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.

This is amazing. Mocks clichés and then becomes them (intentionally and wittily) and eventually points out clichés are fairly accurate. The acting was great, the characters (except maybe one) very very believable and the plot fantastic and creative. You think you know who the killer is (it's really a pool of two or three people) but then you're unsure again and second-guess yourself right until the end. Everything that is said or done near the beginning of the movie is somehow incorporated by the end in a brilliant manner. The whole time you don't quite know what is going on and want to know immediately, to find out who did itAnd at the end... you're still left uncertain what actually happened

I ran across this film on netflix and the description pulled me in. This film would have received a 7/10 instead of a 6 if it had not been so busy pointing out the clichés that every horror film has, then doing that cliché themselves moments later. It tried so hard to make itself stand out from other horror films by bashing them for clichés that it winds up just like them. The acting was pretty good, but the story was pretty basic. I know a lot of people didn't like it, but to me the ending was nice. Sure I would have liked to know exactly what took place, but it gave me and the people I watched it with something to discuss after wards. If you have some time to kill go and watch this movie, but don't expect it to be a hidden horror gem. There are no jumping out of your seat moments and most of the time you can guess what will happen next, but still a very watchable movie.

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")