If you'd never seen a movie before, Chakushin Ari (or One Missed Call) would be an astounding exercise in clever terror; but if you've ever seen a movie, or read a book about movies, or talked to anyone about movies, I can't help feeling you'd most likely see One Missed Call for what it was: an insultingly lazy, sloppy, cynical pastiche of bits shamelessly nicked from other movies.
Many of which you just have to figure Miike knows you've seen and don't care. I mean, stealing half your chops from Hypnosis is one thing, cause lots of people haven't seen Hypnosis; but really, OK, you start off thinking, "no, this can't be just Ring with cellphones, nobody would be that lazy"; but more and more things happen, and the movie manages to incorporate every single stupid horror cliché from the past 20-odd years of white-person cinema, and pretty much anything you can think of that you're sick of seeing in Asian horror as well, and yet - this is almost admirable in its forthright laziness - never at any point does One Missed Call really do anything to suggest that it's NOT just trying to be Ring with cellphones.
(And isn't "Ring with cellphones", really, just about the dumbest idea for a movie ever? I mean, that's like someone trying to make Psycho with a bathtub scene, isn't it?)
Anyways, driving home, I realized that my initial judgment wasn't really the case anyway, as One Missed Call is also an insultingly lazy, sloppy, cynical pastiche of all the most overdone bits from horror videogames (not many of which are scary, and pretty much none of which are the least bit original anyway) and horror writing (I'm sure if you took every book with a predominantly black cover off the shelf of an airport bookstore, threw them in a blender, and tried to read the contents, they'd be either as good as or a little bit better than the script to One Missed Call).
However - this is the embarrassing thing - it's still rather skillful at maintaining a palpable sense of dread. I spent most of the movie wanting to tear my hair out at the astoundingly inept/lazy/just plain useless regurgitation of every horror/thriller element ever, and yet still drove home with the lights on in the car because it'd given me the heebie-jeebies. Throughout most of the movie, I was torn between wanting things to just quit being useless already, groaning when long-haired Japanese women appeared in the corner of frame or musical stabs heralded disembodied hands popping out of nowhere to grab at the heroes (because, alright, shock and surprise me, but be aware that I, like most people, have already seen Carrie, for goodness' sake); and trying to think of the last time I'd been this unsettled and edge-of-set-being-on in a movie made by a white person. (Or, ahem, an Indian-American).