The faint signal emitted from One Missed Call, the latest remake of a Japanese horror flick, is not worth straining to hear. Fans of Takashi Miike's Chakushin ari and the novel on which it's based may be disappointed, but the effort is so weak it's difficult to imagine anyone being seriously aggrieved.

The somnolent film, directed by Eric Valette, centers on a loose network of friends who receive strange voicemail messages on their cell phones prior to their mysterious demise. The messages are in the cell owner's own voice and are left a few hours or days in the future, just before they die. Chalking it up to a bad service provider won't fly.

We never learn what would happen if the victims decide not to listen to their voicemail messages. Removing the batteries from the phones doesn't help. Supernatural possession of this kind can't hinge on anything as mundane as a dodgy power supply, though Andrew Klavan's half-hearted script doesn't offer much of an alternative.  Nobody on screen seems to care whether they're being heard or are making sense.

Until the source is revealed, all we know is that hearing your own voice triggers a distressed state described by one victim (Azura Skye) as feeling "weirded out." You start hallucinating -- seeing lots of centipedes and folks in hoodies wearing deathly-white goalie masks. The ring tone on your possessed phone sounds like a lullaby. And when you succumb, in what looks like an accident or suicide, a red marble materializes inside your mouth.

Shannyn Sossamon plays Beth Raymond (even the character names are bland), a student of psychology bent on solving the murders. Not only is she next in line, but three of the victims are her friends and expire in front of her eyes in grisly if not graphically depicted ways. She's also suited for the task because she was abused as a child by her mother -- who used her daughter's arm in lieu of an ashtray -- and the killing spree is synched to two girls who were taken into protective custody after being mistreated by their mother.

As police detective Jack Andrews -- whose sister, a nurse, was the first casualty -- Ed Burns is the biggest stiff on screen. Since his colleague (comedienne Margaret Cho) is skeptical of Beth's claim that people are dropping courtesy of a deadly mobile phone phenomenon, Jack and Beth must join forces. Their sleuthing leads to the charred nursery ward at St. Luke's Hospital, which was shown aflame in the movie's prologue.

One Missed Call might qualify as disposable entertainment if it were remotely entertaining. There's a dearth of terror (psychological or otherwise) and the production can't even dial-up basic scares. There's no humor or irony to speak of. Ray Wise pops up as the producer of "American Miracles," a TV series about demonic possessions. An evangelical minister (Jason Beghe) exorcises a cell phone in a ludicrous scene taped for the show, yet the sequence isn't even engaging enough to raise the ire of the religious right.

It wasn't screened in advance for critics, so I had to attend the first showing of One Missed Call at my local multiplex. Three teens in the audience started hurling candy -- not at the screen, but I could have sworn toward me as I unhappily scribbled notes. It was as though the bored youths -- hardly threatening, but more menacing than anything in the movie -- were ridiculing me for wasting ink on this dud.

(Released by Warner Bros. Pictures and rated "PG-13" for sequences of violence and terror, frightening images, some sexual maaterial and thematic elements.)