According to Scientific American Mind, close to 10% of men and women in America are taking drugs to combat depression.

 

Holy shit!

 

That is a lot of Depressed Americans.... or is it? Dun dun dun.

The article is titled The Medicated Americans, and it's a pretty good read.  What really got to me were two contrasting pictures.  The first one is of some girl at a party looking bored at some party with the caption reading "Diagnosis confusion: if she were actually experiencing severe depression, she couldn't have summoned the energy to get to the party."  That's right!  Stop faking for your Tofranil fix, you junkie. 

 

The second picture is another girl balled up in bed, with the caption reading "A clinically depressed person may not be able to drag herself out of bed."  Sounds more like clinical laziness!  I kid, I kid.

 

A few interesting facts about the medicated American:

 

Twice as many psychiatric drugs are prescribed for women than men

Most likely a psychiatrist did not prescribe her antidepressants: family doctors now prescribe such medications

The rate of prescription is growing, while the rate of psychotherapy visits are decreasing

 

The article then goes to draw a very distinct line between common depression (described as being bummed out or 'in the dumps.'  haha) and clinical Depression, with a motherfuckin capital D for emphasis.  This shit is frealz!

 

"A true diagnosis of major depression involves some combination of most of the following:  inability to feel pleasure of any kind whatsoever, loss of interest in everything, extreme self-hatred or guilt, inability to concentrate or to do the simplest things, sleeping all the time or not being able to sleep at all, dramatic weight gain or loss, and wanting to kill yourself or actually trying to kill yourself."

 

 

 

This movie was a balls off the walls laugh-fest.  Western horror film makers seem to think that the more scares they can fit in a 120minute time frame, the better the horror movie.  This is the same idea as a strawberry cake maker who makes a strawberry cake completely out of strawberries.

 

Lacking all the necessary devices that make a movie good (or believable), Eric Valette's One Missed Call gets two floppy thumbs down.

 

Why is it that Americans are so bad at remaking Japanese horror movies?  Are the producers and writers actually thinking to themselves "needs more cheap scares" when watching the original movies, or is the boogeyman-around-the-corner their own simpleminded contribution to someone else's story?

Asian horror is deeply tied in to asian folklore, which is why when you watch a Chinese horror movie, someone tapping a pair of chopsticks on an empty bowl at an intersection means a lot more to a Chinese audience than an American audience.  Same goes with haunted objects (cell phones, video tapes) which is connected to Japanese Shintoism.  Asian horror films tend to pace a bit slower as well, with the plot revolving around solving a puzzle rather than escaping the boogyman.  The terror in The Ring wasn't the white haired girl crawling through the television, it was the anticipation of coming death, and the mystery behind a seemingly normal object.  Takashi Miike's original One Missed Call, though peppered with the cheap scare, still created the feeling that evil and supernatural elements can be found anywhere at anytime, whether it's the curse of a video, or a voicemail from the future.  It's drawing from all these factors that have made the Asian Horror circuit respected around the world.

 

This isn't to say that the American Horror genre is a shallow.  The cult classics of American Horror relied heavily on it's own rich history and background.  Rosemary's Baby, The Omen, and The Exorcist used religious themes to create a supernatural environment, one that was believable and terror-inducing.  The Halloween franchise is responsible for other slasher type movies such as Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer, and draws heavily from the American serial killer motif.  The Blair Witch Project combined the believability of a documentary with the realism of a handheld recording to create a new genre of American horror.

 

Despite all this, One Missed Call lacked pacing, decent acting, or a coherent plot, while completely ignoring the Original's resolution.  It was an hour and a half of "I'm going to die tomorrow...*one day later*.. OMG I DIED."