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

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At once a tribute to Italian horror of the 1980s — “the times of Lamberto Bava, when monsters and dolls squirted blood” — and a modern-day attempt to reinvent it, Ubaldo Terzani Horror Show is more successful at the first point than the second. Regardless, it’s both comforting and disturbing that wardrobes of fright-film geeks in both hemispheres consist almost entirely of black horror tees.

Likely an onscreen substitute for sophomore Italian writer/director Gabriele Albanesi, the 25-year-old Alessio (Giuseppe Soleri) is a horror-flick nut and a wannabe filmmaker who’s too tied up in the splatter on which he’s been suckled for so long. His producer insists he try something more psychological, and sends him to Turin to collaborate on a script with the famous horror novelist Terzani Ubaldo (Paolo Sassanelli).

The author’s books prove mighty intense to Alessio, so much that they provoke explicit nightmares. Ubaldo delights in the madness that pours from his pen; in working with this young man, the mentor hides the degree of his nefarious intentions as he gradually becomes a corrupting influence — especially when Alessio’s girlfriend (Laura Gigante) comes to spend the weekend at the host’s insistence.

By and large, this little Horror Show is a twisted love triangle that delights in digging in to the gut-strewn genre that inspired it. Those sequences of pain and death are undeniably grotesque, in the unflinching manner of Lucio Fulci. Those who knows that man’s wet works are most likely to appreciate this flawed but admirably fucked-up valentine. That its final shot fades to a blur is no accident, as Albanesi smudges the line between fantasy and reality throughout. —Rod Lott

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The eyes have it in Anguish, a perfectly oddball horror film from Spain that’s obsessed with all things ocular.

Oh, and snails. It also really digs snails.

Future Oscar nominee Michael Lerner (Barton Fink) is John, an optometrist’s assistant and all-around schlub who lives with his kooky, bird-loving, pint-sized mother (Zelda Rubenstein, Poltergeist). John’s losing his eyesight, so with the help of Mom, who specializes in psychic hypnosis or something, he collects the peepers of other people. It’s good to have a hobby.

Nearly a third in, writer/director Bigas Luna (Jamón Jamón) pulls quite the fast one on us, revealing that all the action we’ve been watching is taking place on a movie screen. Within the rapt audience, one teen girl is particularly freaked the fuck out.

She has good reason to be, as her fellow moviegoers begin to be killed, just as John is offing innocents onscreen. If Luna’s trying to make an “art imitates life or vice versa” statement, it gets a little lost in the mess of the meta, but Anguish is really kind of ingenious and definitely ahead of its time. It would make a good double feature with Lamberto Bava’s Demons from two years earlier, which also plays with the trapped-in-a-theater concept.

When I was in high school, a local mom-and-pop video store was having a huge sale on posters, and I bought dozens, plus a weird countertop box advertising the VHS release of Anguish. It directed you to peep through a cut-out hole at its top, and any curious customers who did were greeted with a still of the film’s graphic scene of eye surgery. Just thought you’d like to know. —Rod Lott

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A planet where apes evolved from men? That strange, sci-fi concept of Ted Post’s Beneath the Planet of the Apes is mere child’s play compared to bizarreness of the director’s outré exercise in suburban horror that is The Baby. Dudes, this one’s colored in all shades of fucked-up.

Newly widowed social worker Ann Gentry (Anjanette Comer, The Loved One) is assigned to investigate the Wadsworth family, headed by a frowny, chain-smoking matriarch (Ruth Roman, Strangers on a Train). Mrs. Wadsworth lives with her two daughters and one son, which isn’t all that odd until you realize that the boy, her “Baby,” isn’t a baby at all, but a fully grown adult (David Manzy) who never matured beyond infancy. He wears diapers and all.

Initially repulsed, Ann starts to ignore most of her other clients to visit this special case. She recommends Baby be put in a clinic — a suggestion that, to Mrs. Wadsworth, goes over about as well as that 10th vodka tonic. Weirdness grows as Baby cajoles his naive teen babysitter (“What kind of question is that? Of course I’m wearing panties. Don’t I always?”) into breast-feeding him on the job.

It all leads to an expected tragic ending, but what is not expected is how disturbing The Baby feels as a whole. It’s not just Baby’s chalkboard-nails crying fits that bother, but an overall pervading sense of unease, and yet somehow, this thing earned a PG rating. Unlike most horror films of the 1970s, it’s not fun — just remarkably confounding and unsettling. I recommend giving it a watch, if only so I’m not the only one so agitated afterward. —Rod Lott

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Hangman’s Curse is perhaps the world’s first Christian paranormal teen mystery spooker, and as expected, it’s so bad, it’s good — a crazy combo of The Omega Code, The X-Files and Spy Kids, with elements of Heathers and Arachnophobia thrown in just to muddy up an already messy mix.

David Keith and Mel Harris star as the parental units of the Springfield family, a gypsy-like clan roving the country in an RV with their twin teenage children, Elisha and Elijah, and Max, the drug-sniffing dog, all working together as The Veritas Project, a crack freelance undercover investigations team. They’re hired by a public high school to uncover the truth behind a series of mysterious deaths that has so far claimed the lives of three football players. The bullied Goth kids — depicted as Satanists, of course — explain that the soul of a kid who hung himself in the school years ago is getting revenge on all classroom tormentors.

Donning baseball cap and spectacles, Keith unconvincingly goes incognito as the school janitor, while Harris looks at evidence under microscopes and calls for the assistance of a nutty professor, played by Frank Peretti, author of the book on which the film is based. I can understand cutting him a little slack since these characters are his and all, but Peretti is no actor and seems to think the dramatic narrative is sturdy enough to support his decision to channel Bruce Dern, Jerry Lewis and Prof. Irwin Corey, inadvertently providing many funny moments. (The honor for the funniest, however, goes to the scene in which virginal Elisha wraps a snake around her neck and comments, “It reminds me of a boyfriend I once dated.”)

The kids are the real stars of the ham-fisted, underlit, amateurishly acted film, especially Elisha (Leighton Meester, TV’s Gossip Girl), who exclaims “Oh, snaps!” whenever something doesn’t go her way — like plunging down an air duct and landing in the nest of hybrid killer spiders. The tumble and resulting bites nearly kill her, but she’s saved by reciting the Lord’s Prayer. (Oh, and a fresh dose of anti-venom, but that doesn’t get near as much credit.)

Whom did the Christian backers hire to helm their cinematic testament of God’s love? Rafal Zielinski, director of such noted church faves as all three Screwballs titty flicks, of course. They also couldn’t have picked a better example for the sanctity of marriage than Harris, who’s such a firm believer, she’s been hitched five times. —Rod Lott

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