One Missed Call (2004)

"One Missed Call" (2004, Takashi Miike, Kadokawa-Daiei) is the Japanese original horror which was then remade by an American company in 2008.

Unlike "The Grudge", where the American remake is almost on par with the Japanese version, "One Missed Call"'s remake was of a much lesser quality.

If you can withstand the subtitles, the 2004 version is really, very creepy.

The premise of the film is that you recieve a call on your mobile phone (or cell phone for all you non-British folk). The phone doesn't ring with your usual ringtone (instead with a creepy little tune) and will ring regardless of whether the phone is off, broken or without a battery. No matter whether you try to answer or not, you always miss the call, and have to fetch a voicemail message.

The voicemail is always set in the future, is from your own number and features the last sounds you make/hear before dying painfully. There's also always a candy sweet in each victim's mouth..., granted sometimes their mouths are quite far away from the rest of their bodies by the time the candy is found...

Creepy stuff!

Now, like "The Grudge" and "The Ring", "One Missed Call"'s ghost girl kills in a domino effect, beginning with Yoko (Anna Nagata) and then working through her phone book...

It's up to Yumi (Kou Shibasaki), Yoko's best friend to try to stop the curse before it's too late for herself! But in order to stop the ghost, she has to follow the clues to the ghosts' beginnings and face some other spectres from the dead girls' past.

But can she convince the angry spirit to stop with the murder? One can only hope.

Nicely gorey with some disturbingly creepy scenes and it may put you off MMS messages for life!

Japanese ghost horror is always a winner with me as it's always creepy, but I sometimes find the differences in culture make it hard to follow. But a shit-scared person staring into the gruesome eyes of death, is a shit-scared person staring into the gruesome eyes of death in every culture, so the importants parts of the film are easy to follow.

I must also admit to jumping nowadays if my phone has an episode and randomly changes its ringtone from a Black Stone Cherry song to one of the preset ringers; Mimiko's gonna get you!

[Picture: Kadokawa-Daiei]

Hani