ONE MISSED CALL TRILOGY
The Ring of Terror
One Missed Call always felt a little late to the party. Arriving five years after Ring’s release, this tale of a ghostly curse transmitted via creepy phone calls couldn’t help but feel like a pale imitator of Kôji Suzuki’s masterpiece. Still, the saga of the ghostly Mimiko was a hit, and its two sequels add up to a strange and fitfully frightening trilogy.
In the first film young people are picked off one-by-one, while Yumi (Ko Shibasaki) and detective Hiroshi (Shinichi Tsutsumi) struggle to piece together the truth. In each case, the death is prefigured by a spooky ringtone, a hook that the local media tries to exploit in the film’s best scene. For all its clichés, it’s a stylish and visceral film, elevated by Takashi Miike’s aggressive direction.
The sequels are far less effective. One Missed Call 2 (2005), directed by Renpei Tsukamoto, is especially odd. It starts well enough, moving the story on and setting up an authentically creepy new mystery. By the end, however, it has quite literally lost the plot, rewriting much of the original film’s mythology, introducing an oddly redundant second spook, and progressing the plot via a string of coincidences. It’s a mess. Manabu Aso’s One Missed Call: Final (2006) – making its UK debut here – streamlines things and is undoubtedly the better for it. Mimiko is, once again, the focus, but it continues to tinkers with the series’ lore – at this point less a coherent backstory and more a series of events that may or may not have happened. Fun, but far from essential, the real curse of this hodgepodge trilogy is that damned ringtone – it’ll be lodged in your head for days. Extras The first film gets a disc to itself, packed with archive material. There are cast and crew interviews, a 20-minute chat with Miike and footage from some of the film’s screenings. An hour-long Making Of and an interesting commentary by J-horror expert
Tom Mes detail the film’s origins and its place in Miike’s wider filmography. There’s also raw footage from its fictional TV show, and some disturbing faux-CCTV footage. A baffling alternate ending caps the disc.
The sequels are also well-served. Both films have accompanying shorts: “Gomu” is a slightly pointless extra scene, tangential to the second film, while “The Love Story” is 12 minutes long, every one of them dull. Both features get archive Making Ofs, and One Missed Call 2 has 10 minutes of deleted scenes. You also get “Candid Mimiko!” – a location tour following the series’ villain through Japan – and a music video for “A Prayer For Love” by Aki. Plus: trailers, TV spots. Will Salmon
A strange and fitfully frightening trilogy