When a Stranger Calls

In an increasingly long list of forgettable horror remakes including The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Amityville Horror, and The Fog, the 2006 update to When a Stranger Calls is certainly far from the worst of the bunch. Of course, if you've seen those other three remakes I mentioned, you probably already know that's faint praise. I do admire that director Simon West (Tomb Raider, Con Air) and first time screenwriter Jake Wade Wall have tried for something a bit more psychological instead of your standard teen slasher flick that the film's ad campaign makes it out to be. Running by at a breezy 83 minutes, the movie never wears out its welcome, and actually has a couple of successful scenes. But, thanks to some dodgy acting, some major lapses of logic in the screenplay, and a laughable music score that drones ominously even when nothing even remotely scary is going on, When a Stranger Calls is immediately disposable horror fluff prepacked for the teen market to scare up a decent weekend before it fades into obscurity.

When high school student Jill Johnson (Camilla Belle) agrees to babysit the children of a noted doctor who lives in a high-tech secluded mansion in the middle of nowhere, she's already been hit by a string of bad luck. She recently caught her boyfriend kissing her best friend, Tiffany (Katie Cassidy), and has been at war with both ever since. This little war of words between friends has led to a massive phone bill, and as such, Jill's parents have grounded her and taken away her phone and driving privileges for the rest of the month. Needless to say, poor Jill is pretty bummed. Her boyfriend and best friend are jerks, her parents are breathing down her neck, and now she has to babysit some kids while all her other friends get drunk and party. The night drags on, and eventually, she begins to receive ominous phone calls from a stranger (voice by Lance Henriksen). The calls start out as bizarre and ominous (heavy breathing for a couple of seconds, then hanging up), but quickly turn deadly serious once the stranger makes it known that he wants both Jill and the children she's watching over dead. It seems there's been a string of murders across different states, and Jill's the next target.

Rather than being slavishly faithful to the original 1979 film, the 2006 version takes the opening 20 minutes of that movie and extends it into feature length. The film takes place during the course of a single night as Jill receives an increasing number of ominous phone calls. She's not sure what to make of them at first. She thinks they're simple pranks being played on her by her fellow classmates. But, as the ominous clues start to build (the live-in housekeeper mysteriously vanishes half-way through the night, she sees the car of her best friend who came to visit her earlier in the driveway, even though the friend left over an hour ago), Jill becomes more fearful and begins to feel that she is being watched. The film makes good use of its enclosed surroundings and a growing sense of paranoia. This was a surprise to me, as the film's opening moments that showcase Jill's school and personal problems led me to think this was going to be a brainless teen horror yarn like I Know What You Did Last Summer. While I wouldn't quite label the movie as being intelligent, it did some things right that I wasn't expecting.

The film opens very strongly as it contrasts an ordinary night in a small suburb (a summer carnival, friendly neighbors greeting each other from the front porch) with the stranger stalking a victim. It's a good way to set up the villain, and is appropriately chilling as it cuts back and forth from small town American life to the brutal stalking and murder of a teenage girl and some young children. It's atmospheric, suitably creepy, and a great way to grab the audience's attention. Our attention takes a dip during the set-up scenes that introduce Jill, but once she gets to the house, things start to look up again for a while. The house itself is dripping with atmosphere, and director West knows how to use it to his advantage, even if he does fall back on just about every horror cliche in the book. But hey, at least he has some new ideas on old favorites. Not only do we get the pre-requisite "it's just a cat" scare, but we also get a "it's just the automatic ice maker in the refrigerator" scare! I think that's a new one...

The movie wants to be an 80-minute game of cat and mouse as the unsuspecting Jill is watched from the shadows by the murderous stranger who slowly makes his presence known as the film goes on. While a good idea, the film is not always successful at stretching out its thin premise to feature length. There are just too many scenes of Jill wandering around the house doing nothing, too many false alarms, and way too many scenes of Jill talking on the phone. It gets to the point that you almost think the phone company deserves a credit in the cast. It certainly doesn't help matters that the highly manipulative musical score is constantly trying to creep us out, even when we know there's no reason to be. It doesn't matter if Jill is talking to her best friend at school, or if she's grabbing a bite from the fridge, the film's soundtrack makes it sound like every action the characters make is ominous and mysterious. Because the movie is constantly trying to creep us out with false alarms literally ever 5 or 7 minutes, we almost start to roll our eyes. That's why it always comes as a surprise when that rare effective moment comes along.

More so than the stretching of the thin premise, the thing that really tested my patience is the just plain idiocy of Jill in order for there to be a movie. If you were alone in a house, and you noticed ominous signs that something had happened to the housekeeper, would you ignore it and wait 20-30 minutes before you start investigating? If you were receiving threatening phone calls from a murderer, would you wait 50 minutes before you decided to try to use the one phone in the house that has Caller ID? And just how did the best friend get into the house in the first place without triggering the house alarm, and bypass the electronic gate at the foot of the driveway, which is shown as being shut when Jill investigates the friend's abandoned car? And how about the scene where Jill discovers a dead body lying on the floor in plain view a good 3 minutes after entering a room? You'd think that would be the first thing her eyes would fall upon, especially since the body wasn't hidden very well. The movie contains numerous lapses of logic throughout which make it increasingly hard to take things seriously.

Due to the movie's isolated structure, Camilla Belle is pretty much forced to carry the entire movie on her own. At this, she is not entirely successful. While she's not a terrible actress, she seems to get a bit too afraid a bit too soon into the movie. And her reaction to the stranger telling her over the phone that he wants to see her covered in blood seems to suggest a rather inappropriate "ew...icky" rather than the sheer horror one would think would greet such an announcement. The rest of the cast mainly get one or two scenes each, so they fail to make any sort of impression. The only actor who stands out is Lance Henriksen who provides the phone voice of the stranger. (When he finally shows up during the last 10 minutes of the movie, he's played by a different actor.) He doesn't have very much dialogue, but he's appropriately unnerving in his line delivery.

Aside from a couple well-done scenes, there's very little worth looking into here. When a Stranger Calls clearly has no aspirations higher than milking some easy to scare teenage girls out of their allowance money. At this, I'm sure it will be successful. The movie is good at building atmosphere, but falls apart in the telling of the story. But still, it's tightly edited and makes good use of its limited surroundings. As far as escapism horror goes, this is pretty much second rate. But, at least they made somewhat of an effort, which is more than I was expecting walking into the theater.

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