One Missed Call

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A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Year:	2003
Country of origin:	Japan
Director:	Takashi Miike
Genre:	J-Horror creepiness
Starring:	Kou Shibasaki , Shin'ichi Tsutsumi , Kazue Fukiishi, Anna Nagata, Atsushi Ida
Rating:	4/5
IMDB link:	http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0366292/
Tagline:	Death cannot be put on hold...
Favourite line:	N/A - Subtitled

I just love Japanese horror movies.
There, I've gone and admitted it so, for the remainder of this review, keep that in the back of your mind.

The plot:
A clutch of attractive Japanese teens begin to receive a phone call, one by one, from their own number. The date stamp on the call is a few days in the future, and the message seems to be a recording of their own death.

And that's about all I can tell you without giving too much away.
It's a neat plot device, of course echoing Ringu's 'watch this video and you die in 7 days' theme, though this is in no way a clone of that movie, despite the obvious influence.
Directed by the legendary Takashi Miike this never quite reaches the greatness of the other two movies of his I am familiar with - the truly terrifying Audition and the extraordinarily odd Ichi the Killer - though this is far from terrible.
The initial premise has legs for about two thirds of the running time, before slowly running out of steam, though it is worth persevering for the utterly bewildering and downright twisted last fifteen minutes.
Bleak and pessimistic throughout, this is genuinely chilling in a way that the output from the other two hotbeds of horror, America and Italy, rarely are. It's hard to explain. True, American horror tends towards the excessive, whilst Italian horror fare goes for atmosphere, and both achieve what they set out to, but seldom are their movies particularly frightening.
J-Horror is different and rarely fails to unsettle.
Whilst not a masterpiece, those fed up with multiplex pleasing fodder could do worse than check this out.
A good, effective chiller all round.