Hello? The American remake of the hit Japanese cell phone spooker One Missed Call has connected with a director, French filmmaker Eric Valette. A French guy doing an American remake of a Japanese movie. Dizzying.
The original flick was a fairly by-the-digits terror tale (at least by the standards of its ordinarily psychotic director Takashi Miike) about a teenage girl whose friends keep getting strange voicemail messages that turn out to be themselves phoning in from several days in the future at the moment of their grisly demise. Could this mysterious dialer be yet another vengeful shuffling spirit with long straggly hair?
In its home country where cell phones are a technarcotic, the first flick spawned a franchise now into its third permutation. The American version is being put together by Alcon, Intermedia and Kadokawa, and ultimately distributed by Warner Bros.
Valette’s last film Malefique was pretty excellent, a claustrophobic occult-themed prison flick that is currently being remade by producer Neal Moritz, the man behind such glossy cacophonous product as Stealth, The Fast and the Furious and the ingeniously awful XXX: State of the Union.