Release Date: April 22nd, 2008
Running Time: 87 minutes

The Film

As much as I love The Ring and found it to be genuinely terrifying, I curse it because of the endless wave of Japanese horror remakes that have crammed into theatres since its success. I thought The Grudge was decent, but after that I have avoided most Japanese ghost films. Frankly, viewers need a break. What was scary when The Ring premiered has now become oversaturated and commonplace. One Missed Call is another Japanese horror remake that fails to capture the tone of the original and winds up being far more tame than it could have been.

One Missed Call stars Shannon Sossamon as Beth Raymond, a college student who has the horrid experience of seeing two friends die within days of each other. The creepy part is how her friends, and others, have died. Before their deaths the people receive chilling phone messages detailing their deaths exactly as they end up happening. As they get these messages they usually have weird visions of strangers with messed up, spooky ghost faces. To make things even more odd, each of the victims die in freak accident ways and all have a red piece of candy in their mouths.

Beth begins to notice these coincidences but the police write it off as nothing more than accidents—all except one. Detective Jack Andrews (Ed Burns) had a sister who was killed in a similar accident and is the only one open to hearing Beth out. The two work together to try to figure out what is going on—and then Beth’s gets a message on her phone.

One Missed Call didn’t work for me for a few reasons. First and foremost, it is PG-13. The original was directed by Takashi Miike, a very hardcore Japanese filmmaker who doesn’t shy away from gore. The style of the film has a death happening every few scenes and having them neutered to PG-13 standards seriously hurts the thrills. In fact, the body count makes the film more of a ghost slasher story than something like The Grudge. If you are going to do a slasher movie, do it right and make it rated R. Outside of that, the characters are too generic and the required leaps of faith on behalf of the audience are too much, even for a horror film.

I have seen far worse horror films than One Missed Call, it is just an unfortunate mix of a tired genre and nonsensical PG-13 neutering.

The Disc

The video is presented in a 1.85:1, 1080p high definition transfer. It is a step above many standard definition transfers, but just barely. The transfer is unfortunately plagued with a lot of problems that show up on standard transfers, essentially negating most of the improved quality you would experience from Blu-Ray. The overall image is a little soft and cloudy, detracting from the detail. The lower lit scenes take the worst hit in terms of level of detail and are also marred with plenty of grain. Don’t get me wrong, it is still a high definition transfer and as such is easy enough on the eyes, but it hardly showcases the mind-blowing potential of Blu-Ray.

The audio is offered in English Dolby Digital TrueHD 5.1 Surround Sound, English/French/Spanish Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround Sound, and English Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo with English/French/Spanish subtitles. The TrueHD and regular 5.1 tracks are very capable horror efforts. The TrueHD offers the most clarity, but both tracks feature plenty of panning effects and great atmosphere coming from all the speakers. The audio cues are more likely to make you jump than any of the visuals. Dialogue is balanced as well though I would have liked the musical score to be a bit more robust. Overall it is a decent display of next-generation audio, but not a reference quality disc.

The Extras

No special features are offered at all…

Really?

Blu-Ray is supposed to be the next generation of home entertainment capable of providing types of special features we’ve never seen. I thought the days of bare bones discs were gone.

Final Thoughts

With a watered down story and no special features whatsoever, I cannot recommend purchasing One Missed Call. It may make a decent late-night rental for a couple of cheap jump moments, but is ultimately quite forgettable.