One Missed Call

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"The Ring" has a lot to answer for. It was a Hollywood remake of a Japanese horror movie that probably did as much to popularize Hollywood remakes of Japanese horror movies as any film in history. Now, every time the Japanese do a horror flick, Hollywood has to do it all over again. Some of them haven't been bad. Others have been horrid. Stick the 2007 remake "One Missed Call" in the latter category. Maybe the original, 2003's "Chakushin ari," was better, or the original 2005 TV series or the 2005 and 2006 sequels; I don't know. They couldn't have been any worse than this.

However, I have to begin by at least giving credit to "One Missed Call" for attempting to do a ghost story. After all, good ghost stories are hard to come by these days. Regrettably, "One Missed Call" is nothing like a "good" ghost story. A good ghost story creates its frights through the use of suspense; it fashions a sense of uncertainty and anxiety in the viewer that can make one's hair stand on end. Instead of doing that, "One Missed Call" falls back on the easier standby of trying only to shock the viewer. The movie's ghost kills people one at a time in various horrendous ways, thus working more like a conventional slasher flick than a traditional haunted-house tale. It's unfortunate because it makes "One Missed Call" just another "Friday the 13th" clone rather than a serious contender in the goose-bumps genre. At the risk of making a pun, Hollywood has already done this stuff to death.

Here's the deal: People in the story are dying one at a time in mysterious ways, and all of them are young, attractive college students. Sure, I mean, what's the point of killing old or middle-aged people if the moviemakers have a young audience in mind? People over forty are ready to die, anyway. But I digress, which isn't hard to do when you're talking about this movie. Or watching this movie.

So, young people are dying, all of them in brutal ways: strangled in ponds, falling off bridges onto railway cars, getting iron rods driven through their bodies; you know, the kind of deaths we all take for granted in modern horror flicks. And the victims all have two things in common besides being young and attractive: First, they all received cell-phone messages from themselves dated the exact time of their deaths. No, it doesn't matter what phone they're using; it's the message that counts. Well, we've had haunted videotapes, why not haunted phone messages? The difference is that with the videotape, the goofy premise worked; with the cell-phone business, it doesn't. Part of the problem is that by now such ideas are not only harebrained, they're old hat.

The second thing the victims have in common is that the police find each of them with a large, red, round piece of hard candy in their mouth. So not only is the ghost, or whatever it is, able to effect the victim's death, the entity is also able to place a candy in his or her mouth. Have you ever wondered where ghosts get candy? Is there a special ghost-candy store for such purposes? I don't have one in my city, but maybe I live in a disadvantaged neighborhood. We do have stores that sell spirits, although none that I know of that sell to spirits. But I digress.

Naturally, nobody sees any of these connections except the star of the show, a college student named Beth Raymond (Shannyn Sossamon), several of whose friends succumb to this bizarre series of deaths. She tries to explain her theories to the police, and, of course, they ignore her. They figure all these grotesque fatalities are accidents, and it's only a coincidence that the victims were all enjoying the same kind of hard candy at the time of their demise. Does anybody remember "Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein," where Costello keeps seeing monsters but nobody else does, so they think he's nuts? More recently, "Hot Fuzz" parodied the same gambit, and both of those movies were comedies. "One Missed Call" might have been a comedy, too, for all I know. But I doubt it. And I digress again.

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