Oh jolly! Here we have another over-hyped and unnecessary complex Asian horror "masterpiece" that actually isn't worth talking about AT ALL! "Phone" is overall tolerable, but Takashi Miike's "One Missed Call" was much better and none of them can even begin to compete with Ji-Woon Kim's "A Tale of Two Sisters", anyway. So why bother? You all know what will happen here: the most common attribute in the world namely a phone turns out to be a paranormal medium and it causes a cute little girl to behave very strangely. Exactly like the videotape in "Ringu" and the house in "Ju-On: The Grudge", this mobile appears to carry around a vicious curse and everybody who once used the phone number ending in 6644 died a rather nasty death. In all honesty, I have to admit that the final 20 minutes are really good and they sort of save the whole movie all together. The denouement makes sense, for a change, and it even manages to flush away the dreary first hour that was full of false scares and story twists that totally went nowhere. The directing is steady and the young girl who plays Yeong-Ju is genuinely creepy. She would form an adorably sinister couple with that little brat from "Ju-On" that kept appearing out of nowhere. Both lead actresses, on the other hand, are insufferable and I constantly mixed up the two. These Asian ghost stories may all very well be nifty and atmospheric, but they seriously lack balls. Call me a savage if you will, but I appreciate a healthy dose of blood and guts.
