As Asian horror goes, One Missed Call was fairly generic, especially considering it came from psychotic director Takashi Miike. One thing in the remake’s favor is director Eric Valette (yeah, a French guy doing an American remake of a Japanese movie), whose last film Malefique was a rather taut little horror accomplishment.
Though she’s probably best known as the object of affection in A Knight’s Tale and Rules of Attraction, the lovely Shannyn Sossamon has been dipping into more genre-themed material lately with Devour, Catacombs and even Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. In One Missed Call she’s a 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 the mysterious dialer be yet another vengeful spirit? Ed Burns, padding his wallet to make more personal movies nobody really sees, will play the detective helping her figure it out.
In its home country where cell phones are a technarcotic, the first flick spawned a franchise now into its third permutation. This latest version, currently shooting in CHUD’s point of origin Atlanta, is being put together by Alcon, Intermedia and Kadokawa, and ultimately distributed by Warner Bros.