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One Missed Call is directed by Eric Valette, and stars
Azura Skye, Edward Burns, and Shannyn Sossamon ***
A group of students attending college become the victims
of a mysterious and deadly occurrence. Each of them receive
a strange message on their cell phones - a message from
the not-so-distant future, in which the person is in their
final moments before death. And each one of these calls
becomes a reality. One of the students teams up with a detective,
in an effort to discover the mystery of this deadly phenomenon.
***
One Missed Call is one missed opportunity after another.
The concept here is interesting enough, but the execution
just doesn't live up the hype. People die at an alarming
rate throughout the course of the film, but since we never
get to bond with the characters, do we really care? And
the whole hunt to find the secrets behind the deadly conspiracy
is stuff we've seen countless times before. This isn't a
terrible movie by any means, but it certainly isn't a very
interesting or intriguing one. ***
The characters strike a fatal blow to the film. They're
all paper-thin stereotypes, just the kind of ghost fodder
you've seen in every horror movie to come out in the last
decade or so. If you've seen ANY horror movie that came
out recently, you've seen these characters before. And they're
no more interesting here than anywhere else. Believe me,
you won't care when they die, since they hardly get developed
at all. ***
And then there's the element of hunting down the source
of the killings. This too is stereotypical of horror movies,
and not just recent ones. It's the classic “person knows
what's going on but no one believes them” thing. And this
movie does nothing to make the age-old cliché any more interesting.
***
Ultimately, One Missed Call falls short of all the
goals it tries to accomplish. And while not a horrible movie,
there are so many better products out there you could go
watch instead. So why bother? ---
Image And Sound:
Not a great transfer. It's a soft and fuzzy picture,
which is all-too-often a grainy one. This is particularly
a problem in darker scenes, and as a horror movie, naturally
there are more than a few of them. Audio fares better, not
a great track, but everything you need to hear, you'll hear
just fine. ---
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