Here’s hoping this ‘Stranger’ doesn’t call back
When a Stranger Calls is a remake of a 1979 movie that starred Carol Kane. In that movie’s great, tense opening scene, Kane is a neighborhood babysitter named Jill Johnson. Jill begins receiving a series of strange phone calls urging her to “check the children.” This is twenty solid minutes of seat-edge suspense, in which the calls grow more ominous and more threatening, until finally, after she’s called the police, they trace the call and discover it’s coming from — wait for it — inside the house!
But you knew that already. I’m not even sure whether the urban legend inspired the movie, or the movie inspired the legend. I know that when my mother — herself a babysitter when the movie was released — was more scared by that opening scene of the original When a Stranger Calls than all of Halloween. In just telling me about it (which she did years before I finally saw the movie), she would tremble with fear, and speak with passionate appreciation for the scene’s exemplary skill in horror and suspense. She was right. (The great opening scene of Scream was even intended by Kevin Williamson as an homage to Stranger.) She was also correct in speaking less enthusiastically about the rest of the movie, a boring police procedural that picks up several years later.
The solitary genius of the new movie, When a Stranger Calls, directed by Simon West (Con Air, Lara Croft Tomb Raider), is that there is no police procedural. There is no “Seven years later…” This is that opening scene stretched out to 83 minutes. And that’s a great idea for a movie. Just not, y’know, this one.
Because this movie is pretty much that one scene done in feature-length, you know that Jill won’t find out the killer’s secret until the movie is almost over. But you know the big twist before you’ve even bought your ticket. The movie’s shot itself in the foot. Just watch the trailer. So what’s the point in seeing it? This movie’s gimmick also serves as its twist: Not even M. Night Shyamalan has gotten that lazy.
This is not an exceptional movie. It’s not especially scary. The actors aren’t terribly charismatic. (Camilla Belle as Jill is an example in stupidity.) There is no deeper, psychological study at work here. Here’s hoping this Stranger doesn’t call back.
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By Barb =:)
February 6, 2006 10:58 AM | Link to this
Of course the whole “the call is coming from inside the house” bit was from the classic 1954 Alfred Hitchcock film “Dial M for Murder” with Grace Kelly and Ray Milland. That scene scared the poo out of me when I first saw it.