One Missed Call

Takashi Miike passed 6 years after the date when long-haired ghosts officially conquered Japanese cinema before placing One Missed Call, and Video Sewer wonders; why the wait? Sewer also wonders why Miike's bid at creating dreadful J-horror-style-chills (that don’t hinge on extreme human cruelty) seems so Hollywood?

No mistake, if you like J-horror, you’ll like One Missed Call, which hits all the right stops on its way to making you fear a simple cabinet or mirror. But while you relish the central conceit, which inserts ghost in machine in a uniquely timely way, you’ll probably slap your head in anguish by the final half-hour as old-hat J-horror turns to egregiously formulaic Hollywood tripe.

When a group of young Japanese women (the obvious target group of One Missed Call) start receiving eerie messages on their cell phones, you know it can’t be long before the long black hair starts swaying. Yep, the message seems to foretell the recipient’s time-specific death, but now they don’t even get a week, just a day or two before the girl-who-needs-Nutrisse comes a-crawlin’.

Standard amateur sleuthing is the method of choice for our heroine, Yumi, to try to cheat death - as if there’s a hope in the world for her - meanwhile helpful cops, a tabloid TV show and a handsome gent go through the motions, stopping frequently for (mostly) deftly staged scenes of terror.

Not surprisingly, the best work here is done by spindly grey fingers and implacable phantom faces that emerge from the periphery, daring you to notice them as they study you with intent to kill.

Unfortunately, some overwrought set-pieces climax with Hollywood style special effects, or worse, long, unflinching shots of the gory ghost. Once you see it, it ain’t scary anymore, especially if it looks like the niece of the Creeper from Jeepers Creepers.

Miike certainly demonstrates that he knows what he’s doing when crafting fingers-up-your-spine chills, but his late entry in the Ringu race, coupled with gussied-up Western horror film tropes that we’re all sick of, make the Sewer suspicious of One Missed Call. Is it a slight misfiring of a reliably unnerving picture, or a semi- contemptuous, lowest-common-denominator money grab?

A good group to question about cell phones.

One creepy camera-phone is more like it.

Now you've seen too much ...