The biggest Japanese horror hit of 2004 was Miike Takashi’s One Missed Call, which grossed nearly $15 million in Japan alone. Instead of videotape - that oh-so-eighties technology that powered The Ring - the transmitter of ghostly grudges was the new-millennial cell phone.
One Missed Call 2 continues the haunted cell saga, albeit with a new director, TV veteran Tsukamoto Renpei, and a mostly new cast, headed by TV drama star Mimura. The only really new twist are the Taiwan locations where much of the action unfolds. Otherwise the script by Daira Minako, who also co-wrote One Missed Call, follows the narrative tracks laid down by previous spooks-in-the-circuits films, including a back story, set in the misty past, to explain the present-day goings-on. In directing this material, Tsukamoto makes little pretense to Miike-esque originality. Instead he serves up what he and his producers think their teen-aged audience mostly wants: big shocks and plenty of them.
Tsukamoto, however, delivers with a force that compels attention and a persistence that gets under the skin. Also, he is neither slumming nor clowning. Instead he creates the illusion of conviction that gives Japanese horror so much of its power. Tell yourself it’s nonsense all you want - but after walking out of the theater you won’t be in the mood for cherry candy balls.
Tsukamoto makes good use of his Taiwan locations (several of which are actually the northern Japan town of Yubari), including a creepy abandoned mine where and a rusty-looking electrical grid. Some of his effects verge on the absurd, but he keeps them coming, with a nightmarish implacability.
He gets able assistance from lead Mimura, whose smile lines turn into an uncanny round rictus when she screams, which is often. Also, the cell phones are all the latest models, with big screens and streaming video that make the looming ghosts and panicking victims all the more scary.
Why not, I wondered as I watched, with my own cell in my pocket, ditch the damned things? But that, to the film’s characters, is unthinkable. Better off horrifically dead than without a cell! In that respect, as in others, One Missed Call 2 is a movie for our times.