The American remake of “One Missed Call” is sometimes credited with ending the short-lived trend of American remakes of Japanese horror movies. The original “One Missed Call” felt way too similar to “Ringu” and “Ju-On: The Grudge” to be interesting but it did at least have a few creepy moments. The American remake is just unsatisfying with horrible special effects.

Just like the original “One Missed Call”, we find that people are receiving voicemail from themselves in the future at the moment they die. Each time somebody dies, a contact in their phone receives a voicemail. Can this terrible cycle be broken? It’s a race against time as death will soon come to those that have received the voicemail.

The characters are really boring. None of them are remotely remarkable. The only good thing is that they are not always complete idiots. They do at least try to do things like take the batteries out of their phones in the hope that it will stop the voicemail from being left on their device. I complained that the original version just had another pale lady with dark hair like several other Japanese horror movies but the ghost in this one just looks awful.

Even fans of the American remakes of Japanese horror flicks tend to find this one the weakest and maybe the big problem is that the original is not all that great either. There’s a formula to these movies and it just feels like it had been used too many times. It also does not help that the special effects here look really cheap and nasty. It becomes hard to find any of the visuals disturbing because everything looks so synthetic. There are countless worse horror films out there but I certainly do not recommend the American “One Missed Call”. If you are going to see one version of this then see the Japanese one.