And Another

After mentioning (yesterday’s post) Eric Valette’s Maléfique being his ticket to The Show, I considered checking it out on DVD, but there’s no U.S. release yet. Presumably this will be remedied when the remake comes along in 2009.

By then, it probably won’t resemble itself too much. I can see some changes to the premise – four criminals locked in a cell find a book of black magic and use it to escape? Sounds a little direct-to-video for a U.S. release. In any case, it’ll start with a title change. Maléfique sure doesn’t work, and neither does the English translation “malefic,” a direct-to-video title if I’ve ever heard one. Come to think of it, there was a Steve Sessions direct-to-video horror flick called Malefic, dated 2003 to Maléfique’s 2002. It’s about – hmm – four criminals in a cabin who find a ouija board.

The 2009 release is in early stages, with a script by John Pogue, whose was writing the universally respected Rollerball remake when Valette was making Maléfique. No director or cast, though T.I. – sorry, I guess that’s “Tip Harris” since American Gangster – is rumored to star. One can only hope!

I didn’t bother with the poster for the new Eye remake on the last post, because it’s dull. Might as well throw it at the bottom of this entry, if only to put it eye-to-eye with another creepy ocular one-sheet, for the upcoming remake of One Missed Call.

The original (Chakushin Ari) is a fairly straight-ahead entry from Takashi Miike, both in comparison to his wild directorial ways and in terms of its place within the genre. 2003 is a little late to be relevant in the category of Japanese ghost thrillers, and especially the subset of these dealing with Japan’s technophobia. Anyone who’s been on a Japanese train (and probably those who haven’t) might have told you that a cell-phone-based horror film was only a matter of time, but after such flagship subgenre entries as The Ring (Ringu) and Pulse (Kairo), One Missed Call adds little but a particular technological specificity. Even that touch is too little, too late – Ahn Byeong-ki beat Miike to the punch with his own haunted-cell flick, 2002’s Phone.

Lateness to the party notwithstanding, One Missed Call did pretty fair business, spawning a ten-episode television show, two sequels (One Missed Call 2 and One Missed Call: Final [more series should name an entry 'Final,' though I guess it didn't work for The Final Chapter, The Final Nightmare, etc. – maybe we can get Final Destination: The Final Destination?]), and a minor craze for the melodic little ringtone bearing bad news. Even today, the IMDb board has numerous threads asking for or supplying the tone; I count eight distinct threads posted in 2007 alone.

Is it too late to invest in whatever company’s supplying the ringtone for the U.S. version? On second thought, perhaps it’s not wise to expect a particularly high demand – we can expect One Missed Call (in Australia, revealingly titled Don’t Pick Up the Cell Phone!) to debut to some tepid reviews and box office in early January. The new version stars Ed Burns, Shannyn Sossamon, and Azura Skye. Margaret Cho is cast as “Detective,” so we’ll see how that goes.

Director is Eric Valette, another name to add to last week’s post about French directors imported to make U.S. projects after a single feature film – in Valette’s case, the 2002 thriller Maléfique. Once again, his on-the-job training is a horror remake. Sorry about the inauspicious introduction, M. Valette; hopefully your next project will have a little more to offer you.

Even if it turns out to be an adaptation of a 1990s video game series called Clock Tower.