(Streamed via Midnight Pulp)
I watched One Missed Call 2 during the early days of this thirty-one-movie watching project. I figured why wait to close out the trilogy? As it turns out, it’s the best of the trio.
A group of Japanese schoolkids bully a classmate until she finally cracks and tries to commit suicide. The indifferent brats then head to South Korea on a field trip. During their sightseeing tour, the students begin receiving ominous phone calls that portend their impending death.
There are a couple interesting elements here that help to separate Final from the other films in the One Missed Call series. The first is the fact that the ghostly girl is aided in her quest for revenge by a friend who helps select the order of the victims from a class photo. Another new wrinkle is the fact that the would-be victims can escape their death by forwarding their deadly phone call to another student. This adds to the animosity and distrust among the circle of classmates. Because of that, the horror comes not only from the ghostly girl, but seeing how the classmates turn on one another. This helps give this installment a unique energy. Another cool thing is that the deaths sometimes feel like they came out of a Final Destination movie (especially the one involving a live wire), which might explain the subtitle. Although some of the deaths are more effective than others (the scene where the guy pukes feathers is kind of lame), they work reasonably well for the most part.
I was intending to give this a favorable review until the third act rolled around. The subplot involving people trying to stop the ghostly girl’s reign of terror by flooding her inbox with emails containing “positive messages” made my eyeballs roll back into my fucking skull. That dumb scene definitely knocked the movie down a notch in my book. However, even with that supremely shitty sequence, One Missed Call: Final is easily the best film in the franchise.
AKA: One Missed Call 3: Final. AKA: The Call: Final. AKA: Final Call.
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