input: Young and attractive Japanese people are getting on the wrong side of some curse again, this time it involves mobile phones. Various people die until the disgruntled spirit behind it all is unearthed, so essentially if you've seen more than 2 recent Japanese horror films you can plot this film in the dark with your hands tied.

The main attraction here is the fact that Takashi Miike is behind the camera. So far I've been more impressed with his low key works like City of Lost Souls, however as One Missed Call plodded along I was yearning for his more renowned envelope pushing of Dead or Alive or the overly pseudo-Cronenberg style of Audition. Despite a lot of his films being essentially empty, at least they do have merits such as these, or at least something to keep your attention like Tadanobu Asano prancing about in shiny suits impersonating Johnny Depp. There's none of that in One Missed Call; there's just very little of credit: the acting is bland and average, there is very little (nothing, in all honesty) in the way of scares or suspense, and in places it's just downright boring.

However, there are moments where Miike's glacier-like sense of humour seeps through the bland commercialism; most notably with the instance of the TV show intent on filming the demise of one of the cursed subjects, and the TV programmer more concerned about his ratings than the girls' life. But aside from this there is nothing to suggest it is Miike behind the camera; most notably his usual visual flair has vanished without a trace (and that includes his famous gore), although it's more likely he just didn't have any enthusiasm for the project, and I can understand why. One Missed Call isn't offensively bad. It's just frustratingly average.

Miike obviously loves directing. With his huge yearly output it's obvious he isn't going to be 100% concerned about all his projects. But even with this in mind, One Missed Call felt like he was just paying the bills.

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pos/neg ans: negative

input: We now travel to a parallel universe where the appearance of giant prehistoric monsters flattening cities are part of the daily routine. It's the world of Godzilla, Rodan, Mothra Ghidrah and their kind - a strange world, and one made even stranger by the appearance of an unidentified flying turtle called Gamera.

Forever in the shadow of the monolithic Toho Studios, second rung Daiei Studios were more famous for samurai sagas than monster movies. In the mid 60s they decided to join the giant reptile race and designed a rival monster series to Toho's mammothly successful Godzilla. They wisely chose Gamera as their flagship - a giant turtle that shoots flames from between its snaggle-teeth, and spins through the air by shooting flames through its shell's feet-holes (and at one point you almost see the paper mache shell catch fire!).

The first Gamera film "Gamera The Invincible" (as it was sold to the US) is a virtual mirror of the first Godzilla film, only 10 years behind. American fighters chase an unmarked plane over the Arctic to its fiery demise - the nuclear bomb on board ignites and awakens the giant Gamera from its icy slumber. Feeding off atomic energy, it immediately goes on a rampage, and the world wants to destroy Gamera once and for all, but a little Japanese boy named Kenny, who has a psychic connection with the giant turtle and even keeps a miniature version in an aquarium by his bedside, believes Gamera is essentially kind and benevolent. He's like a little Jewish kid with a pinup of Hitler. "Gamera is a GOOD turtle," he pleads, then sulks, and puts on a face like someone's pooped in his coco pops. Miraculously the world's leaders listen to him, and so begins Z-Plan to save the world AND Gamera from complete destruction.

Released in 1965, Gamera was a surprising hit. The annoying infantile anthropomorphism actually worked on kiddie audiences in both Japan and the US, and the sight of Gamera on two feet stomping miniatures of Tokyo and the North Pole is gloriously chintzy. Most surprising of all is the longevity of the series: eight original Gamera films, plus a slew of recent remakes. Not bad for a mutant reptile whose only friend is mewing eight year old milquetoast - and if I hear "Gamera is friends to ALL children" one more time I'M going to crush Tokyo. Which appears to be an easy task in the parallel universe where children are smart and turtles are bigger than a Seiko billboard in the 1965 turtle-fest Gamera.

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pos/neg ans: negative

input: What Is It? is a mish-mash of bizarre recurring motifs (snails, Shirley Temple, swastikas, and overtly racist music, among others) unfettered by any sort of narrative or plot or character development. The whole thing struck me as self-consciously "freak show," and I don't mean only the unusual casting decisions. It has the feel of a bad acid trip, far beyond any level of drug use one might attribute to Hunter S. Thompson or William S. Burroughs. The only movie to which I can compare it is Eraserhead (my second-least-favorite film of all time), which was by intent much more depressing, but I still found What Is It? a total waste of my time. It's one thing to give me a peek into the inner workings of someone else's mind -- even someone else's chemically altered consciousness -- but quite another to just throw weird visuals at me purely for the sake of weirdness.

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pos/neg ans:
negative