Takeshi Furusawa’s “Ghost Train,” opening today for a one-week engagement at the reliably eclectic Pioneer Theater, unites so many of the tropes and ersatz traditions defining latter-day Japanese horror films that it might as well have been written by a computer algorithm. One of 2006’s biggest box-office successes throughout Asia, “Ghost Train” is yet another reminder that America hasn’t yet cornered the market in mediocre, unimaginative, yet commercially viable genre filmmaking.

Nana, a leggy but somber teenager, has been cheated out of high school popularity, friendship, and promiscuity by the dual burdens of caring for her younger sister Noriko and her invalid widowed mother. During their daily school commute, one of Noriko’s pals finds an abandoned rail pass on a Tokyo subway platform and encounters a wraith-like fellow commuter whose rage has nothing to do with schedules, fares, or crowds.

“Some strange lady said I’m going to die soon,” the kid confides in Nana. But the older teen is unable to see the grim writing on the graffiti-less wall. No sooner has she reassured the little boy that he has nothing to worry about than a ghostly straphanger grabs and growls, “I want what’s mine.” True to the conventions of poorly conceived and executed horror films of any nationality, Nana begins to experience shock-cut flashes of insight.

But Mr. Furusawa piles on so many dumb and literal explicative flashbacks and other redundant reminders of what’s happened, what’s at stake, and what may or may not be going on, that Nana appears to have been blessed not only with second sight, but third, fourth, and fifth as well.

Noriko becomes the subway spirit’s next victim, and the little boy from the first abduction returns as one of those stringy-haired ghost children that are the Japanese horror genre’s poster children. Nana bands together with a young subway motorman, himself a victim of a terrestrial cover-up of the subterranean supernatural doings, and Kanae, a popular girl made a believer courtesy of her boyfriend’s one-way trip to the morgue and the increasingly harrowing effects of an unremovable piece of jewelry growing tighter on her wrist by the hour.

Latter-day Japanese horror films painstakingly peel back the familiar surface of modern life to reveal glimpses of the irrational fear, primal chaos, potential suffering, and inevitable death that no amount of mechanization and civilization can fully cover. The Japanese horror genre is predicated on the suppressed anxieties we harbor about our ultimately futile struggle to stay alive — let alone happy — in an increasingly sterile but nevertheless lethal environment, and the latent guilt and unease we carry about the incalculable body count that precedes us. Swapping dread for shock, the best Japanese horror pictures offer as much sympathy as explanation for their devils, spooks, and psychopaths tormenting the living.

But the only lingering and escalating dread in “Ghost Train” is that the film’s scatterbrained flashbacks, one-dimensional characterizations, and simultaneously incomprehensible yet oversimplified revenge conceit will remain as uninspired as they appear to be two reels in. Eventually Nana, Kanae, the motorman, and yet another victim of the ghost descend into a subway tunnel in the hopes of rescuing Noriko and stopping whatever it is that’s doing all the taking, killing, and wrist bruising.

As the film reaches its climax Mr. Furusawa and his co-writer, Erika Tanaka, even shoe-horn H.P. Lovecraft’s pulp horror arcania into their passably groomed but ultimately mangy cross-breed of co-opted teen movie dross and Japanese horror gloss. A film filled to bursting with unfinished dramatic thoughts, senseless and jarring changes in tone, and laughably repetitive (subtitled) dialogue, “Ghost Train,” hearkens back to the half-joking Grade-Z American horror of the 1970s rather than to more recent fare like “The Ring,” “The Grudge,” and other, sturdier Japanese horror films that it was programmed to imitate.

Through June 12 (155 E. 3rd St., between avenues A and B, 212-591-0434).