miss it!

One Missed Call
By:Erin Thursby
From: EU Jacksonville
Date: 1200514080
Rating: PG 13
Grade: D+

Want to watch a bad urban legend? One Missed Call is in theatres right now. If you haven’t seen the previews, the premise is that sexy co-eds are getting spooky phone calls on their cell phones, the sound of their own voice just before death. The calls are conveniently dated in the future, with the time and date of their impending doom.
It’s not a terrible premise, as horror movies go, but most of the plot points are as predictable as a Britney Spears breakdown. If you take the cell batteries out of the phone, will that keep the dreaded phone call from happening? It’s way scarier if it doesn’t. And it doesn’t.
Nifty CGI weirdness doesn’t make up for the acting and a wooden script. Shannyn Sossamon plays the lead girl, Beth Raymond, who watches her friends die before inevitably getting one missed call herself. She and Detective Jack Andrews (Edward Burns) are investigating, since Andrew’s sister was one of the earliest victims. There’s an attempt at some sort of chemistry between the two, but it comes off as sort of forced and awkward. Strangely, comedian Margaret Cho appeared in the flick, in a bit role as a very, very serious cop. I’m hoping that she did for a paycheck rather than artistic satisfaction.
Within the first few minutes of the movie, one of the most often used gags in horror film history appeared—the cat. Whether they’re rummaging through a garbage can to make you jump during a particularly tense moment, or leading a character that is tentatively calling Fluffy’s name just moments before their demise, cats are used so often in horror films that I’m considering getting a hamster, just to be safe.
Horror films try to hit what’s scary in the collective unconscious, which is why so many of them feel like a Reduce, Reuse and Recycle campaign for ideas.
Every movie genre has its conventions, but horror movie convention is more obvious than convention in other flicks, because the whole point is to scare and surprise you. One Missed Call just took itself too seriously, and it really wasn’t good enough to take itself that seriously. Self-conscious horror films that acknowledge the conventions can wink at the audience whilst scaring the bejesus out of them.
The movie does do that, a little, when a producer from an “American Miracles” show approaches one of the terrified co-eds for a possible reenactment of the phone call for his show. Unfortunately, there wasn’t enough of it to keep me interested. It wasn’t corny enough for me to really laugh at, it was just bad. And not an entertaining kind of bad. It misses being campy and it misses being truly frightening.
You have to know a movie is bad when the people defending it on the IMDb boards just point out that most horror movies feature bad acting and a “retarded plot.” To be fair, there are times when the movie almost doesn’t suck. (The best stuff happens inside the burnt out hospital.) The unsatisfying end of the movie leaves room for a sequel which, I have to say, is one of scariest things about One Missed Call.