One Missed Call

By all the fawning people have been doing over Miike and his work. I sat through this flick tonight. I figured, if it's half as good as Ringu, as I assumed from these comments it might be, then it will be worth my time. No such luck. I'm all for finding the next great director (or writer), but I don't think Miike is the one. I don't have an NYU Masters of Fine Arts, but I do know this much: a horror movie has to have pacing. It also has to give the viewer more credulity than this movie does. This film's pacing had me shaking my head. Some of the scenes near the end dragged so badly, I went to the fridge and lingered there while Kou Shibasaki stared at the camera for seemingly minutes on end, eyes wide and mouth agape. A famous director once made the claim, and I'm paraphrasing, a movie could be made by turning the camera on a beautiful woman and letting it roll. Kou is not a good enough actress to make that work. She stares paralyzed at the undead girl for more scenes than I care to remember. And she isn't the only one doing an impersonation of a deer in headlights; other cast members apparently feel the need to imitate this non-performance. The script gives them little room to do much else for far too much of the time. I like Asian cinema. Hong Kong action flicks from the last 30 years, Korean horror like "Phone" and "Koma", Ang Lee's work, some of the trashy but fun Filipino movies with gratuitous sex and fighting, as well as others. Chakushin Ari I could have done without.

Well An friend had comment wit me about one missed call 2, i checked the trailer seemed pretty go so i decide go for the 1 first. Since people that are reading this have read the other posts, i won't go on the "it's an Japanese horror movie so it have an grudge " and " it's not then an copy " point. This movie is pretty different and amusing cause it built psychological issues for the characters, including who kills, this give more consistency to it's story and makes it real. The story have an real nice development, and so goes on till the last minutes were it gets screwed. My only advice is "stop watching when there's 5 minutes to the end", but it's still an great movie. ^^'

After "Audition" and "Ichi The Killer", I had great expectations for this movie. What it delivers is essentially the "greatest hits" of Asian horror. There's more than a passing resemblance to "The Ring", with bits of "Ju-On" and other films thrown in for good measure. The film revolves around mobile 'phones. A girl has a message left on her mobile 'phone answering service - only it's been left by herself and in the future! To make matters worse, it ends with a blood curdling scream! Well, it soon turns out that the message is the girl's final words on this mortal coil. The girl is not alone. It's only a matter of time before the body count starts rising and a race against time begins to solve the mystery of the bizarre calls. Despite being more than a shade Ringu-clone-esquire, I heartily enjoyed this film. It has some great set-pieces (including a memorable death), some spooky moments, a few "jump" sequences, etc. What the film didn't deliver, though, was any real fear. It was a case of "seen it all before" (a criticism that some levelled at "Ju-On"). The plot unravels in a logical manner and there's a decent pay off. It may not be a future classic, but this is a very well made example of Asian horror cinema. My rating: 8 out of 10 for a stylish addition to Miike's portfolio

A high school student named Yumi Kamura finds with a group friends in a coffee bar,while her pal Yoko receives a cellular call with a rare tone which she had heard before.Into screen phone appears one missed call.The message is sent for her cellular and contains a horrible shout that sounds like her voice.Besides the call is from three days after.A time later young people receive the call are dead for terrible killing.A strange curse causes a criminal rampage among various adolescents. The picture gets suspense,horror,shocks,grisly terror and several eerie scenes.The film displays hair-rising and horrifying images with a bit of blood and graphical gore.Mysterious and sinister atmosphere is well made by the photographer Yamamamoto. Takashi Mike(Ichi the killer) direction sometimes is actually creepy and frightening like proves the first entry ¨Dead or alive¨with the execution starring by a mobster and much more in ¨The audition¨.This horror film is inspired by ¨The ring¨with certain remembrance more even storyline coincidences.Like that and in fact happen in the most part of recently Japan horror cinema deals about an urban legend.It's the initial argument for introducing the terror in the ordinary life by means a phone.While the look is suitable spooky and eerie the plot spread to the breaking point and the final resolution results to be a little confused.The flick will like to Japan modern terror cinema enthusiastic.

If you'd never seen a movie before, Chakushin Ari (or One Missed Call) would be an astounding exercise in clever terror; but if you've ever seen a movie, or read a book about movies, or talked to anyone about movies, I can't help feeling you'd most likely see One Missed Call for what it was: an insultingly lazy, sloppy, cynical pastiche of bits shamelessly nicked from other movies. Many of which you just have to figure Miike knows you've seen and don't care. I mean, stealing half your chops from Hypnosis is one thing, cause lots of people haven't seen Hypnosis; but really, OK, you start off thinking, "no, this can't be just Ring with cellphones, nobody would be that lazy"; but more and more things happen, and the movie manages to incorporate every single stupid horror cliché from the past 20-odd years of white-person cinema, and pretty much anything you can think of that you're sick of seeing in Asian horror as well, and yet - this is almost admirable in its forthright laziness - never at any point does One Missed Call really do anything to suggest that it's NOT just trying to be Ring with cellphones. (And isn't "Ring with cellphones", really, just about the dumbest idea for a movie ever? I mean, that's like someone trying to make Psycho with a bathtub scene, isn't it?) Anyways, driving home, I realized that my initial judgment wasn't really the case anyway, as One Missed Call is also an insultingly lazy, sloppy, cynical pastiche of all the most overdone bits from horror videogames (not many of which are scary, and pretty much none of which are the least bit original anyway) and horror writing (I'm sure if you took every book with a predominantly black cover off the shelf of an airport bookstore, threw them in a blender, and tried to read the contents, they'd be either as good as or a little bit better than the script to One Missed Call). However - this is the embarrassing thing - it's still rather skillful at maintaining a palpable sense of dread. I spent most of the movie wanting to tear my hair out at the astoundingly inept/lazy/just plain useless regurgitation of every horror/thriller element ever, and yet still drove home with the lights on in the car because it'd given me the heebie-jeebies. Throughout most of the movie, I was torn between wanting things to just quit being useless already, groaning when long-haired Japanese women appeared in the corner of frame or musical stabs heralded disembodied hands popping out of nowhere to grab at the heroes (because, alright, shock and surprise me, but be aware that I, like most people, have already seen Carrie, for goodness' sake); and trying to think of the last time I'd been this unsettled and edge-of-set-being-on in a movie made by a white person. (Or, ahem, an Indian-American).

The movie just suck. You don't get scared, not even a bit. And that's what's horror movies are supposed to do, or am i wrong??? The ringtone may be nice so, just download it. One advise for you who haven't seen it: -DO NOT WATCH THIS MOVIE -A COMPLETE WASTE OF TIME If i was the one who bought that movie (saw it with a friend) i would of wanted my money back, and the hour and a half i spent watching crap bullshit! But by all means, if u like being bored for an hour or a half expecting a good movie... watch it, see if i care.

This movie has a more than interesting and good premise and it also has a real promising beginning but as the movie and its story start to progress more the movie actually gets worse and starts to drag and become overlong. Japanese horror movies are well known and appreciated over the world now days, due to the global success of several genre pieces, with of course "Ringu" as the best example of this. And even though these movies are always well made and good looking ones, there are often more or less the same. Aside from its premises, they are often hardly original in their execution, with the exception of an occasional memorable and effective sequences. And yes, this movie is also pretty much more of the same. It's welcome for the fans of it but it's just offering too little originality, which makes this a movie you'll easily forget. This is a pretty mainstream movie for normal Takashi Miike standards. Guess he needs to make these type of movies, every once in a while, before he can continue and finance his other movie projects, that are less mainstream and just plain odd and weird with their style and approach. But it are still the movies he is known for and also most appreciated more by people all over the world. I'm not a fan of just all of his movies but often his weirdness, extreme graphic violence and humorous approach of it all can still appeal to me and make his movies something unique and enjoyable for me. But this movie really doesn't has any of that. It's made in the same style as any other popular Japanese horror movie, which means that this movie will probably also disappoint most Takashi Miike lovers. Thing with this movie is that it has an alright story and main premise in its beginning but the more it all progresses the harder it gets to understand and the less interest you'll keep in this movie. It's the reason why the movie feels like it's dragging at points and feels also certainly overlong. This is a movie that should at least had been 20 minutes shorter really. This also certainly goes at the expense of the horror and mystery of the movie. Horror-wise this movie is certainly disappointing in what it is offering. Again, because it's being nothing too original but also because the movie it's story-telling doesn't really get you involved with things and therefore a lot of the mystery and tension dies off pretty quick already. It also doesn't help that the movie becomes more and more confusing toward its ending. But overall, this movie still does a lot of things well. It's certainly not any worse than the average Japanese horror entry and despite all of its problems, I still consider this a watchable movie. 6/10 http://bobafett1138.blogspot.com/

I listened to this film purely to study its dialogue as an exercise in my Japanese language studies (a hobby). I was somewhat edgy, expecting my dictionary to be scared out of my hands at any moment. Instead, I encountered nothing very startling, but found that the film developed a good sense of student ambiance, and the horror elements were carefully stylistic - use of shadows, characters unseen by our heroine lurking in backgrounds, subtle bridging to more sinister music to suggest dangers ahead. Then, still early on in the film, I awoke to comic elements - the serial use of gimmickry from other horror flicks. I haven't seen many, but the references to "The Birds" and (rather obliquely) to "Psycho" were obvious, as was the straining facial indentation on a door a la Ghostbusters - and parodies aside, the classroom scene with the heroine fiddling with her cellphone while the teacher lectures is comic enough. In fact, the exaggerated omnipresence of the cellphones, wherever our characters turn, makes them seem to flock around as comically as though they were Hitchcock's birds. I'll admit I can't think of "The Birds" without imagining myself with a baseball bat whacking the poor attackers as they swoop in - something of course the characters themselves couldn't be permitted to do. And in this flick, the all too obvious mystery for the viewer is "how the director and script writer can possibly explain to us how cellphones can attack and kill..." It's a great joke! Well, given the level of absurdity, the denouement was bound to be messy. Personally, as I watched and replayed lines and looked up words and phrases, I gradually expected an "Alice"-like ending - in the style of American McGee's Alice, the fantastic PC game - i.e., our girl would wake up from her nightmares, freed from inner anguishes, and we'd learn no one but her inner demons had actually died. Well, that's not quite the ending, but for those who're interested in this genre, I'll not spoil it. All in all, it wasn't bad - pretty well made - and as said, I found myself interested in some of the characters.

PLOT OUTLINE: A group of friends are shocked when they start receiving voicemail messages on their cell phones from themselves 72 hours in the future. As the time that each message arrives, the recipient is killed by a malevolent entity seeking retribution for their death. One Missed Call is one of a spate of Japanese horror films (commonly known as J-Horror) that came out in the late 1990s / early 2000s. The genre was kicked off by Hideo Nakata's ridiculously successful RING, which set up the clichés that all the other films, including this one, follow almost to the letter. As far as horror films go, this particular one is nothing special. In some respects, it is a bit of a disappointment, mainly due to the fact that its director, Takeshi Miike, is capable of making some really individualistic films that can be fairly compared to the works of Shinya Tsukamoto. One Missed Call follows the Ring formula almost to the letter – there is a technologically-minded curse (in this case cell phones) where the owner of the device is given a warning & a deadline before they are killed. To be fair, Ring was not that good a film, but it did have an atmosphere that was creepy & unearthly. This film doesn't even have that, not to mention the fact that, at nearly two hours long, it overstays its welcome. There is the occasional moment which suggests a work of promise – one of the victims meets her fate in a television studio – but for all intensive purposes, One Missed Call is dead on arrival. The execs at Hollywood conducted a remake some years later, which was actually quite better than this original.

Although a very formulaic movie, ripe with unoriginality, still very scary, and sure to give you nightmares afterwards. It basically follows the standards that Ringu set up. Some vengeful ghost sends warnings out to people before it kills them. There is even the funeral scene after the first death, where a school girl tells the female lead all about the myth. And also just when you think it is over at the end, the ghost comes back for one last scare. Not very much character depth or plot depth. Just a very very good exercise in trying to scare the audience, which works very well here in One Missed Call as it did with Ringu. The problem is that the day before I saw this one, I saw A Tale of Two Sisters. Another equally terrifying movie, but with an incredible story and character depth, so it is hard not to compare. Check it out if you haven't seen it. Best scene in the movie? The Exorcism show. Chilling as much as it is funny; very entertaining! Well done! 7/10