“One Missed Call” lays bare, in a single line, the difference between formula Hollywood horror and the quietly chilling Japanese horror films Hollywood is so fond of remaking.

“So it was YOU all along!”

Somebody utters this to somebody else late in “Call,” the new remake of the 2003 Takasi Miike “J-horror” film about death and doom and that international epidemic of obsessive-compulsive disorder, the cell phone. Miike’s film, based (as this one is) on a Yasushi Akimoto novel, was joltingly creepy and subtly mysterious, as were the original Japanese versions of the J-horror “The Ring” and “The Grudge.” But “remake” to Hollywood means “all mysteries must be solved,” no matter how supernaturally silly that solution.

The premise here is hair-raising. Somebody dies. And then everybody on her cell phone’s stored-numbers list gets a call. One at a time, they hear a ring tone that is not their own, answer the phone and hear their own voices utter the last words they’ll say on this Earth (often followed by a scream). They see in the message field the date and exact time of their deaths. Never has “You have one voice message” seemed so spooky.

French director Eric Valette (“F-horror”?) and the script reach for and fail to find laughs about trying to cancel or change your cell service, a down-the-rabbit-hole nightmare that would have driven Kafka to suicide. The odd spine-tingling moment pops up as characters put down their latte, answer their cursed cell or a friend’s cursed cell, and say “It’s for you.”

Ed Burns shows up as a cop trying to piece together the supernatural puzzle, as if there’s anything he can do about it other than stomp on a phone. Margaret Cho has the thankless, humorless role of his partner. The odd chilling moment or satiric poke at the cell-obsessed culture is always followed by another blast of “exposition,” the manic need to “explain” the unexplainable. This is boring in the extreme and serves to utterly shut down the “ticking clock” that begins every time a new and undeveloped character hears that fateful ring.