Saturday, June 23, 2012

ONE MISSED CALL (2003)

A young woman receives a mysterious voicemail from herself two days in the future. Two days later (at the exact moment of the voicemail timestamp) she finds herself unexpectedly saying the same shit she said on the voicemail...right before getting tossed in front of a train by a ghost. So now, one-by-one all of the people on her quick dial start getting phone calls and then dying in boring ways two days later. Yawn.

As you can probably tell by now I'm not really the biggest fan of ghost movies, mainly because I don't finds ghosts scary, but at the same time, I kinda like ghost horror movies because of the variety of the stories and there's really no set rules. So with that in mind, I was very excited to watch a ghost movie directed by the great Takashi Miike especially the Takashi Miike from 2003 because that's the same year me made GOZU which might be Miike's finest moment.. Well, I think he probably blew his creative wad on GOZU, because ONE MISSED CALL is lame as fook! The ghost isn't scary and the movie depends too much on jump scenes.  Also, the story is so confusing.  I pretty much tuned out after Kazue Fukiishi died. She was, by far, the most talented actress in the movie, so I'm not sure why she wasn't the main character.

Another thing that irritated me is after Kazue was violently mutilated and beheaded by the ghost on live television(!!!),  the ghost calls the next girl (still on live television!!!) and she just walks off! Something like that would have been the biggest news story since the moon landing and yet this woman is allowed to wanted off and start exploring an old abandoned hospital by herself?! That's even more unrealistic than the idea of the ghost haunting a phone because you know there would be a hundred television crews following her day and night for the next 48 hours.

Not worth watch. Interesting idea, but the story is too confusing and the payoff nonexistent. Skip it.

Part 2 - One Missed Call 2 (2005)
Part 3 - One Missed Call 3: Final (2006)
Remake - One Missed Call (2008)

Crew members hand visible.

THE ABOMINATION (1988)

[Update 08/25/2022: Need rewatch this film and redo this review completely. I also 100% thought that I had posted better scans of my VHS tape. I need to fix that also.

Update 10/09/2023: Blu Ray came out. Going to leave my old crappy screenshots for now just because I love how gritty they look, but I did add some scans of the blu ray cover and insert.]

This movie is awesome!!!

THE ABOMINATION starts out with a strange as hell 3-minute dream sequence that gives away all of the gore scenes (some of them multiple times). Eventually the dreamer, Cody, wakes up and, I'm not bullshitting, then the entire movie appears to be dubbed over. I don't know what the hell was going on, but the audio didn't perfectly match what was happening onscreen but for whatever reason I loved it. There was even footsteps for when people walked around! Hahaha! I haven't laughed so hard since I first watched my bootleg double audio version of EBOLA SYNDROME!

So anyway, Cody lives in some rundown ass house but yet his voice is talking offscreen with a doctor. He's telling him about how one day he came home late from work and his mom, as usual, was watching her favorite TV preacher, Brother Fogg, on TV. They talk for a bit, then he leaves and afterwards she barfs up a nasty tumor. Later that evening, the tumor crawls into Cody's mouth as he's sleeping and possesses him. This Abomination is now in control and it causing him to kill and kill again!!!  It's awesome.

The rest of the movie is just Cody going around killing people and doing wacky shit. I'm not going to give it all away, but goddamn it I laughed so hard I thought I was going to soil myself. From a filmmaking perspective there's hundreds of things wrong with this movie, but yet they're all so perfectly wrong in just right ways! This film, in my opinion, is a goldmine. It's even better than THE NAIL GUN MASSACRE! That's right. You heard me. THE ABOMINATION is a masterpiece of zero-budget shitty horror movies. Any worthless hack can make a terrible movie (PARASITIC I'm thinking about you motherfucker!), but all the stars have to align just right to make something so unique and perfectly horrible as THE ABOMINATION. It's truly one of a kind.

But should you watch it or go through the trouble of locating a copy? Probably not. I would imagine that 99% of the people in the world would absolutely hate THE ABOMINATION, but if you're one of the lucky few that can appreciate it for what it is then yes by all means watch it. You'll be smiling for days.