Not so much abused, or abusing, children as their ghost-spirits are all the rage in J-horror. So it is no surprise that, just shy of forty, prolific Takashi Miike should try his hand. After tackling the disappearing dead, Yakuza, lost souls, homosexuality, teen prostitution, lactating ceilings, martial arts, drugs, replicants, robot sex, tureen-ladle orgasm, and BVD’d cow-demons, not a whole lot was left to choose from, anyway. Like his erratic, multi-media career, One Missed Call/Chakushin ari is mixed, up-and-down, but, with a sequel already in the oven and rights sold for an American cover version at the same time as DVD release, the director seems primed to reach a wider public.

Old trusty atomic radiation giganticizing or unleashing monster mutants or prehistoric beasts is passé. Today it is chip-technology and childhood psychic scars that raise the demons, although targeted teen audiences’ screams are no more subtle than yesterday’s. Most recently it has been a passed-on video cassette that produced don’t-play-it! shivers, and Miwako Daira’s script from a Yasushi Akimoto book goes the logical next step, as the title indicates, to cell-phone calls.

Against poor, unimaginative sets, with zero of Miike’s trademark sex and profanity, and comparatively low on the genre’s bloodandgore scale, but with skilled visual composition, the film opens with a few hints here and there and spends a fair amount of time belaboring its exposition/complication by repeating what is really the same situation. At a restaurant gathering of college students, Yumi Nakamura (Kou Shibasaki) reveals a fear of eye examinations and peepholes, “what we can’t expect,” and has a vision while lighting a fondue burner, although the sudden hand on her shoulder only belongs to friend Yoko (Anna Nagata), in mourning for a mutual friend’s drowning. In the ladies’ room, Yoko’s cell-phone launches an unfamiliar ring-tone, and, sent from her own number three days into the future, the re-played “one missed call” includes a horrified scream and “oh, no, it’s raining!”

Along the way, other characters are introduced, including a chain-smoking, suspicious but ineffective detective (Renji Ishibashi), gaggles of uniformed schoolgirls, an undertaker who smiles over computerized cadaver photos (Goro Kishitani), and black-clad funeral director Hiroshi Yamashita (Shin’ichi Tsutsumi), whose sister mysteriously burned to death half-a-year earlier and who will be the heroine’s protector and prospective love interest.

Yumi is to go shopping with Yoko, who wants a new bathing suit to beguile boyfriend Kenji Kawai (Atsushi Ida). Cell-phoning from a pedestrian overpass, the latter girl is stalked and swept through a chain-link fence onto a rushing train, her severed hand dialing one last time. Kenji receives a call, marking him as next in line. And so on, from one phone memory to another, even when service has been disconnected.

Understating that “excess logic will destroy my films,” Miike places red hardcandy balls in some victims’ mouths and makes clocks meaninglessly stop or go backwards, while pretending that there is coherence. Student Natsumi Konishi (Kazue Fikiishi) receives the next, slightly varied, warning -- Yumi obviously waiting in the wings -- and becomes the cynosure of media frenzy, a TV panel program and live broadcast exorcism.

To occasional asthma aspirator puffs, child psychology major Yumi and her incipient beau come across the case of Marie Mizunuma (Mariko Tsutsui), diagnosed with Munchausen syndrome “by proxy,” a motherhood craving for attention that injures children in secret so as to reap sympathy. The woman has vanished, reputedly after ignoring an older daughter’s fatal asthma attack, but Yamashita locates the selective mute younger child, who, like Oskar in The Tin Drum, does not age.

A hospital abandoned five months before substitutes for the haunted house, where Yumi foolishly enters alone and predictably gets trapped inside while the hero rushes to the rescue. Following this de rigueur episode, the police and clarification, there will be final twists, although the resolution turns out not all that clear, anyway.

For those who enjoy this manga-mentality sort of thing, One Missed Call is okay. But it relies on tired scare tactics not very well done, is derivative, and falls below its spiking director’s sometime talent for the inventive outré.

(A Tokyo Shock Release; rated "R" for violence, disturbing images and brief nudity.)