STUDIO: Warner Brothers
RELEASE DATE: April 22, 2008
STARRING: Jason Beghe, Donna Biscoe, Edward Burns, Wilbur Fitzgerald, and Rhoda Griffis
WRITTEN BY: Andrew Klavan
DIRECTED BY: Eric Valette
FEATURES: None

It's really a shame that Hollywood decided to return One Missed Call to audiences, opening on the first weekend of 2008 and starting the year off with a half-asleep alleged scarefest that is simply one of the worst in a long line of bad Asian remakes of recent years. Much has been made about Hostel: Part II supposedly putting to bed the trend of "torture porn" with its lackluster box office. What is it going to take to stop the onslaught of Asian horror remakes that aren't even a tenth as effective as the originals? Seriously. Shouldn't The Grudge 2 have been enough? If not, couldn't the remake of Pulse have been the nail in the coffin? What is it going to take? This year alone (and it's only mid-April), we've suffered through The Eye, Shutter, and One Missed Call, arguably the worst Asian horror remake yet. It's a completely pointless and dramatically inert mess without a single scare and two of the most half-asleep performances you're going to see all year...in the same movie. Only a brief appearance by the always-spectacular Ray Wise and the film's mercifully short running time keep it from being the worst movie of the year so far (a title still held by 10,000 B.C.). But it's close.

Ranking a generous 2.7 on IMDB and a fantastic 0% out of SIXTY-THREE reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, it's difficult to exaggerate how useless One Missed Call truly is but we know there are some people out there who rent or buy everything horror, so we trudge forward. And we understand. Being horror junkies ourselves, we were cautiously interested in a remake of the well-liked Chakushin Ari, a Japanese horror film from 2003. And the central conceit of the plot isn't half-bad. People start to receive voice mail message from their future selves at the moment of their death. It's like Final Destination meets The Ring. If you heard the moment of your death and even knew the day and time (the "missed call" voice messages are stamped like any other), could you avoid it? The concept of an inevitable fate is regularly used in horror and could have been effective but debut director Eric Valette doesn't even seem interested in his own story.

One Missed Call is shockingly slow, even at 87 minutes, and the dragging pace isn't helped by Shannyn Sossamon or Edward Burns who give nothing to their roles. You can practically see them endorsing their paychecks on-camera. Sossamon has done decent work in films like Wristcutters and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and also appeared as a regular on both Dirt and Moonlight, so she's done enough good work to be forgiven, but it's time we take a good, hard look at the resume of Edward Burns, a man whose best work in the last decade has been a recurring cameo on Entourage (and, it should be noted, he played himself, a part that presumably doesn't require a lot of range). His film work in movies like 15 Minutes, Sound of Thunder, The Holiday, 27 Dresses, and now this clunker has firmly proven that his quick-start career in The Brothers McMullen and Saving Private Ryan was a fluke.

Warner Brothers clearly knows the caliber of stinker they have on their hands and treat is thusly on DVD. One Missed Call comes without a single special feature. The video and audio are traditionally good for WB theatrical movies and OMC doesn't break that rule, but the studio has had a bad habit of bonus-free DVDs this year with several titles coming home nearly special feature-free or, in the case of One Missed Call, completely bare-bones. Should one of the worst movies of the year be criticized for not having special features? Yes. Every movie has fans, even the worst, and studios should design discs that appeal to them. Although if the lack of special features finally ends the Asian remake train, we'll call it even.

For a piece on original Asian horror movies that you should watch instead of One Missed Call, check out Asian Horror 101.