko turns up dead after a big fall, the screams that were heard on the message being replayed for us in a truly subtle "gotcha" moment.

There are a couple more character deaths done in this fashion, the most interesting of which being the fact that we're witness to a horrible reality show exorcism gone horribly wrong (/double word alert).  The story seems to kind of zigzag in about eighteen different directions, between the woman on the reality show (named Natsumi, if you're unable to live without these details) to the back story of Yumi, involving an abusive mother.  This serves as a kind of juxtaposition to what the characters gradually discover about the message, which (surprise) involves an abused child carrying forth a kind of eternal punishment, complete with the characters spitting out a red candy as they die as a repeat of the way that our star villain lived her own life.  For her part, Mimiko - the evil little girl who is directly behind all of the death and (sort of) dismemberment - is a pretty cool villain, and the twists and turns that we go through as the victim characters discover more of her background make up some of the best stuff in the movie.

The big problem with this movie is that it's all just too much.  Too many characters, too many storylines, too many flashbacks.  Compare this flick to any of the four Japanese Ju-On flicks, which are classic examples of "lean and mean" played out to perfection.  Everything served a purpose, everything that didn't was cut out.  This same theory really does go for horror movies at large, not just this one.  There's very few of them that are longer than 90-or-so minutes that don't feel like bloated messes, and that's unfortunately what we have with One Missed Call.  Scaled back even 20 minutes, we would have had a really enjoyable, creepy movie.  By the time the ambiguous ending hits, it just feels like overkill shoved onto a sandwich with about fifteen too many ingredients.

That's not to say that the movie isn't worth checking out at least once.  As aforementioned, the performance by Shibasaki as the main heroine is top notch, and the scenes where Mimiko is onscreen (ghost form or otherwise) definitely hold your attention.  Particularly that TV exorcism scene - that thing as dynamite.  Still, after Sadako, Kayako and Mitsuko, Mimiko really did feel like just more of the same, just in a much longer package.

** out of ****.  Worth a rental only, because it's far too slow-paced and deliberate for anyone else.