By Kofi Outlaw

ONE MISSED CALL was supposedly adapted from the novel “Chakushin ari” by Japanese novelist Yasushi Akimoto. That book was then adapted into a 2004 Japanese horror film. This means that the “minds” between the American version of ONE MISSED CALL had not one, but two prior examples to reference when bringing their version of the ghost-in-the-cell-phone tale to the big screen. So how did they still manage to screw the pooch so royally?

The basic plot of the film is pretty straightforward: A series of people, connected to one another through “mysterious” circumstances, (they’re on each other’s cell phone contact lists,) begin to get calls from a creepy ringtone. When they listen to the call, they hear horrific messages left by their future selves instants before their deaths. The calls are dated for the exact date and time the victims will suffer their grisly end, leaving them little time to escape their fate. Basically it’s THE RING, with cell phones instead of videotapes.

Of course it takes a few initial victims before the deadly pattern is discovered, leaving somber young psyche student Beth (Shannyn Sossamon), and her few friends still breathing, to defeat the ghost in the machine. Beth gets help from a young cop named Jack (Ed Burns), whose sister was one of the initial victims of the cell-phone murderer. Jack is the kind of cop who believes what his eyes are telling him; in this case, that otherworldly forces are indeed at work, using cell phones to dispatch their victims. Somehow Burns and Sossamon are able to explain this premise while keeping straight faces, a discipline I am still unable to master.


Not content to rip-off THE RING just in premise, Jack and Beth manage to uncover the ghost’s “mysterious” origins, which involve a fire at an old hospital, an abusive mother, her daughters, and, you guessed it, an evil little ghost-girl whose spirit is bound to a cell phone. Like all standard J-horror fare, everybody ends up getting bumped off except for Beth, who manages to stay alive through some flimsy plot contrivance—again, just like THE RING.

Even crappy, knock-off scripts can turn out ok when placed in the hands of an able director. Sadly however, ONE MISSED CALL landed in the bumbling hands of Eric Valette. The film looks like it was shot on somebody’s personal camcorder—not one of these new, hi-tech, HD digital handhelds, but rather one of those oversized, shoulder-mounted, VHS artifacts that somehow survived the ‘80’s. The editing is even worse—but then, since many of the scenes are barely intact to begin with, it’s no wonder the cuts are often jarring and jumpy, leaving you with the feeling that you missed something, even though you never stopped watching the screen. The pacing is absolutely wrong as well.
Instead of providing the usual staples such as characters, setting, and background story, ONE MISSED CALL opts to jump right into the murders, knocking off three victims in the first twenty minutes, leaving the audience wondering about who these people are were, and why the hell we should even care about them. The actors don’t do anything to up our empathy either. This will be another sad strike against the lovely Ms. Sossamon’s stalled career, and it’s a good thing the script didn’t call for chemistry between her and Mr. Burns. I’ve seen more sparks come from a campfire caught in a monsoon.

More offensive than anything however, has to be the sheer amount of ways ONE MISSED CALL rips off THE RING. Victims see horrific and disturbing images before they die—where do those images come from? Things the ghost-girl saw before she died; there is the ‘all is well now…no wait the ghost is still here!’ so-called “twist” at the end of the film, which might have been scary…if we hadn’t already seen it! There is the make-your-skin-crawl mood of the film, and, of course, the not-so-subtle commentary about modern technology—which actually turns out to be wholly irrelevant, once the ghost’s origins are revealed And even though THE RING used television as its medium de murder, I don’t remember that film having as many BLATANT, (and I mean that in capital letters,) product-placement moments as Boost Mobile managed to $queeze into this flick. Of course, I wouldn’t be surprised of that company put up every red cent to get this movie made. No other way I can explain how it ever made it to theaters.


Bottom line: ONE MISSED CALL is the sort of movie that should’ve been dumped into the lineup of those abysmal Horrorfests they’ve started to roll out every year. To spend a single dollar doing all the marketing and promotion they’ve done for this movie is a joke somebody should be fired for telling. You can only fool an audience so long, and in this case, the joke is on ONE MISSED CALL. I didn’t even have to be in the theater before I’d called this flick out as a stinker.