One Missed Call Movie Review (and other scary flicks)

I saw One Missed Call at the 5:30 show tonight.

OMG!!

It's a little after 10:00pm and I'm still shuddering quite a bit. But before I get into the review on this movie, I need to mention a few things. Because, not a lot of people tend to agree with my take on horror movies. A very specific type of scene or storyline or character freaks the hell out of me when it doesn't bother others and then some movies that give other people nightmares are just sort of ho-hum for me. So let me give you a few examples of horror movies that to this day either give me nightmares or give me a general feeling of uneasiness and then after I tell you what I thought about One Missed Call, you can figure out for yourself if you think it might affect you the same way it did me.

The Ring
This one gave me daymares. I had wanted to see it at the theater but back when I insisted on not going to the theater alone, there was no one around that was willing to go with me. All of my movie buddies hated scary movies and the guys that liked the scary movies were...well, MARRIED guys, so that was a no-no. So I had to wait until it came out on dvd before I would get to see it.

When it did finally come out on dvd, I purchased it that night - even paying the extra money to buy it at Schnucks so I could see it NOW as opposed to waiting for it to arrive via mail from a much cheaper online source - and of course that day I ended up working late which meant that by the time I was ready to watch it, it was 10pm. It didn't matter to me, though; I was dying to see this movie and had been for months, so I would just quickie watch it and then go to bed right after. Many nights I would get to bed around midnight and still be able to get up by 5 the next morning, bright eyed and bushy-tailed ready to go to work. (Okay, not quite those adjectives, but still awake and capable enough of getting my job done.)

Anyway, I popped the dvd into the player in my living room and at the time, I was out of lightbulbs, so there were no lights except for the moonlight outside (Yeah, I know, I could have bought lightbulbs while I was at Schnucks buying the dvd, but the thought didn't even cross my mind on my mission to get the movie.) and as soon as the menu page came up and that creepy chair was sitting there with the screen all wobbly and that eerie music started playing, I knew I was in for a good scare.

As a sidenote: I have a specific routine that I go thru when I watch a dvd...first, I watch the trailer for it (to refresh my memory on the storyline) and then I go into the setup area and select the closed caption option (you wouldn't believe how much stuff you miss if you don't have this enabled - plus, it's funny to see the goofs with the misspellings and the missed dialogue), then I watch the movie, then watch all the special features like the behind the scenes, deleted scenes, alternate endings, music videos, etc., and then last I watch the movie again with the commentary.

This movie didn't seem to have any of those options so it was less like a movie and more like a real life kinda story....which added to the creep factor, and made it more difficult for me to comprehend the difference between "just a movie" and the kind of thing that really seeps into the unconsciousness and makes you start hallucinating.

After the movie was over (of which I didn't think I was going to survive it without either having a heart attack or hyperventilating), I was searching for the special features like a "making of" featurette...something...ANYTHING to bring me back to reality, but the only thing I was greeted with was a bunch of "deleted scenes" which ended up being a mini movie made up of tiny scene bitlits that actually tied into the movie but as an add-on. (Sorry, it's kinda hard to explain.) The one trailer for Ringu really helped since it was just trading one creepy set of scenes for another.

And then there was the infamous easter egg that I came across purely by accident. My remote control for my dvd player has a problem with the down part of the joystick control, so it only goes up, to the right, and to the left, so as I was trying to move it around to get to the "don't watch this" portion (which was the mini movie), I noticed that my pointer had disappeared and like an idiot, I pressed the enter, anyway, and of course that showed "the tape" and as I'm sure everyone out there knows, after you're finished viewing the contents on this tape, it takes you back to the menu page, but the menu page now looks really different, and just as you're cocking your head to the side to figure out why it looks different, you hear a phone ring. I gotta tell ya, when it's after midnight, in a pitch black room, and you're alone in the house (except for a wuss of a dog who's happily snoring on the floor oblivious to the terror that was just invited in your brain), and you're watching the movie with surround sound and you hear that phone ringing.....you could have scraped me off the ceiling.

I was able to call this one friend who was a night owl and he helped calm me down as I think I was pretty hysterical for the first few minutes and after talking with him about normal stuff for about an hour, I was finally able to get a few hours of sleep. But the next SEVERAL days, I kept seeing in my mind those awful scenes that freaked me out so bad and just seeing a picture of a well gave me the shivers. And I couldn't bring myself to sleep downstairs where my bed is because there was a tv at the end of the bed...and it didn't get any kind of reception so it was strictly being used to watch video tapes, so neither the idea of the tv being off nor it being on with just fuzziness to listen to was something I was willing to do.

To this day, I don't dare watch any of The Ring movies at night...American or Japanese versions. I have all three of the Japanese Ring movies, (Ringu, Ringu 2, Ring 0) and I can't bring myself to watch the rest of Ring 0. That whole shaking of the head thing from Ringu 2 and then seeing it again in Ring 0 gets to me just thinking about it. I figured that after seeing the American version (and surviving the viewing), I could easily watch all of the Japanese versions which I figured would be laughable. But they weren't laughable, and I got pretty freaked out by those, too.

It
I will regret admitting this, probably, but I am deathly afraid of clowns. And as with The Ring, anything coming at me on the screen (even if it's just a harmless commercial) makes my heart start racing and makes me think that if I just close my eyes and pretend that it's not really there, everything will be okay, but I can never seem to close my eyes because I can usually still hear the scary thing and it's best to have all senses working when questioning reality. This movie has a creepy clown involved and also a scene where the clown runs right up to the screen....that part is scary for me.

What made the movie even more terrifying is that the dvd is on a loop. So when I let myself fall asleep one time watching the movie, once It was over, there was about a ten second stay on the menu page (with creepy music playing the whole time) and then the movie started over. That music crept into my dreams and made them nightmares and when I woke up, my blanket was drenched in sweat and it took me awhile to get my heart back to normal.

feardotcom
This movie is made fun of and for the most part, the "scary" scenes are really just stupid and sometimes funny, but the scene where the pictures are flashing from a ball bouncing and then that ghostly figure crawling down the hall - and it's crawling towards the screen - I have trouble erasing that one from my memory.

What's more, stupid me, I went to the website and as soon as you enter in, it asks your name and then displays how much time you have left until you will die. And as you're watching that counter and the makeshift roaches are crawling around on the screen - remember my more than slight aversion to creatures with more than 4 legs - it can be a little disturbing. Your rational mind is telling you that of course you're not going to die in another hour and 23 minutes, but there's that one tiny piece somewhere in the very back of your mind that says "what if it's true" and when it's late at night and you're all alone in the house, and it's dead quiet, and you're watching the numbers count down to how much time you have "before you die", especially when you get to those last couple of minutes, it can tend to make your heart race pretty fast. At least, it did mine.

Obviously I didn't die when my time was up, but I was under its spell for the entire duration...not daring to turn off the computer because it would seriously freak me out if by some chance, the computer came back on by itself. I know it sounds stupid, but I've had some really odd things happen to me in my lifetime, so I've learned not to rule anything out.

Dead Silence
This one is probably the most recent movie that scared the bejeebers out of me. Thankfully, I saw it in the afternoon so that it was still daylight outside when I left the theater, and I went back to work afterwards, too, so that helped out a bunch as well...nice to get back to some human companionship for that extra helping of reality.

Besides clowns, I'm not that fond of dolls, either...and ever since that episode of Fantasy Island that I saw when I was just a kid, mannequins have been extremely disturbing to me. To me, they are all maniacal killers who come to life when you are asleep. Dead Silence preys on that fear of mine and add to it the scenes where the scary creature is coming at the screen, and I was in full panic mode pretty much thru the entire movie.

Another little something that I probably shouldn't admit because it just invites the evil in now, but when I get scared...and I mean really scared...I can't scream. I can't blink. I think I maybe even stop breathing. I am totally frozen in fear and (if I don't die the way that a fortune teller told me I would a long time ago) I can honestly see myself dying of fright.


There have been other movies that have scared me to the point of having nightmares, but the above metioned are the frontrunners. I get freaked out pretty easily if it's anything that comes at the screen, any scene where the POV is coming up from behind someone who is sitting in a chair (because they always end up being freaky looking, don't they?), anything involving clowns or dolls, and anything with a focus on mirrors. (I'm not quite ready to divulge why that's scary for me just yet...but let's just say I will NOT look into a mirror in a dark room.)

And for the movies that scared other people, but only mildly made me shudder: Vacancy, Silence Of The Lambs, Halloween, Friday The 13th. Pretty much the slasher films never gave me nightmares except for the Nightmare On Elm Street franchise - and that's only because the concept was based on a true story - Did you know that? - which gives me chills just thinking about it. I guess you could say in general, anything related to the occult (black majic, demons, spirits, vampires, etc.) has a better chance of scaring me than a story about a human serial killer looking to up his body count. In that case, in my opinion, the movie is a thriller, not a horror flick. In fact, until the character comes back from the dead, all slasher movies involving humans are really just thrillers wanting the horror title.

Ok, now onto the movie review of One Missed Call. It's a little after 11pm as I type this. The house is completely silent. The dogs are here in the house with me, but they finally went to sleep because they are no longer yapping. A train whistle is blowing in the distance, but otherwise, no other sound is audible except for the clicking of the keys on the keyboard. I did another incredibly stupid (read: brave) thing earlier tonight and it's freaking me out quite a bit. I decided to download the ringtone from the movie and it's now going to play as my main ringtone. I am picturing at least one of you calling my cell phone just to find out later if it gave me a heart attack hearing it ring. It sounds pretty close to what it was in the movie...it's pretty creepy. I guess I downloaded it because I needed to prove to myself that it was just a movie. If you text "die" to 94444, you will get a text message back with a link to take you to where you can download the ringtone. I think maybe during the day when there's activity going on and lots of people around, I think I'll be okay with hearing it. But right now as it's late at night, if my phone rang right this minute, I think I might seriously go into shock. (So please don't test this theory, okay?)

One Missed Call
A twenty something girl, Jean, who has supposedly committed suicide by drowning herself in her pond in her backyard; even though, you, the viewer, have seen the strange hand that came out of the pond and pulled her in. You find out that after she has died, one of her friends, Shelley, is called from the dead girl's cellphone with a voicemail post dated two days that is Shelley's voice screaming. Shelley then dies on the date at the time of the voicemail that was sent and after SHE dies, one of Shelley's friends listed in her cell phone is called and that person hears her own voice of her last words and that message has been post dated, too. Going thru several of her friends, the deadly voicemail call eventually gets around to our heroine, Beth, who is determined that if she can find out where the calls originated from, she can save her own life and break the cycle.

It sounds like a stupid story, I realize, and admittingly, there were a few hokey scenes; BUT remember that moment when you were watching Child's Play for the first time and she turned the Good Guy doll over to remove the batteries and you saw that THERE WERE NO BATTERIES!! Remember how that sent chills thru you? Well, in the scene (that is also from the trailer) where the two girls decide that they'll just turn off their cell phones and take the batteries out and then throw them on the couch (announcing that if a dead person tries to call, they're not home) and still one of the phones rings and now they are both shaking as they have to figure out whose phone is ringing when both of the batteries have been taken out...that's a pretty creepy thought that goes thru your mind.

And speaking of creepy...on a personal note, the timer on the living room light just activated, and that little click coming from the front room with the immediate darkness in the hallway and then hearing the jingling as one of the dogs was trotting down the hall to come see me gave me a pretty good panic attack just now. Then again, I think I might be a little on edge still, and the slightest thing may send me over - into the looney bin. (Which means I need to hurry up and finish this review so that I can go watch something funny on tv before I go to bed.)

So back to the movie. There are several laughable creepy faces that are supposed to be scary, but the few that are scary are really scary. In fact, at the reveal of the source making the calls, I swear to you, several people in the theater screamed, I think the rest were gasping...I, myself, was frozen staring at the screen (three rows from the front, so the screen was right there in my face) as my heart was racing and being VERY thankful that there was a whole theater full of people (that reality check, you know) and knowing that the movie was almost over. There were probably four REALLY good scare scenes with several others that were more suspense-driven. The entire movie was VERY intense as far as the suspense scenes were concerned. Another couple of shots where there's someone sitting in a chair and you're seeing them from behind....man, I didn't think I was going to survive those...kept picturing what awfulness is going to be jumping out at me. Panic attack city for me from the second scene almost non-stop all the way to the last scene. (The first scene would have been better if they wouldn't have relied on the comic relief by yanking the cat into the pond after the girl...that part was pretty stupid in my opinion.)

I'd rather not give away anymore details so that you can enjoy the surprises - and there are many.

One Missed Call really freaked me out and now that I have the ringtone from the movie on my phone, I have the feeling that daymares are likely to occur and I think this one will require a repeated viewing (to remind myself that it's just a movie) but I'll need to give it a few days before entertaining that idea. Definitely best when viewed surrounded by an audience. I just don't think it would have the same feel as if you were sitting at home with the lights on, with maybe a few family members watching with you engaged in pleasant conversation. I really believe that you need to have the right setting to fully enjoy it. (Dark theater, people watching it that haven't seen it before, or if they HAVE seen it before, they are at least able to keep their yaps shut about it.) I would suggest this being a great popcorn movie with all the pulse-pounding scenes, but there are quite a few of the bug scenes, too, that is making me re-think that.

That's it for now. Let me know what YOU thought. Am I just a pussy who trembles at the slightest fright on the screen? Or did this one get to you, too? (Or, perhaps, that's two different questions.)

Vixy :]