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")

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 began as a very good idea, revenge on a plagiarist Professor.

It, however, due to poor direction primarily I believe, turned into a cliché of a bad cliché of murder mysteries. The Protagonist Matthew Lillard as Professor Joel Brandt makes every mistake possible in his dealing with, not only Lavery and Breedlove, but his on again/off again Girlfriend as well as student Millie Counsel and news reporters who could have helped him champion his cause if he'd been a bit less brusque. In situations such as Brandt finds himself, brusqueness is perceived as 'hiding something'. The worst thing he did, from my perspective, is to not tell the investigators about the similarity between his manuscript "Senseless Killings" and the order and names of the victims, that was obvious (to me) the whole thrust of the series of killings. I'm assuming, at this point that he pilfered this idea from a student's work. Although, at the end, while he's discussing the deal with his agent, I was unconvinced that he had not, in reality, committed the crimes. SO I gave it a 7 instead of my original 5. I like tales that make me change my mind at times, much better than figuring the whole thing out before the drop of the first curtain.