One Missed Call

NEW YORK (CNS) -- Ring-a-ding-ding -- you're doomed! In the hands of a more creative screenwriter and director, a horror picture such as "One Missed Call" (Warner Bros.) might have been an imaginative and original black comedy about the forces of evil harnessing ubiquitous communications devices to spread terror and death.

But director Eric Valette and screenwriter Andrew Klavan adapted this by-the-numbers (literally) remake of the 2003 Japanese film "Chakushin Ari," minus the gore of the original -- but, less happily, the pointed satire as well. The tired conventions of a horror flick aimed at teens keep the movie as predictable as a sports film with a last-second touchdown.

In this version, the story takes place in an American college town. A vengeful spirit is leaving messages on college students' cell phones. (It takes a long time to figure out what the vengeance is about in an underdeveloped back story concerning child abuse.)

In the messages students hear their own voice, about two days hence, dated and timed to the moment of their death. No land-line phones and no Bluetooth wireless headsets are used; this ghost likes the small handsets, and it even provides its own ring tone. Taking out the phone's battery pack or destroying the phone does no good. Not even a bad exorcism by an evangelist for a reality TV show can stop this evil.

Ignoring the occasional lapses in logic -- why do a corpse and a teddy bear have their own cell phones? who gets those bills? -- the result is grim mayhem. Shannyn Sossamon as frightened yet brave student Beth Raymond is the poor man's Sarah Michelle Gellar. Edward Burns as detective Jack Andrews would be a reassuring masculine presence were his character not so obviously dense.

Although the filmmakers clearly went for a PG-13 rating as a lure for teens looking for a spooky night out, the intense terror sequences and images of child abuse make this unsuitable even for younger teens. Beyond that, the unfortunate inclusion of a sacrilegious image during the exorcism necessitates the harsh classification.

The film contains rough and profane language, a half-dozen deaths involving varying degrees of violence, scenes of intense terror, an instance of nonexplicit mother-daughter child abuse, another instance of a little girl physically abusing her sister, a couple of gory corpses and a sacrilegious image of a leering crucifix during an attempted exorcism by a nondenominational evangelist. The USCCB Office for Film & Broadcasting classification is O -- morally offensive. The Motion Picture Association of America rating is PG-13 -- parents strongly cautioned. Some material may be inappropriate for children under 13.

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Copyright (c) 2007 Catholic News Service/U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops