Chakushin ari
Tags: good versus evil, paranormal, cruelty, sadist, flashback

Plot synopsis:
The film begins with a young girl being rescued from a burning hospital. A firefighter asks her if her mother is still inside, to which she remains speechless.
Meanwhile, Shelley, a college student, sits outside near her koi pond in her Japanese-styled home and after having a chat over the phone with Leann, she hears her cat making strange noises. Shelley walks towards it but after a quick second, she finds it standing on the other side of the pond. Bewildered by the situation, she suddenly hears strange murmuring in the pond and out of nowhere, a hand emerges and drags Shelley into the pond, drowning her. A red candy then appears on the surface and the same hand proceeds to drag the cat and drowns it as well.
Many weeks later, college student Beth Raymond is talking with her friend, Leann, who attended Shelley's funeral. Leann's cellphone rings with a lullaby-like ringtone, and it says it's from Shelley. Leann listens to the voicemail, which is herself screaming. The voicemail is dated three days in the future. Leann begins to experience hallucinations that make her increasingly anxious. While walking home minutes before the time on the voicemail, she calls Beth. Beth runs to get Leann, but unfortunately, she arrives at the same time where Leann accidentally falls off from an overpass and lands on top of a speeding train, killing her. A red candy pops out of her mouth and Leann's hand dials an unknown number on her phone, despite being dead.
At Leann's funeral, Beth's roommate, Taylor, is talking about Shelley receiving a strange voicemail before her death, just like Leann had. Brian, Leann's ex-boyfriend, begins to see disturbing apparitions, and leaves the funeral in a rush. Beth catches Brian outside a coffee shop and Brian shows her a voicemail he received the night Leann died, from Leann's phone. Beth realizes the voicemail is dated mere seconds away. An explosion at a nearby construction site sends a rebar through Brian's torso. Similar to Leann, Brian coughs out a red hard candy and collapses, as Beth stares in horror.
When Beth arrives home, a distraught Taylor is waiting for her. Taylor says she knows she's next, even though she hasn't received a voicemail. Beth assures her that it isn't going to happen, and takes the batteries out of both their cellphones to ensure they can't receive calls. Later that night, Beth and Taylor are awakened by the lullaby ringtone coming from Taylor's battery-less cellphone. Despite having no power source, Taylor's phone screen displays a video message of her death, dated two days in the future.
The next morning, Andrews visits Beth, saying his sister was the one who called Shelley, despite his sister being dead at the time of the call. He also says he traced the voicemail left on his sister's phone and was going to find out more about the person who sent it, Marie Layton. Andrews goes through the local autopsy reports, and finds a report for Ellie Layton, Marie's eldest daughter, who died of an asthma attack. They find records for hospital visits for Ellie and Laurel, who is Ellie's younger sister. Laurel was injured often, which leads Beth to suspect abuse from her mother. As Taylor's time approaches, Beth races to her, and sees Taylor being choked to death by an unseen force. A red hard candy falls out of her mouth. Suddenly, Beth's phone begins to ring and she finds a voicemail dated for tomorrow. In an effort to save herself, Beth decides to find out more about the hospital fire alone.
At the hospital and with less than 30 minutes left, Beth is frightened by various apparitions. She runs into Andrews, and the two try to escape the hospital. They are later separated and Beth finds a crawlspace. She discovers Marie's body, burned to death and clutching a cell phone. At the time of Beth's foretold death, Marie's corpse assaults her while weeping. It is later revealed that Marie was actually protecting Beth, not trying to hurt her. Amazingly, Beth survives her predicted death.
While visiting Laurel, Andrews goes to her room and finds her teddy bear with a video disc in its back. The disc is a video of a camera Marie hid to monitor Laurel and Ellie. The disc reveals that Ellie had cut Laurel's arm with a butcher knife. Marie had entered and realized that the abuse she has been blamed for has been Ellie all along. She then left to take Laurel to the hospital, locking Ellie in the bedroom. Ellie suffers an asthma attack and dies while dialing her mother's cell, making Marie the first real victim of the curse as she died in the hospital fire after leaving the room. Laurel tells Andrews that though Ellie hurt her, she always gave her the red hard candies, the ones found in the mouths of all the victims. Andrews' cellphone begins to ring with a voicemail dated for thirty minutes later.
Andrews realizes that the force behind the murders is Ellie, and races to Beth. After he arrives at her house, the two hear a knock on the door. As Andrews looks through the peephole, a knife stabs through it and kills him. Ellie's spirit appears and reaches out to kill Beth. The spirit of Marie then appears and grabs Ellie, saving Beth yet again. A red candy spills out of Andrews' mouth and his cell begins to dial a number on its own, revealing that Ellie's ghost is still out there, and more people will die.

Review: However this factor does not deter Japanese creative production teams to come up with movie gems, in different genres.In the realm of Japanese horrors for example, a studio working with a limited budget has to resort to Jaws-style direction, in which you hardly see or visualise the ghosts/monsters.And it is through the movie's simplicity, or by not showing/explaining too much, that J-horrors have turned up the notch on the haunting and horror levels through movies such as Ring and Dark Water.
i read a lot of bad reviews about this fantastic movie, so i watched it without even expecting something good.Of course i was positively surprised,the actors are very good : very few American actress knows how to express pure terror on they're faces as well as a Japanese actress.Miike success in creating an intense and creepy mood that follows you all the way till the end credits.
it's another Japanese movie with a "grudge" (grudge: curse that happens when someone "most of the times a girl" dies in a tragic or horrible death,then the girl return from the dead to kill,usually grudges have long dark hair covering they're faces) but the ghost or grudge in "one missed call" is a lot more scary than Sadako in ringu or even the one in ju-on and there is a lot of murders going on from the beginning to the end.
Ju-ons (all of them except the part 2 of the one made only for video which sucked badly) are scary; the series break the silent rule of Japanese horrors, its director even say that he tried to go the opposite way Nakata and Kurosawa went, he will scare the audience by showing the ghosts and gore as much as possible.
Now it's time for the ever creative Miike who once scared the hell out of the audience, not by using ghosts, but using a sadistic but innocent-looking girl, to put some new blood into Japanese horrors.
As a big fan of J-horror and Miike, I was so looking forward to the film and that I was afraid my high expectation will kill it, but the result was beyond my expectation, I enjoyed this thrill ride so much I wish it would never end.
Miike has toned down his weird and over-the-top scenes to suit the taste of wider audiences, but this film is still full of creative and scary scenes (the scene at the TV station which I deem so good it's classic, and the scene at the hospital which is so weird and spooky that I wish it could last longer) with quite satisfying story and (many may argue) acceptable open ending.
Takashi shows he knows a lot about filming methods, and also gives us an overview of the Japanese craziness about mobile phones : I can assure you that you will never look again the same way at your phone after seeing such a movie.For the ones who have seen other Japanese horror movies, I would advise it as well, as you enjoy seeing again the same old tricks in a different context...and it works again !So if you have the chance to have this one in a nearby theater...just try it !!.
A high school student named Yumi Kamura finds with a group friends in a coffee bar,while her pal Yoko receives a cellular call with a rare tone which she had heard before.Into screen phone appears one missed call.The message is sent for her cellular and contains a horrible shout that sounds like her voice.Besides the call is from three days after.A time later young people receive the call are dead for terrible killing.A strange curse causes a criminal rampage among various adolescents.The picture gets suspense,horror,shocks,grisly terror and several eerie scenes.The film displays hair-rising and horrifying images with a bit of blood and graphical gore.Mysterious and sinister atmosphere is well made by the photographer Yamamamoto.
Takashi Mike(Ichi the killer) direction sometimes is actually creepy and frightening like proves the first entry ¨Dead or alive¨with the execution starring by a mobster and much more in ¨The audition¨.This horror film is inspired by ¨The ring¨with certain remembrance more even storyline coincidences.Like that and in fact happen in the most part of recently Japan horror cinema deals about an urban legend.It's the initial argument for introducing the terror in the ordinary life by means a phone.While the look is suitable spooky and eerie the plot spread to the breaking point and the final resolution results to be a little confused.The flick will like to Japan modern terror cinema enthusiastic..
They search the family together trying to save Natsumi from her fate."Chakushin Ari" is scary like most of the Asian horror movies, and has a promising beginning supported by a great acting and a good plot.
But not like this guy did it...It takes a lot to creep my out and Takashi Miike managed to do it pretty well in the final twenty minutes of this movie.
One Missed Call is also Know as Chakushin Ari is 2003 J-Horror movie made by Takashi Mike.This movie dose sound a lot like The Ringu but instead of Tape now, it Cell Phone and Instead of a Older DEAD Girl with Long Black Hair, This time, it a little Girl With Long Black Hair.Apart from that, most of this movie is total DifferentMay contain Spoiler ONE MISSED CALL features a series of victims who receive messages on their cell phones: the gimmick is that the calls come from their own cell phones - a day or two in the future - and the messages appear to have been recorded at the precise moment of a violent death.
The mother, who mysteriously disappeared, is eventually found, dead, and the malevolent ghost apparently put to rest - until a twist ending keeps the horror alive.This movies had some really good creepy moments , Awesome creepy Death Ring tone was great.talking about the Ring tone in Japan, had become rather popular and even I have it on my Phone in the UK.
This movie has a more than interesting and good premise and it also has a real promising beginning but as the movie and its story start to progress more the movie actually gets worse and starts to drag and become overlong.Japanese horror movies are well known and appreciated over the world now days, due to the global success of several genre pieces, with of course "Ringu" as the best example of this.
It's made in the same style as any other popular Japanese horror movie, which means that this movie will probably also disappoint most Takashi Miike lovers.Thing with this movie is that it has an alright story and main premise in its beginning but the more it all progresses the harder it gets to understand and the less interest you'll keep in this movie.
There were two moments in this film that made me shudder, both involving an unexpected hand, and after Oodishon (another Miike Takashi one, this one from 1999) had me tingling all over for hours after seeing it, and all of the films this steals from were actually scary, I can't see this film as anything other than a sell-out to the western popularity of the big Japanese horror films.
Though it has elements of this, the characteristics of J-Horror, which are very much rooted in standard social and spiritual taboos that many Japanese people take incredibly seriously, are used as window dressing here, intended to distract the audience from the more important and subtle ideas at work behind the surface of the narrative.It certainly isn't a pastiche or a spoof as some viewers have indicated, though you could argue that it works on a certain satirical level, with the odd hint of benign humour that we've come to expect from Miike woven throughout.
The streets are mostly empty, save for the presence of the adult media, the police (who have a complicated role within the film) and the students who are at the centre of the whole thing.Those claiming that this is a comedy seem uneducated when it comes to Miike and his work; looking for the vapid cartoon character and his torrents of gore and depraved sex, and not the finely nuanced filmmaker who gave us excellent, multi-layered works like Shinjuku Triad Society (1995), Rainy Dog (1997), The Bird People in China (1998), Audition (1999), Dead or Alive: Birds (2000) and Gozu (2003).
And that's what's horror movies are supposed to do, or am i wrong???The ringtone may be nice so, just download it.One advise for you who haven't seen it:-DO NOT WATCH THIS MOVIE -A COMPLETE WASTE OF TIMEIf i was the one who bought that movie (saw it with a friend) i would of wanted my money back, and the hour and a half i spent watching crap bullshit!But by all means, if u like being bored for an hour or a half expecting a good movie...
This starts a chain of odd deaths which causes our main character, Yumi (Kou Shibasaki) to investigate the source of the phone calls with the help of policeman Hiroshi (Shin'ichi Tsutsumi).Miike knows how to create suspense and he proves it here.
And if like me, you became mesmerized by the ring tone on this movie you can download directly to you cell phone from the following website.Follow this website: http://gallery.mobile9.com/f/10470/You can download the polyphonic ring tone by WAP.Other great movies from the same genre I've seen lately are "The Tale of Two Sisters", "Audition", "Kairo", "Ichi The Killer" and "Night Watch" (from Russia!).Keep watching this extraordinary horror movies and share your thoughts and ideas with everyone!.
Really the only thing that sort-of sets this film apart from being just another generic horror-flick are some wonderfully subversive little scenes that pop up now and again and a few big stand-out scares thanks to the skill of director Miike.
"One Missed Call" is a little overrated but still fairly enjoyable Asian ghost film.**SPOILERS**Following a friends death, Yumi Nakamura, (Kou Shibasaki) wanders about a strange story being told by her friends, about weird messages on their phones warning them of their future deaths.
The fact that the ghost is missing from these scenes is incredibly apparent, hardly anything scary or interesting happens and it basically seems to become more of a police-procedural drama more than anything else, which is not all that bad since the mystery is at least given some more weight to than most others, but when it takes longer than the amount of screen-time given to it to fully get the idea across in a completely non-confusing matter is when it runs into trouble.
I mean, stealing half your chops from Hypnosis is one thing, cause lots of people haven't seen Hypnosis; but really, OK, you start off thinking, "no, this can't be just Ring with cellphones, nobody would be that lazy"; but more and more things happen, and the movie manages to incorporate every single stupid horror cliché from the past 20-odd years of white-person cinema, and pretty much anything you can think of that you're sick of seeing in Asian horror as well, and yet - this is almost admirable in its forthright laziness - never at any point does One Missed Call really do anything to suggest that it's NOT just trying to be Ring with cellphones.(And isn't "Ring with cellphones", really, just about the dumbest idea for a movie ever?
I mean, that's like someone trying to make Psycho with a bathtub scene, isn't it?)Anyways, driving home, I realized that my initial judgment wasn't really the case anyway, as One Missed Call is also an insultingly lazy, sloppy, cynical pastiche of all the most overdone bits from horror videogames (not many of which are scary, and pretty much none of which are the least bit original anyway) and horror writing (I'm sure if you took every book with a predominantly black cover off the shelf of an airport bookstore, threw them in a blender, and tried to read the contents, they'd be either as good as or a little bit better than the script to One Missed Call).However - this is the embarrassing thing - it's still rather skillful at maintaining a palpable sense of dread.
Throughout most of the movie, I was torn between wanting things to just quit being useless already, groaning when long-haired Japanese women appeared in the corner of frame or musical stabs heralded disembodied hands popping out of nowhere to grab at the heroes (because, alright, shock and surprise me, but be aware that I, like most people, have already seen Carrie, for goodness' sake); and trying to think of the last time I'd been this unsettled and edge-of-set-being-on in a movie made by a white person.
I've seen "Ringu" and "Ju-on" (this movie supposedly followed those), and while "Ju-on" I felt was very boring also (not as boring as this film however), "Ringu" did have a very genuinely intensely scary moment at the end....In conclusion, if you're going to start watching Takashi Miike films, don't watch this one first.
But aside from this, there are other good moments of the kind of horror that made Audition the classic that it is, and an ending that puts a very bleak twist on the whole story (and a "it was you all along" kind of connotation that reeks of being lifted from other movies).It's nothing much of a great horror film though, because despite the possible interest in the more horrific side to the story, the one involving child abuse, is not given much clarity- save for a scene in a classroom- until the last twenty minutes of the movie, where lots of emotion spurred on from the actual cell phone ring tone comes out.
If you want to have a clearer picture of what to expect from One Missed Call, think of Juon: The Grudge mixed with the weirdness of Gozu, add a dash of Uzumaki (not a Miike film I know) and the pacing of Audition, and random spots of grotesque images and you have a basic idea of the tone the movie holds.
You'll ruin it for yourself and really, though the basic idea is comparable to many prior ghost films Miike manages to keep things original and retain his wicked sense of humor and bizarre style.One Missed Call is great.
A new horror film that tries to follow the trail of "The Ring" and Hideo Nakata, with a pretty similar plot (this time instead of VHS there're cellular phones), the same look, and a little bit more of gore.It is not totally awful, but it's not the revelation of the season either.
Before the ending and through most of the movie it is more like "Ringu" as we have people trying to find out and trying to stop the mysterious killings as the victims are apparently getting calls from themselves just as they die.
Acclaimed Japanese director Takashi Miike can't seem to get the wheels moving with this torpid thriller, an adaptation of Yasushi Akimoto's book concerning an evil old woman (and child abuser!) who is part of a new urban legend: if your cell-phone rings with a strange tone--and you see the message 'One Missed Call'--you will replay the message only to hear your own final words before your death.
At first, this seems derivative of other Japanese horror movies--especially the "bad mommy" films--but it has a nice dose of nastiness (although not as much gore and twistedness that most viewers are probably accustomed to from the director.) Miike also puts in a few interesting and unpredictable twists that make this one stand apart from its contemporaries.
Since people that are reading this have read the other posts, i won't go on the "it's an Japanese horror movie so it have an grudge " and " it's not then an copy " point.This movie is pretty different and amusing cause it built psychological issues for the characters, including who kills, this give more consistency to it's story and makes it real.The story have an real nice development, and so goes on till the last minutes were it gets screwed.My only advice is "stop watching when there's 5 minutes to the end", but it's still an great movie.
Miike exploits this modern fear to the limit in the greatest horror scene since the one in the shower, or 9-11 itself -- I'm talking about the very public death of Natsumi Konishi.The second half of the movie tracks the heroine as she tries to locate the source of the malevolent phone calls who are picking off her friends left and right, hoping to escape the same fate.
That's really the downfall of this (and most Asian horror movies) is that if it doesn't deliver the scares then it's just not that good.As far as directing, Takashi Miike still did a pretty good job.
More Asian horror films need to be more like Audition and A Tale of Two Sisters, two movies that if they don't frighten or scare you, at least they have great stories, acting, direction, cinematography, and much more to back them up.
Then Yumi's best friend Natsumi Yamashita (Shin'ichi Tsutsumi) receives a call, determined not to let her friend die or even become the next victim Yumi sets out to find the truth behind the killings & stop it...More commonly known under the title One Missed Call to English speaking audiences this Japanese production was directed by Takashi Miike & for me is another rubbishy Asian ghost story, to be brutally honest it's a straight rip-off of Ringu (1998) only difference being instead of a mysterious video tape Chakushin Ari revolves around mobile phones.
Like the scene I've mentioned earlier, it is NOT a very big deal in the movie, that scene is a totally non-sense and has NO connection on the film.One missed call fails only on originality, but it is a very good psychological shocker freshly made by Splatter Horror king, Takashi Miike....and the ring tone is SO very creepy...6/10.