(Streamed via AsianCrush)
Takashi Miike’s One Missed Call was an OK variation on The Ring. Instead of a ghostly girl bumping off people who watched a haunted videotape, it featured a ghostly girl killing people who answered a cursed phone call. This sequel (directed by Renpei Tsukamoto, who primarily works in television) picks up one year later with another circle of friends receiving mysterious phone calls. Shortly after answering them, they die in gruesome ways. A detective (Renji Ishibashi) teams up with a journalist (Asaka Seto) to investigate the deaths.
Like its predecessor, One Missed Call starts off on the right foot. The opening death scene works rather well, and the revelation of the body is well done. Again, as with the first movie, it bogs down once the characters start snooping into the ghostly girl’s past. That’s okay though, because some of the other horrific sequences aren’t too shabby. There’s a nifty scene where the spectral sister shows up during a video chat, as well as a low-tech, but effective shower sequence. Coming from someone who isn’t typically a fan of J-Horror, I have to say these moments work.
While the first act is a solid piece of J-Horror, the flick kind of hits a wall as it enters the middle section. It’s here where the characters team up to take a field trip to Taiwan to search for the source of the diabolical phone call. It’s also here where my interest started to wane as this stretch of the film was devoid of creepy murder set pieces and had a heavy concentration of dull police work/journalism investigation scenes.
Once the horror finally begins ramping up again, it hews a bit too close to its inspirations to be all that effective. The scene involving the well suffers from major déjà vu from The Ring and the scene where a dead girl crawls down a flight of stairs is an awful lot like The Grudge. Maybe if One Missed Call 2 had found something original to do with the genre, it might’ve been worthwhile. Despite the promising beginning, you might find yourself wanting to hang up on this one.
AKA: The Call 2.
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