La Mort au bout du fil

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...

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.

A movie that starts off with a mockery of clichés and then goes on to show that it contains each one of them. There is blood, there is a workaholic cop, a struggling professional in a dysfunctional relationship who realizes he cares for his girl in the moment of crisis, the prodigal protégé' and a "twist" that could be spotted from the moon. I had narrowed down on the eventual villain 20 mins into the movie, and so will you.

Performances are forgettable, a very lame and unconvincing attempt by the actors to show sexual tension between their respective characters, and its as if death, even of your loved ones, can be forgotten in a matter of minutes.

I am not even writing this review properly, coz seriously, even trashing this movie seems like a waste of time. You wanna stay away from this one, trust me.

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.

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.