If the vengeful spirit of young Samara in the American remake of the Japanese horror/thriller "The Ring" had a cell phone, the movie would have been renamed and released on the market under the name "One Missed Call". At least that's what I thought after watching "Chakushin Ari", the (you guessed it) Japanese horror that was released a few years ago, and that in the good fashion established by the "Ringu" series is getting a nice old American sequel.

But since fierce dead young girls who like to scare the living daylights out of unsuspecting people don't have access to new technology (remember the whole series revolved around a cursed video tape, not even a cursed CD or DVD), the story got an upgrade. A new movie altogether was made to take communication between ghosts into the mobile age - and the American market soon found it needed a new scary catch phrase after the whole "7 days" line got just a little too old.

You can watch the trailer for the soon-to-be-released American "One Missed Call" below - it was released a short while ago, and it promises to give the audience a relatively good scare. Although - and this is a warning - it brings nothing new in terms of visual construction and atmosphere and we've already seen pretty much every trick in the book in terms of severed hands, rotting corpses bursting out of closets and so on.

What this movie has got, however, is a reasonably good cast (it stars Edward Burns and Shannyn Sossamon) and the advantage of a director with a sense of humor - Eric Valette - and with an interesting record of horror movies (although at the end of the day the idea of a French director doing an American remake of a Japanese movie still makes my head spin).

The story goes like this - a curse is spreading through a group of teenage friends who begin dying one by one. Shocker. They get a mysterious phone call from what appears to be their own number, dated two days in advance - and they basically hear themselves dying. The movie turns into a race against time to find out what the curse is about - and stop it, although as you probably remember from "The Grudge" or "The Ring" there's not much that can be done in these cases.

"One Missed Call" has the advantage of not being as visually blunt and violent as its Japanese predecessor. The ring tone in question does sound creepy though - enough to stick in your memory and play at the back of your mind whenever you are left home alone. It will be interesting to note how the audience reacts to yet another Japanese horror installment - and perhaps then the mystery of whatever draws us to this horror franchise will be revealed. Make sure your cell phones are switched off when you watch the trailer - coincidences make for some pretty serious spooks.