January16

BMN: One Missed Call

“We see bad movies so that we can truly appreciate the good ones.”
– Someone who (obviously) thinks we’re doing a service.

It’s a rare occurrence that Hollywood would write, film, and release a film that garners zero positive reviews. It’s a more rare occasion when the BMN crew can’t go confirm such absurd claims. Last night was when both of those rare moons were aligned and we found ourselves heading to the theaters to see “One Missed Call.”

It had been a while since our last movie rated at the lowly 0%, but we were well prepared. Or, we were willing, that’s about as prepared as you can get. The film still sits at a lowly goose-egg on RT, and I’m fairly certain that none of us would give it a positive review. The thing about OMC is that it could’ve been a fun movie, but something, err, a lot of things, were missing.

I overheard the following story on some movie blog, it succinctly describes why this movie was so horrible...

The other night, Andrew Klavan, the writer of the screenplay was out at a bar and ran into Yasushi Akimoto. They struck up a conversation and upon discovering that Akimoto was a Japanese horror writer, Klavan mistakenly thought he was talking to Koji Suzuki of “The Ring” and “The Grudge” fame.

This is where the story gets a little shady. Klavan knew the writers strike was coming up quickly and thought that this was a quick way to turn a screenplay around quickly, get it filmed and earn a fat paycheck before he was picketing. After a few cosmos, Klavan asked if Akimoto had any new work as of late. Akimoto told him about his greatest work ever, a series of novels that was centered around people receiving voice-mails from themselves at the time of their death. Klavan thought he had hit the jackpot. Then Akimoto dropped the bombshell on him, the novels had been made into movies overseas!

More cosmos were ordered and Klavan proceeded to get Akimoto wasted. The following was transcribed from several cocktail napkins that Klavan used to pitch the movie idea the following morning:

Chick on phone at beginning. Cat runs away. Chick gets voicemail. Both get pulled into pond. Death. Probably spooky. Fire in a building, kid smashes face into window, looks like it’s trying to be silly. Main chick won’t look into peep hole of door. More voicemails, everyone’s a friend. Death. Die. Killed. Fiery kid in hoodie. Gobstoppers in eating. Detective. Ed Burns!!! Eddie rules. Freaky dad fom Twin Peeks. Cigareete burns on arm, poor girrl. Momm issues. Baby on phone. FREAKYYY corpse crawls in thunrder rainstorm. Can’t break phone, c keeps calls calling you. Seances and exorsisms on tvl. Kid killer in celll phone. IN CEL PHONE1

That’s what was pitched to Warner Bros. And they went with it.

I will say that I don’t think the movie was a zero. It wasn’t a good movie, but it wasn’t a zero. There were just a lot of loose ends that were evidently lost in translation. Nik said he hoped they shot that digitally, otherwise it was a waste of film. And here’s Scoot’s description of the movie:

People get voice mail from the future that plays the sound of them dying. Then, later, they die. (Think "Final Destination" mated with "The Ring", then the offspring mated with "Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure", then that offspring ate a DVD of "Scream" and then took a shit.)

Yeah, that’s about right.

+ original post date: January 16, 2008 07:48 AM
+ categories: Bad Movie Night