Single mom Carla Moran (Barbara Hershey) has a problem: She can’t type worth a flip, and if only she could, she could make a better life for herself and her three children.

Wait, make that two problems, because she keeps getting raped in her rental home by a ghost. And Lord knows Mavis Beacon can’t do anything about that.

I suspect more people know about The Entity than actually have seen it. At my middle school, it was the talk of the lunch table, but the only friend who saw it was the one whose parents had split up. (She didn’t care what he watched; hell, she even let him eat marijuana brownies she made.) To the rest of us, The Entity didn’t sound possible: “How did they make her boob move like it was being squeezed if no one was there?”

To be fair, the sexual assaults are just part of the multifaceted film from Sidney J. Furie (Superman IV: The Quest for Peace), but they’re a large part, and why the movie remains remembered today. (Having the soundtrack drill an aggro-metal riff into your brain every time the malevolent force attacks tends to have a lasting effect.) But the poltergeist activity also grows to include flashes of weird-science electricity and little lasers that go pew-pew-pew like a vintage video game. The parapsychologists who arrive to help her are a trio later semi-parodied in 2011’s Insidious, in which Hershey played the mother of the haunted.

Not that I’m defending the ghost’s actions in any way, but Hershey is a very beautiful woman; The Entity makes me feel a tad ashamed for finding her attractive since I hit puberty. She gives a believable performance of a desperate woman no one else believes, but Furie does her no favors by allowing the screenplay by Audrey Rose‘s Frank De Felitta (based on his novel, based on “true” events) to go on as long it does: more than two hours. For chrissake, Sid, it’s a horny spirit horror thriller, not a Revolutionary War epic. —Rod Lott

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Arriving at the tail end of the Grudge/Ring string of Japanese-to-American horror films was One Missed Call, a Hollywood remake of a 2003 Asian film of the same name. By then, no one cared. They didn’t miss a thing.

The premise is that a college student receives a cellphone voicemail from his or her near-future self dying. (It even comes with its own ringtone!) Luckily, it’s stamped with the date and time, so he or she knows exactly how much time’s left on the clock. Then, as the imminent moment approaches, hallucinations of centipedes and Joker-faced people kick in. Death occurs, a piece of hard candy pops out of the corpse’s mouth (like a parting gift?), and someone in the freshly deceased’s contact list gets the next call.

So, yeah, it’s Final Destination with a family plan.

Since psych student Beth (Shannyn Sossamon, A Knight’s Tale) is rapidly losing friends to this accursed cellular scam, she teams up with a police detective (ol’ sandpaper throat Ed Burns, A Sound of Thunder) who lost his own sister in the same way to solve the mystery before they, too, get One Missed Call.

The characters in this stupid movie are stupid, so at least consistency is in place. In an effort to stay alive, they remove their batteries and they smash their devices. In fact, they do everything but the obvious: Cancel their contract or, if their carrier prohibited such a thing, change their damn phone number.

Equally dumb in French director Eric Valette’s film is the expected not-an-ending ending, which counted upon it being successful enough to merit sequels, as the Japanese original did. I, for one, am glad the Call was terminated here. —Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.