Messages Deleted

Joel Brandt (Matthew Lillard) is an efficient screen writing professor in the university but has never succeeded as a screenwriter. When Brandt receives a weird phone call asking for help, he believes that it is a prank of his best friend Adam Brickles (Michael Eklund) and he deletes the message. When he is having a conversation with his girlfriend Claire (Chiara Zanni) on the sidewalk of a bar, the body of the caller falls off a building in front of them on the sidewalk. Brandt tells to the Detective Lavery (Deborah Kara Unger) and Detective Breedlove (Serge Houde) that are in charge of the investigation about the call that he had received and he becomes a suspect.

When he receives another mysterious call from a woman also calling for help in his answering machine, he goes to the location and finds that she is dead. Brandt becomes the prime-suspect of Detectives Lavery and Breedlove when they find that the message was deleted from his answering machine. When Brandt discovers that the killer is following the only screenplay that he had sold to the cinema industry, "Senseless Killing", he tries to guess the next move of the serial-killer.

"Messages Deleted" is a senseless, annoying and absurd thriller about a screenwriter that is informed about murders that are following a screenplay that he had written stolen the idea from another screenplay.

Joel Brandt is irritating, hysterical, clumsy and imbecile, and takes all the possible wrong attitudes along the story. The plot is based on deleted messages in times when it is possible to have traceability of phone calls, technical means to retrieve a deleted message and surveillance (bugging) a phone number. The stupid open conclusion is never clear but the worst is the use of the word "cliché" along the story. The writer had the intention of making a cult-movie but unfortunately he has totally failed. My vote is one (awful).

Title (Brazil): "Mensagens Deletadas" ("Deleted Messages")

Here we have a movie written by Larry Cohen, a man obsessed with phones. This movie is a true B list movie. It is a cliché thriller which likes to point out and almost humiliate itself for being a cliché thriller. Matthew Lillads acting in the movie was very well done in comparison with how the movie represented itself. The movie showed no signs of severe bad directed,writing, or acting but also did not show signs of it being phenomenal either which is why I gave it a 5/10. The events that confused the "Protagonist" and twisted the view of who was the killer was quite creative and I give props to Larry on that. Other than that you will get your usual thrilleresque type storyline with a suspenseful feeling of "who did it"I would recommend this movie if you are a thriller fanatic or you need a nice background to waste some time.

I thought that MESSAGES DELETED was a very poor thriller. It's a Canadian film that looks and feels like a television movie, so stilted is the dialogue and watered-down are the thrills. The director, Rob Cowan, only ever shot this one film and for the rest of his career has worked as a producer, so I guess this was a case of him dipping his toes into the water and finding it too cold.

I've always liked Matthew Lillard as an actor - I remember him back in SERIAL MOM - but he can do little with his underwritten character here. Deborah Kara Unger (THE GAME) is on hand as a cop investigating a rather preposterous case, but she's a bore as well; this is a film where it feels like everybody left their talent at the door before the shoot.

It's doubly disappointing as the script was written by Larry Cohen, who once had a fine career as a director of quirky, low budget horror pictures like IT'S ALIVE. More recently Cohen has enjoyed some success with his scripts for PHONE BOOTH (which was great) and CELLULAR (which wasn't), but MESSAGES DELETED is bottom of the barrel stuff for him.

7/10.

I thought it would be a boring movie, but to my surprise it was very tense and exciting and not at all predictable.

It's good, recommended. Look.

Good to see Lillard in a horror movie again, shame it's this one. By no means a terrible movie, it's not great either. It starts with enough promise that you keep watching, hoping it will keep it up.

Unfortunately, it doesn't. It gets sillier and sillier until the easily foreseeable ending. As the title says, it suffers from the 'spiraling into mediocrity' syndrome, something many movies today seem to have. A writer had an interesting opener and premise, but had NO idea how to conclude it on the same level.

I'd give it a 6, but only because i'm a fan of low budget thrillers/horror movies. If you're not into the genre, you'd probably be better off skipping this one...