Hellphone feels like an approximation of a horror movie, an attempt at producing a scary film by people who don’t really understand or respect the genre. All semblance of plot is abandoned as the film sets about creating scene after scene where a while lady stands around where the characters can’t see them, or grabs something from under the bed. It’s all the dumbest trappings of horror films without any of the context that makes it work. Hellphone only thinks it’s scary. It’s mostly just boring.

A mother (Snooky Serna) saves up to buy her daughter (Jackie Rice) a cellphone for her birthday. Little does she know that the phone carries a curse with it. Before she can even get the phone to her daughter, she gets caught in a deadly accident, leaving her dead and the phone stolen. The culprit is a janitor having trouble making ends meet. His elation over finally acquiring a cell phone is short lived, as the phone regularly receives calls from a mysterious voice. No matter what he does to get rid of it, it seems to constantly find its way back to him, bringing along with it images of vengeful spirits.

The best thing about this film is the cinematography from Romy Vitug. The movie will be playing in formats that won’t really to justice to the images that he conjures up, but it’s still pretty easy to recognize the talent behind those frames. Sadly, this will be the last good thing I will say about this movie, because the rest of it is pretty terrible. Based on hard numbers, the movie is pretty short. The experience of watching the movie, however, feels excruciatingly long. This is mostly because the movie doesn’t really have a story to tell. It has about an eighth of a full idea floating through its runtime, while the rest of it is padded out by a series of depressingly lame attempts at scares. These scenes are mainly composed of a pale, bloody Snooky Serna crawling out of somewhere, followed by a “spooky” sound. None of these scenes end up being scary because none of them mean anything to the larger story, the ghost seemingly benign, unable to do anything other than appear when none of the characters are looking their way. It’s all largely a waste of time, the entire plot unraveled by a rather humongous plot hole, and made even worse by a really stupid eleventh hour twist. The film is put together pretty badly, sloppy editing never allowing the movie to gain any rhythm. The sound design is dismal if we’re being generous. Most of the dialogue is drowned out by noise or the overbearing “spooky” score.

Seeing as the film is mostly made up of scenes where the characters are doing nothing while a ghost shows up somewhere in the frame, the actors don’t get a lot to do. And what little we do see isn’t great. Snooky Serna might as well have been replaced with a mannequin in her ghost scenes, doing little more than staring blankly at the camera. She doesn’t come off as scary or remotely menacing. She’s just there. The rest of the cast doesn’t really make much of an impression.

Hellphone just isn’t very scary. It’s the latest in an alarming trend of films that thinks horror is just a loud sound and a white hand coming out of the darkness. It abandons all pretense of storytelling and basically just stacks scene after scene of Snooky Serna standing around looking mildly disturbed. On the screen, a white hand is just a white hand as long as it doesn’t actually pose a threat to anyone we care about. In this film, everything is non-threatening, and there’s nobody to care about.

My Rating: