When a Stranger Calls
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Movie Reviews of When a Stranger Calls
Movie Review: ORIGINAL THRILLER STILL A CHILLER!
Summary: 4 Stars
"The call is coming from inside the house"! That famous line had movie goers screaming! I had not seen this film since I saw it in the theater many years ago. I was very surprised at how well it held up. This version blows the remake out of the water! I actually forgot the second and most of the third acts when watching this film. It has good acting, pacing, suspense and tension, even if It seems a little tame by today's standards. I think it still delivers the goods and I give it 3 1/2 stars. The DVD transfer is very good.Movie Review: The first 20min is worth it all
Summary: 4 Stars
If for know other reason the first 20min of this film is worth checking out. If you want tension suspense and pure terror this is it. If your a fan of this type of film or even a film student the begining of this film alone is worth a look.....The rest of the film is slow with no action and kind of falls apart really. I'm not sure how you top the first part of this film with the great mood it sets with it's camera work and music !Movie Review: When A Stranger Hits Redial
Summary: 3 Stars
"What are you going to do tonight?" a friend of mine asked.
"I'm going to watch a movie, an old scary one. WHEN A STRANGER CALLS. It's supposed to be good."
"Is that the one with the babysitter?"
"I don't know. I haven't seen it."
"Yeah. I know that one. It's famous, right? It's the one where you find out he's calling -- "
"Shut up shut up shut up! I don't want to know anything about it. I like to go in fresh."
So I went in fresh, and ten minutes in, I realized that I already knew the creepy twist. And if you've been told at least three campfire tales in your life, I'd wager odds that you know the twist, too. Even if you've never seen the movie in question.
That's not so bad. The first twenty minutes of the original manage to be tense without trying the patience. The elfin Carol Kane stars as a babysitter named Jill who finds her night plagued with strange phone calls. The caller never says much, but what he does say (voiced with fragile menace by the late Tony Beckley) can melt the nerves. It's the kind of powerful scene that is usually found at the climax of a movie.
And therein lies the problem.
WHEN THE STRANGER CALLS (1979) has a neat idea, but nothing to go with it. After the First Act scare, the movie becomes philosophical and ponderous. The camera follows two men: Charles Durning as the dispeptic private detective John Clifford and our resident serial killer, Curt Duncan. "He's from England."
It's not unheard of for a "horror" movie (that's where you'll find this title shelved, but the genre is misapplied) to reveal some of the basic humanity of its villain, but this flick goes a step further and exposes his tenderest vulnerabilities. He is made more human, brittler, his actual madness becomes a place for pity. All of this while Clifford pursues him with squinty-eyed persistence and a lock needle in his pocket. (If you've never heard of a lock needle before, it is a long, pointy thing that you would never, ever want to carry in your pocket.)
Trying to reverse the roles like that -- murderer becomes society's whipping boy versus the man trying to get vengence beyond the law -- makes for an interesting social studies lesson. But it's not hard to get the picture within the first fifteen minutes, and yet there are roughly forty more to go. After this, the finale is a welcome burst of energy, but it doesn't linger with quite the smack that the intro offers.
Certainly a movie that could use some renovation, right? So thought Simon West, whose directorial debut was Con Air. And thus a remake was born.
Watching the remake immediately after the original might have been a bad idea, but it did make a few things very clear to me.
First of all, West must've been aware of the first film's shortcomings, because he only sticks to what worked for the original: the first twenty minutes. Granted, the first twenty minutes would make a GREAT episode of The Twilight Zone (I could've sworn it already was), but a feature-length movie? Errrmmmm.
And there's the unfortunate part. West's re-do steals some scene direction and a lot of lines from the original. But to pad the film out, he has added the tricky maze of a doctor's absurdly large house, along with all of the doctor's weird gadgetry (automatic lights, a greenhouse built in the center of the house, a remote controlled fireplace). He also gives us a few unnecessary characters (a ridiculous visit from a friend and a live-in maid ... why are these people hiring a babysitter if they have a live-in maid?). This plus a very fragile sub-plot involving jogging.
West moves fast once the movie has finally exhausted it's key line ("He's calling **** ****** *** *****!"), which is wise. It gets a little awkward when the kids get involved, but only because they are such poor actors that West films them mostly in obscurity and gives them no lines whatsoever. And whereas the first film shows the killer in a shadowless spotlight, West keeps him as murky as his voice, this time around the over-done gravel of Lance Henriksen. It's a predictable trade-off, and it has predictably mediocre results.
It's a movie that knows what it has going for it. Even after fullfilling the necessary wrap-up, though, West can't resist one last stinger, a completely unnecessary but totally understandable last moment zing that, of course, concludes with the greatest thing about either of these movies:
"HE'S CALLING ...
No. I'm not going to be the one to spoil it for you.
Movie Review: Ring, Ring....
Summary: 3 Stars
We all know the story about the young woman who gets the eerie calls. It's a great urban legend that has been around a while and used time and again. Sadly, a lot of people thought the re-make of this film, released a few years ago, was a new production, and had no idea about this little 1979 film.
A young babysitter named Jill(Carol Kane)is babysitting the two small children of a doctor and his wife. She is all alone in the big house when she begins getting creepy and scary phone calls from a man asking, "have you checked the children?". What unfolds is very tense and scary. I don't want to give too much away if you haven't seen it, but a tragedy occurs, and the young woman lives to see another day. We cut forward seven years and private detective Clifford(Charles Durning)is on the case. You see, the crazy phone caller has escaped from the mental asylum(as they do in these movies), and Det. Clifford makes it a personal task to find and hunt this crazed man down, as the killer befriends a woman(Colleen Dewhurst). The movie ends back where it begins with Carol Kane, now a wife and mother herself, and has to face every mother's worst fear when a stranger calls back.
As a kid, all I remember was the opening. It was scary, creepy, atmospheric, and great. The rest is a blur. Having seen it now as an adult for the first time in years, I can see why. There is no doubt that the opening 22 minutes or so is a classic piece of tension and thriller. The last 15-20 minutes are just as great. The middle hour of the movie is where it goes all wonky, loses track, and muddles up what could of been a really great thriller. When our loon escapes the hospital, the movie veers off into typical cat and mouse/serial killer/detective movie, and is just a different movie than what you thought you were going to get in the opening minutes. It becomes a different movie. It isn't that bad, just disappointing....and typical. What works against the movie is that we see the killer in all his glory, as a crazed homeless guy walking on the streets and trying to pick up Dewhurst in a bar. Not exactly the most physically threatening guy. Dewhurst looks like she could take him if she had to!. The suspense and mystery of it all is completely drained once we start following this guy. A good chase movie between cop and killer is fun, but this just brings too much out in the light. It's not as much fun when you know who it is and see a typical guy doing it. That being said, Durning and Dewhurst are easy and fun to watch, and Tony Beckley, as the killer, does a pretty good job too. It's just all so standard and watered down from the brilliant opening.
Thankfully, the movie gets back on track when Carol Kane's character, Jill, comes back into the fold at the 77 minute mark. Our killer sees his next move, and after the last hour, it's most welcome. The movie unfolds as suspenseful and fantastic as it started, and you wonder why it couldn't of been like that for the entire running time. Why did it veer off so?. Regardless of the writers' intentions, it didn't work, and you are left with about 37 minutes or so of a great suspense thriller, 22 of which is in the beginning. It's an odd structure, and you really wish the middle was more connected with the opening and ending, and shot in the same suspenseful style.
In the end, "When A Stranger Calls" is better than most, and there is no brushing aside the opening and ending. It's those 60 minutes in the middle that bring things down and prevent the movie from being the real classic it should of been.
Movie Review: A mixed bag
Summary: 3 Stars
What a mixed bag this movie was. There were a few good parts here. For instance, what the killer says over the phone and what we're told happened to his victims is truly disturbing. It's shuddering to think what would've happened had Carol Kane walked up those stairs.
Two other successful scenes are the one where the killer is naked, crouched on the floor in a bathroom and the scene where Carol Kane is sitting in bed and hears moaning. I also appreciated an attempt to get inside the mind of the killer. What was especially helpful is when he keeps repeating the mantra that he's invisible.
However, there were more bad parts that ruined this film for me. The killer, for one, seemed more meek than menacing. The part where he hisses at Carol Kane was corny, too, and I didn't like that we see him out in the open.
The actors in this movie either underacted or overacted. There's an unintentially funny scene where the cop tells his partner he wants to kill the killer because this whole crime is eating him up inside. What's funny is that his expression is totally flat when he's saying it.
Carol Kane does a better acting job towards the end of the film, but in the opening scene (a scene that could've been really scary), she underacts here, so I wasn't scared at all. What also didn't help was the loud screeching violin music that created more annoyance than suspense.
This is one of those movies where the victims make stupid decisions. For instance, the woman from the bar leaves the door open with the killer standing at her doorway and just walks away. She then acts surprised when he walks right in.
She also lets in a man who says he's a cop without seeing his badge first. Turns out, the cop was legitimate, but what if he wasn't?
There were also some plot holes, too. When the killer went into a rage, he would yell...yet he's able to kill two people in complete silence.
It also seemed implausible that the cops would know the killer's name and what he looks like and yet for 7 years be unable to catch him.
But the most rediculous scene is when the cop confronts the killer while sleeping. The cop's plan is to kill the killer without getting caught...so then, why would he attempt to kill him at a homeless shelter with a bunch of witnesses present? And even more rediculous, to bring this little pick as his murder weapon, which he then tosses at the killer and misses! And yet, without a weapon, still goes chasing after the guy.
This movie copied a scene from "Black Christmas" and while I think this movie is better than that movie, it's not that much better.