'One Missed Call' dials wrong number

Here's proof positive that awards season is over. In "One Missed Call," French director Eric Vallette creates an American horror film based on a Japanese shocker. This ungainly hybrid's original premise is bizarre enough -- a cell phone service whose Friends & Family Plan includes death. But the final product is worse yet, a filmed version of the party game where a spoken message is passed from player to player until it's gobbledygook.

Shannyn Sossamon frowns and frets as a university student whose friends receive supernatural cell phone minutes before they croak, complete with a chiming ringtone of death. Ed Burns impersonates Luke Wilson minus the humor as cop investigating the case. The film gets off to a weird, promising start along the lines of Drew Barrymore's cameo in "Scream" as "Stomp the Yard's" Megan Good is killed by something nasty in a goldfish pond, which then adds insult to injury with a second attack too amusingly twisted to describe. The dead girl's phone becomes possessed, involving her contacts in a lethal game of phone tag.

Japanese horror movies can survive a ludicrous premise because their cultural expectations are different. They don't require every moment of a ghost story to make literal sense, so the premise of a death-dealing Nokia can be an excuse for oddball visual poetry. American audiences demand neat resolutions that resolve the nature of the threat and bottle it up again. In "One Missed Call" there's an unproductive tension between the two approaches that generates snickers instead of shrieks. Without explanation, chalk-white J-horror zombies ride the city bus, characters' bodies emit glowing tendrils of ectoplasm and hallucinate ooky centipedes, and a cadaver with phone in hand punches in a friend's number. Random!

The film makes a halfhearted pass at explaining these mysteries with detective work, but Burns' policeman is beyond clueless. He doesn't realize that, like the butler in a drawing-room mystery, the key to Japanese-inspired ghost stories is always a spooky little girl. He's a useless hero, powerless to protect the students, unable to order Sossamon away from creepy, corpse-strewn haunted hospitals, and inept at defending himself from occult assaults.

Sossamon gets closer to the ghost's origin through her flashbacks to laughably over-amped scenes of childhood trauma. At such moments the film reaches pinnacles of lunatic hilarity. I couldn't contain my laughter when Ray Wise ("Twin Peaks") arrives as a reality show producer who stages a live, televised cell phone exorcism and again when Burns, scowling with heroic determination, seizes the key to the mystery, a child's white teddy bear.

But my mirth was tinged with regret that Burns, once a celebrated indie director, has fallen so far. The deadliest call the cast and crew of "One Missed Call" ever received was the one from their agent telling them that this was the best work available.

Colin Covert • 612-673-7186