I took the bite on this one because the description was dropping horror names in a way that (foolishly) gave me hope. From the makers of Final Destination and two elder statesman of the genre: Lin Shaye and Tobin Bell. Forget that there’s as many bad Final Destinations as good and the actors aren’t always in the best of movies…. maybe there’s hope. But there isn’t… I think maybe I should have just hung up the phone.

The Call is about four teens who harass an old woman who they accuse of having murdered one of their sisters. She commits suicide and her husband calls the four teens in for a simple game. Pick up a phone, call a number, and stay on the line for one minute to win a lot of money.

It’s a legit intriguing setup… what will be on the call? Will this be a ghost story? Some kind of sick prank? A long con? Too bad the movie takes well over half its runtime just setting up the scenario in some rather dull and poorly paced scenes. And then it just gives us a generic horror show in for the remaining time. A boring, redundant, repetitive horror show with a bunch of generic scares (including yet another contortionist ghost). What’s on the other end of the phone? YOUR WORST NIGHTMARES! <insert spooky music here>. Too bad we don’t know each teen well enough to care about their inner demons and certainly too bad we probably don’t even like them to begin with.

Doesn’t help either that two of the teens’ backstory demons are irrelevant to what the movie is kind of/sort of about. Because one of their backstories seems to matter and, honestly, it was a pretty good reveal. Not good enough to save the movie… but maybe good enough for that extra half star.

But, yeah, once again we have a horror movie that’s 75% filler. This should have been a short film or, hey, maybe the writer should have found a different angle. But what they have here is just a bunch of setup leading to a bunch of generic “Scares”. Next.

Score: 63