Not even your cellphone is safe if you get ONE MISSED CALL, the J-horror trilogy on Blu-ray from Arrow Video.

Yumi Nakamura (Ko Shibasaki, 47 RONIN) is a student of child psychology who is present when her best friend Yoko (Anna Nagata, BATTLE ROYALE) receives a mysterious phone call with an unfamiliar ringtone. The missed call inexplicably is from Yoko herself with her own voice and scream, dated two days in the future. When Yoko supposedly jumps off a train overpass on the appointed date after uttering the same works to Yumi on the other end of the phone, the other girl is not sure whether the death was really a suicide. When Yumi's friend Kenji receives a similar call from himself dated only five minutes into the future and Yumi witnesses him dragged by supernatural forces and thrown down an empty elevator shaft, she comes to believe an urban legend about people who die after receiving calls from themselves with a telltale ringtone, supposedly from a woman who died full of hate. She crosses paths with Hiroshi Yamashita (Shin'ichi Tsutsumi, POSTMAN BLUES) who has been investigating the case which goes back farther to another classmate of Yumi's who had mysteriously drowned and to Hiroshi's sister Ritsuko (Azusa), a social worker who died in a mysterious fire at the Kigami Hospital just before. They trace the number to one of Ritsuko's cases, Marie Mizunuma (Mariko Tsutsui, HARMONIUM) who was suspected of Munchausen syndrome by proxy, seeking attention by injuring her daughter Nanako and her older sister Mimiko (Karen Ôshima) who died from an asthmatic attack. While Yumi and Hiroshi try to discover the mother's whereabouts, Yumi's friend Natsumi (Kazue Fukiishi, NORIKO'S DINNER TABLE) is the next recipient of a call and is immediately targeted by a production company who want her to appear on live TV with an exorcist on the appointed date of her death. When Yumi is the next recipient of "one missed call", she may have to come to terms with her own childhood past of abuse and neglect.

Part of the latter day Japanese horror boom known as following RINGU and JU-ON: THE GRUDGE, ONE MISSED CALL is at once a quirky entry in the genre while also being more of a conventional work for outrageous Japanese auteur Takashi Miike (AUDITION); indeed, the film may seem rather ordinary to fans expecting a straight horror film but more rewarding to those who recognize it as a straight-faced parody of the J-horror conventions with the black-haired, contorting ghost and little ghost girl more obligatory elements deployed for jump scares rather than frissons. The rules to the haunting are set up pretty quickly and the deaths are increasingly over-the-top leading up to a dismemberment by ghost on live television and the false ending in which characters believe discovering the place of a hidden corpse will end the haunting as an obvious misdirect to the real source with about twenty minutes left of the running time. In spite of this approach to the genre, Miike manages to make the traumatic backstory moving while exploring the hypocrisy and ruthlessness of Japanese society in which unpleasant things that are not supposed to happen either go unreported or uninvestigated by the very people who are meant to address them, with the victims as likely to be victimized as they are to become a source of a "grudge." The film was remade to considerably lesser effect stateside in 2008.

In ONE MISSED CALL 2, Yumi has gone missing, and Detective Motomiya (Renji Ishibashi, GOZU) who spent most of his time dragging his feet in the first film is on the case when a restaurant owner dies in a freak fiery accident after answering a call on his daughter's phone in which he heard her voice before the sound of an explosion. He and reporter Takako Nozoe (Asaka Seto, DEATH NOTE) are puzzled by similarities to the earlier murders but for one recurring element, the red candy found in the mouths of the previous victims is absent. When her friend Madoka (Chisun, MIDNIGHT DINER) receives a call and subsequently dies after her best friend Kyoko (Rie Mimura, SEA CAT) sees a dark figure behind her during a video chat, the only commonality with the first murder is not the candy but the presence of coal dust that forensics isolates to a mine in Taiwan in a village that was the birthplace of Mimiko's grandfather. Takako meets up with her estranged husband Yu-Ting Chen (Peter Ho, AGE OF REBELLION) in Taiwan and discovers that similar murders have been happening there all along, making her wonder whether Mimiko really was the originator of the curse. After Kyoko receives one of the calls with a picture of her at the mine, she and boyfriend Naoto (Hisashi Yoshizawa, NIGHT OF THE SHOOTING STARS) follow Takako there where they discover that the once-thriving village was decimated after a bullied young girl started predicting deaths of the locals which continued after they tried to do something about her.

In attempting to expand the ONE MISSED CALL premise, ONE MISSED CALL 2 feels more like a straight telling of the same story with the twists introduced here causing confusion that the filmmakers seem to try to draw attention away from with constant action. The borrowings from earlier J-horror films seem more blatant with a teaser in a schoolyard recalling a similar sequence in DARK WATER, traveling to the rural village setting to discover the backstory of the curse harkening back to RINGU as well as the Chinese horror film THE EYE, and the mine location replacing the burnt-out hospital of the first film's climax. While performances are relatively engaging, particularly female leads Seto and Mimura, the ending involving another self-sacrifice and another twist of perception work to lesser effect than the more ambiguous ending of the first film.

On a school trip to South Korea, a clique of students entertain themselves with ghost stories and urban legends, only for one to come to life when mean girl Azusa (Miho Amakawa) receives a call from herself that has a photograph of herself hanging from a noose which reminds them all of the recent suicide attempt of bullied classmate Pam who lies in a coma in the hospital, with the message that she can avoid death if she forwards the message. Azusa and the others laugh it off as a prank, but then she disappears the next day at the appointed time, and classmate Teruya also has a freak accident minutes after a similar call. The other students quickly become afraid as they await the next call, and the possibility that one can escape death by forwarding the message leads to divisions within the clique, retaliation, bullying, and violence that estranged classmate Asuka (Maki Horikita, PREMONITION) likens to the pecking order of chickens. As her classmates turn on each other with each subsequent death, Emiri (Meisa Kuroki, ASSAULT GIRLS) and her deaf Korean boyfriend Jinwo (Keun-Suk Jang, CRAZY WAITING) attempt to discover Asuka's connection to the curse, also forcing Emiri to confront her feelings of own guilt in Pam's curse.

The title ONE MISSED CALL: FINAL states its definitiveness as it carries the concept to its logical extreme in both plot and tone, falling back on that popular trope of Japanese genre film: the ruthlessness of Japanese youth in a school setting but more in common with the South Korean WHISPERING CORRIDOR series than BATTLE ROYALE. Although the cast of students with which to contend is large, they make their types known right away and it is amusing just how they can flip from two-faced to mock sincere to terrified as they think they may be targeted by another classmate for forwarding or try to sway the victim to target others, with some victims would be victims believably conflicted and others truly spiteful, and the bullies becoming the bullied, with even the chaperone teacher revealing that he has confiscated the phones not because of the children's hysteria but because his number is also programmed into the phones. The scenes of the students attacking each other include victims chased by vicious mobs through the corridors of their hotel, brutal catfights to snatch each other's phones, and the lowest of which depicts one victim separated from his phone and shut in a closet by the others as his time ticks away. While some of these bits have a blackly comic element, the emotional backstory of this entry is far more effective than that of the second film, with the guilt felt more by those who stood by and watched than those who perpetrated the bullying, and the climactic attempts at self-sacrifice to end the curse and protect others (not all of them deserving) being truly moving; more so than the more risible attempt to end the curse by flooding the message server from which the calls originate with thousands of messages internet cafés and message boards that is apparently enough not to just freeze a computer but cause it to explode. The ending is downbeat but favors melancholy over a final shock.

Released direct to DVD in the United States by Media Blasters in deluxe editions with anamorphic transfers as well as both original Japanese and English dubs, the ONE MISSED CALL films were like pretty much every other J-horror film long in coming to Blu-ray (with the four RINGU films only hitting Blu-ray last year from Arrow). The first film's 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.85:1 widescreen transfer seems to ape the look of the first RINGU film with an emphasis on low-lighting, subdued colors, and an emphasis on browns, reds, and fluorescent tube lighting. The second film's 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.85:1 widescreen transfer has a more naturalistic look with more blues, yellows, and greens, and healthier skintones, while the third film's 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.85:1 widescreen transfer also favors a more naturalistic palette but with interjections of eerie green and red gel lighting and simulated cellphone video footage with flatter colors. Although these transfers more than get the job done, they were obviously struck for Japanese domestic distribution since Japanese subtitles are burnt-in for Mandarin dialogue in the second film and for Korean/Japanese sign language in the third film (with optional English subtitles presented on top of the screen). The English dubs have been dropped in favor of foreful Japanese DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 mixes and LPCM 2.0 stereo downmixes.

The first film is accompanied by an audio commentary by Tom Mes, who has written books on Japanese filmmakers including Miike and Kiyoshi Kurosawa, in which he discusses the ways in which the film is a straight-faced parody of J-horror films while also noting that as a Miike film, some of the threads do not tie together neatly. "The Making of One Missed Call" (57:05) is an archival documentary featuring the cast and Miike, looking at the shoot, and noting that Miike is inspired to rewrite during the shoot, and showing the director's obvious enthusiasm in a project once he is working with the actors. EPK interviews are also included with Shibasaki (6:26), Tsutsumi (3:34), Fukiishi (1:56), and Miike (2:31) but more interesting is another archival interview with Miike (20:15) in which he discusses making films for his fans and films for normal viewers, including ONE MISSED CALL, not doing research on Japanese horror films and instead trying to develop his style from the material while also noting that the crew includes a number of craftsmen who have worked on some of the better known J-horror films including regular collaborators cinematographer Hideo Yamamoto who previously shot RINGU 2 and went on to shoot the American remake of THE GRUDGE and sound effects designer Kenji Shibasaki who worked on the original JU-ON: THE GRUDGE film and its direct sequel.

"Screening" (14:08) is video from the film's premiere while "Live or Die" (11:56) is a look at TV special in the film viewed from two camera angles. "A Day with the Mizunuma Family" (2:45) is the uninterrupted videotape from the film's climax while the alternate ending (3:44) is not official but a bit of comic comeuppance for one of ruthless TV show producers. The theatrical trailer (1:21), teaser (0:51), and TV Spots (2:15) are also included.

Disc two includes "The Making of One Missed Call 2" (32:45) archival documentary follows the format of the first film's documentary with talking-head interviews of the three principals and the director along with a look at the shoot intercutting film and video. "Gomu" (3:51) is a short tie-in film that is also more comical than terrifying in the fashion of the first film's alternate ending. Director Renpai Tsukamoto provides introductions to a series of deleted scenes (10:10) noting that it was these three scenes that slowed down the pacing once the film moved to Taiwan, and the music video "Prayer for Love" (4:46) is also included along with the film's theatrical trailer (1:38), teasers (1:37), and TV spots (1:17).