End Call is about a group of teenage girls who manage to get the phone number of the Devil. According to the urban legend, if you call He'll grant your wishes, but your life will be shortened by the length of the call. So just hang up! But the Devil is tricky, and stays on the line, racking up the charges on your phone bill up to $15,000.00! So you may get your wish, but you'll have to pay for it. And also, since it's the Devil, rather than shorten your life by a few minutes he just makes you miserable and then kills you.
It's a rather far-fetched premise, but I think even the most outlandish concept can work if it's treated with either (1) respect and intelligence, or (2) humor and wit. Or if you just mask the craziness with a lot of crazy style/eye-popping visuals/etc. Unfortunately, End Call doesn't have any of those traits. The Devil isn't really a character here (I was hoping for a guy painted red sitting at a switchboard), just a shadowy, voiceless presence on the other end of the phone line. There are also a few other issues here. (1) It's a Japanese horror film, so it's possible that some things are lost in translation, and (2) it's about a group of teenage girls, so it skews younger anyways. It's got an awfully 'soapy' vibe for a horror film.
But other than me not being in the target demographic, it's just kind of confusing. The structure is really quite odd, in that it jumps around in time a lot (informing you via subtitle - '2 months ago,' '1 week earlier,' or sometimes just a date). It's hard to get situated in time - you keep asking yourself "did this thing happen yet?" You can kind of figure it out based on context, but even that is a little tough at times, as unseen characters are referred to by either first or last names. Regardless, it takes more effort to track that it should.
Also, the kids seem way more concerned with finding which of their friends called the number first, rather than asking "what the hell is this number anyways?" There's no incentive given for tracking down the initial caller, so I thought their time would have been better spent elsewhere. And the $15,000 phone bill was a bit of a stretch. I would assume you could contest that somehow? Although one girl does become a call girl in order to pay it off. (I think?) So maybe if you keep paying your bill, the Devil doesn't kill you? I guess we've all suspected that the Devil and [insert your cellular provider here] have been in cahoots for some time...
Anyways, the disjointed structure stops the film from getting any real momentum. Rather than seeing these high-schoolers slowly descend into madness, you get little bits and pieces of them going off the deep end. It makes them seem more "moody" than possessed. And again, that might work with the YA demographic, but I wasn't buying it.
There are a couple of decent death scenes that don't fit in with the YA vibe though. I'll spoil them here. SPOILERS! In one, a girl who has recently called the Devil has wished to be rid of her asshole drunk of a father. She wakes up in the morning, and sees him brushing his teeth - hard. Then she realizes his toothbrush is still in the holder - he's actually using a razor! Gross! Lots and lots of mouthblood ensues. In the other, one of the girls decides to off herself by wandering into a batting cage and just letting herself get pummeled with fastballs. You see it from security footage, so it isn't graphic. But it's still a brutal concept that is well executed. You'll still wince, you know? And while those are both cool, they still don't make a lot of sense in the grand scheme of things. Are the girls possessed? Can the Devil just possess anyone? If so, why even mess around with the phone business?
The acting isn't too bad - I dug the main group of three girls, but their characters aren't really clearly defined in any way. They are all concerned about doing well in school, all concerned about getting a boyfriend, all creeped out by the skeezy teacher (he *is* sketchy), and all get morose at one point or another. You don't get much of a look into anything that makes any one of them an individual, so they just kind of make a boring whole. The two boyfriends are pretty aggravating though - one in particular just overreacts all of the time. And again, who knows what their motivations are... they fight at one point, but you can't really get into it because you don't know what is at stake. I was all:
As far as direction and cinematography goes, it's a serviceable film. I always kind of hope for some crazy effects/stylistic flourishes in my Japanese horror, but things are played pretty straight here. There are a couple of exceptions - there is a little found-footagey feel to the security footage you see periodically - but nothing super noteworthy.
Also, the film seems to want to say something about technology (as a lot of J-Horror is wont to do), but the phone angle is pretty weak. There is the presence of an "international website" called UTubes, but people just pretty much post videos of murders there. Which is maybe misunderstanding the appeal of YouTube.
Overall, I can't find much to get excited about with End Call. It's needlessly confusing, or maybe just stupid - sometimes I have trouble telling the difference. While there are a couple of fun death scenes, they happen early on, and the rest of the film is kind of a slog.
I would not recommend this film.
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