Editor’s Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on February 3, 2006, and we’re proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
Unlike many of the ’70s horror films being remade recently, 1979’s When a Stranger Calls is one where there was significant room for improvement. The first 20 minutes or so are justifiably celebrated as a taut exercise in tension, but to this viewer the movie completely falls apart thereafter. The makers of the new Stranger had the right idea: Take that first act and expand it into an entire feature, making it a movie-length tete-à-tete between a teenaged babysitter and a creep who terrorizes her with scary phone calls and worse. Yet while director Simon West and screenwriter Jake Wade Wall do their best to sustain the premise and are backed by some impressive craft contributions, the result is uneven and let down by an unsatisfying final act.
The opening scenes aren’t promising, as West indulges in stuttery flash-framing effects that are apparently supposed to create edgy tension but succeed only in being annoying. Thankfully, West calms down as he develops the central story of Jill (Camilla Belle), a teenaged girl who, in a fun touch, has to take the babysitting gig to help pay off a huge cell phone bill. The job takes her to a huge house up in the mountains reminiscent of the one in the Bruce Willis thriller Hostage—chock full of long halls, rooms where the lights are motion-activated and other features handy for building suspense. It’s an impressive, well-designed location for a horror/thriller film, one that makes such an impression that it really isn’t necessary for James Dooley’s overwrought score to keep reminding us HOW REALLY SCARY IT IS!
A good portion of the movie is devoted to buildup; it isn’t until nearly 50 minutes into the 87-minute feature that the signature line “Have you checked the children?” is spoken. Up till then, West and Wall tease the audience by having Jill receive a string of phone calls—from friends, a boyfriend she’s mad at, a prank caller—to keep us guessing as to when Jill will be greeted by the Stranger when she answers. The villain, who speaks in the familiar threatening tones of Lance Henriksen, has already done something unspeakably horrible to a family in that prologue, leaving behind carnage that we don’t see but is enough to seriously unsettle a sheriff when he looks at it. Yet for some reason, the Stranger seems to favor strangulation or some other, cleaner method in the film proper; maybe he doesn’t want to mess up that beautiful house.
In any case, Jill becomes spooked as he continues to ring her up, and her reactions range from satisfyingly intelligent (calling anyone she can think of for help, including the police) to traditionally foolish (dropping flashlights and weapons she should really be holding onto). The filmmakers’ suspense-building technique is similarly uneven; cinematographer Peter Menzies Jr.’s remarkable, layered lighting creates a real sense of visual menace in the house, and at moments West effectively exploits the fear of being in an unfamiliar home that makes funny noises, yet the movie still stoops to clichéd stuff like cat scares. And while Jill is introduced as a runner on her school’s track team, the better to flee the Stranger when he eventually becomes a physical presence, she takes her sweet time whenever she goes to investigate those strange sounds. You start to get the feeling that if she walked at normal speed instead of her slow, tension-building pace, the film would be about 10 or 15 minutes shorter.
Still, as protracted setups go, the first hour of When a Stranger Calls does a decent job overall of setting the audience up and getting them nervous about when the real action is going to start. Once it eventually does, and the Stranger (Tommy Flanagan, seen almost entirely in silhouette, with a profile like Robert Patrick) takes off after Jill, West choreographs the mayhem with vigor and energy. Problem is, there’s not enough of it. We’ve been primed for a lengthy cat-and-mouse chase and fight around that huge house (plus an outdoor guest cottage), and while we get a bit of that, and the filmmakers pay off somewhat on their earlier introduction of the home’s more unusual features, the pursuit and struggle ends just when it feels like it’s really getting started. There’s a scene late in the game that seems to promise that the action will continue, but its resolution is a letdown.
Belle has an appealing girl-next-door vibe about her, but her performance is just OK; she doesn’t invest Jill with a particular spark of personality. The rest of the actors are decent in functional roles, and the real star comes to be the house. When a Stranger Calls will probably score with the teenaged girls who are its true target audience, but die-hard horror fans may not find it a significant improvement on the original—or on the made-for-cable sequel When a Stranger Calls Back, which for this writer’s money remains the best entry in this minifranchise.
