This week in the Deep Hurting Project is One Missed Call, the American Remake.
Full disclosure, the only Japanese Horror films I can remember watching are Ringu, Kwaidan, and Audition, but I'm pretty sure the latter two aren't actually proper J-Horror as the term is commonly known. This may be a detriment because a good portion of the criticism on TVTropes' page talks about how it lifts scenes directly from the original and still manages to fuck it up.
I haven't seen the original (it's not available in the library, but this shitty remake is), and I get the impression that the second scene in the film could be a good example, because that Japanese-style house suggests this might have been lifted directly from the original, but the utter incoherence of it suggests quite a bit was lost in translation:
What the fuck is convincing her to look at the water, especially as she's trying to fetch her cat, who's clearly on the other side of the huge pond she has in her home for some reason? Why can't we see anything until that random arm comes out of the water and drags her in? And what does it want with her cat? What's with the long shot of the phone scrolling through her address book? What connection did this have with the child who got rescued from the burning hospital that this scene directly faded into? It's been forever since I've seen The Ring, but, IIRC, at least they knew to have scenes that the audience could understand. Maybe let the audience in on what's actually happening, like the opening scene of Get Out. It doesn't have to set up the central gimmick (this time of a killer voice message on her cell phone), but it should at least make some sense.
Eventually, they do set up the gimmick, and it's mildly explained. It involves cursed voicemail messages that foretell the time of death, and the people affected by it start seeing startling things that aren't all that scary (some creepy looking people who look like they're wearing Spirit Halloween costumes in broad daylight), or might be scary if they weren't so clearly CGI (like a centipede crawling inside the skin of someone's hand.) Despite the fact that the passage of time is a crucial part of the plot, a ticking clock to the time when each person is going to die, as foretold by those voice messages, the pacing is horrible. At least The Ring, for all its flaws, gave a sense of time. This doesn't. All of a sudden, it's Friday one week, and then it's Monday, then it's Friday of the next week.
There is not a single decent performance, which is shocking when one considers that it includes some legitimately talented actors, like Jason Beghe, Ray Wise, and Ariel Winter. Seriously, Ray Wise plays a guy who works for an exorcism TV show (who somehow heard about the killer phone calls; this may have been explained, but, honestly, I don't give a shit.) Ray Wise also played Leland Palmer, Laura Palmer's father from Twin Peaks, who was possessed by the spirit BOB and, under his influence, kills Laura, and sets off the plot. I would love to be able to make wisecracks about the parallels between the two, but I'm given so reason to give a shit about it that I just can't. Hell, in one scene, he tries to exorcise a cell phone on national televison, and the religious figures around him start coming to life, and even that's just so boring that I can't even smile at it. Or even my own little autistic version of a reflexive smile, anyway.
Even when the movie inserts abusive parents into the mix (and it turns out it's the ghost of an abused child doing the phone killing), it just does nothing, and that's usually a good way of getting me to at least feel something. Seriously, Margaret Cho's on-and-off attempt at a Southern accent feels like she's putting more effort into her performance than the rest of the cast combined. Christ, the new Black Mirror trailers just dropped and watching this killer technology movie just makes me dread having to deal with those. Sure, I've seen the trailers for all three episodes, and at least they feel like they're giving a shit from the minute's worth of each episode we've seen, but thinking about them with this horseshit on my mind is just going to make everything worse. I'm still going to do an Anglotopia article about them, but it'll be a lot less joyful than my previous attempts have been.
Also, is the killer ringtone "No Dogs Allowed?" From that one Peanuts movie?
Full disclosure, the only Japanese Horror films I can remember watching are Ringu, Kwaidan, and Audition, but I'm pretty sure the latter two aren't actually proper J-Horror as the term is commonly known. This may be a detriment because a good portion of the criticism on TVTropes' page talks about how it lifts scenes directly from the original and still manages to fuck it up.
I haven't seen the original (it's not available in the library, but this shitty remake is), and I get the impression that the second scene in the film could be a good example, because that Japanese-style house suggests this might have been lifted directly from the original, but the utter incoherence of it suggests quite a bit was lost in translation:
What the fuck is convincing her to look at the water, especially as she's trying to fetch her cat, who's clearly on the other side of the huge pond she has in her home for some reason? Why can't we see anything until that random arm comes out of the water and drags her in? And what does it want with her cat? What's with the long shot of the phone scrolling through her address book? What connection did this have with the child who got rescued from the burning hospital that this scene directly faded into? It's been forever since I've seen The Ring, but, IIRC, at least they knew to have scenes that the audience could understand. Maybe let the audience in on what's actually happening, like the opening scene of Get Out. It doesn't have to set up the central gimmick (this time of a killer voice message on her cell phone), but it should at least make some sense.
Eventually, they do set up the gimmick, and it's mildly explained. It involves cursed voicemail messages that foretell the time of death, and the people affected by it start seeing startling things that aren't all that scary (some creepy looking people who look like they're wearing Spirit Halloween costumes in broad daylight), or might be scary if they weren't so clearly CGI (like a centipede crawling inside the skin of someone's hand.) Despite the fact that the passage of time is a crucial part of the plot, a ticking clock to the time when each person is going to die, as foretold by those voice messages, the pacing is horrible. At least The Ring, for all its flaws, gave a sense of time. This doesn't. All of a sudden, it's Friday one week, and then it's Monday, then it's Friday of the next week.
There is not a single decent performance, which is shocking when one considers that it includes some legitimately talented actors, like Jason Beghe, Ray Wise, and Ariel Winter. Seriously, Ray Wise plays a guy who works for an exorcism TV show (who somehow heard about the killer phone calls; this may have been explained, but, honestly, I don't give a shit.) Ray Wise also played Leland Palmer, Laura Palmer's father from Twin Peaks, who was possessed by the spirit BOB and, under his influence, kills Laura, and sets off the plot. I would love to be able to make wisecracks about the parallels between the two, but I'm given so reason to give a shit about it that I just can't. Hell, in one scene, he tries to exorcise a cell phone on national televison, and the religious figures around him start coming to life, and even that's just so boring that I can't even smile at it. Or even my own little autistic version of a reflexive smile, anyway.
Even when the movie inserts abusive parents into the mix (and it turns out it's the ghost of an abused child doing the phone killing), it just does nothing, and that's usually a good way of getting me to at least feel something. Seriously, Margaret Cho's on-and-off attempt at a Southern accent feels like she's putting more effort into her performance than the rest of the cast combined. Christ, the new Black Mirror trailers just dropped and watching this killer technology movie just makes me dread having to deal with those. Sure, I've seen the trailers for all three episodes, and at least they feel like they're giving a shit from the minute's worth of each episode we've seen, but thinking about them with this horseshit on my mind is just going to make everything worse. I'm still going to do an Anglotopia article about them, but it'll be a lot less joyful than my previous attempts have been.
Also, is the killer ringtone "No Dogs Allowed?" From that one Peanuts movie?
Comparing the Universal Oneness of All Life to Yo Mama since 2010.
I was born with the gift of laughter and a sense the world is mad.
I was born with the gift of laughter and a sense the world is mad.