Stranger Calls but Terror is Disconnected
Jill Johnson (Camilla Belle, “The Chumscrubber”) is being grounded for going over her cell phone minutes. For one month she will have no car, no phone and going out and hanging with her friends is completely verboten. She also has to payback the overage charges, all 800 minutes of them, and her first job to earn the money is babysitting the children Mandrakis family inside their extravagant home. Off the beaten path, the house is literally in the middle of nowhere, filled with lavish enmities including a large-scale living area that even has it’s own indoor Japanese-style bird atrium and fishpond.
The job should be a cakewalk. The kids are asleep, there’s plenty of food, the maid is a live-in and there is a high-tech security system keeping all of them safe from harm. Or is it? Someone is calling the babysitter, calling her over and over from a phone number that keeps reading as being unavailable. It’s all starting to make Jill scared, borderline terrified, and while she knows she’s protected the young teen still can’t help but feel nakedly exposed to a stalker somehow watching her every move.
A remake of the 1978 Carol Kane thriller, “When a Stranger Calls” is indeed that fabled movie where a frantic police officer phones the distraught babysitter and screams, “The call is coming from inside the house!” Director Simon West (“Con Air”) does his best to actually construct a sophisticated shocker, relying upon misdirection and a viewer’s imagination to build all of its suspense. It is also amazingly well constructed, everything from cinematography by the great Peter Menzies, Jr. (“The Great Raid”) to crisp editing by Jeff Betancourt (“The Grudge”) top notch and worthy of applause. Best of all is Jon Gary Steele’s production design, the house Jill is running around in a marvel of cinematic creativity.
Too bad it stinks. Jake Wade Wall’s writing is insipid, people doing things so stupid and mind-boggingly idiotic I’m sure my forehead is still red from all the times I slapped it during the screening. This is the type of film where the alarm goes off, the babysitter gets a call from the security company and then says everything is just fine even though she’s been receiving strange phone calls and hasn’t even bothered to make sure the maid really is back in the house. Better, there’s an extended bit with a blonde (don’t ask how she gets in the picture, the answer isn’t worth the effort of the question) where just about every woman-in-peril stereotype imaginable, save the magically breaking high heeled shoe, is used. Other than that one, though, Wall makes sure the bimbo acts as bright as her hair color, leading to a comeuppance that’s as forgone as my striking out badly (and embarrassingly) on my next date.
But all of this is better than poor Belle. Don’t get me wrong. I like the girl, thinking she was just fine in “The Chumscrubber” and “The Ballad of Jack and Rose,” but she’s shockingly awful here. In fact, I didn’t even realize I knew whom she was, the actress so sensationally one-dimensional and stone-faced I just assumed this must be her first picture. Imagine my surprise, then, to get home and realize I’d seen her, and loved her, before. In all my time as a critic, while I’ve seen many fine actors give a bad performance or two, I can’t remember ever seeing one I’d liked previously give one so awful I couldn’t even place where I’d seen them before. It was like I blocked out everything good Belle had ever done, not wanting to admit a girl this bad could ever have one me over at any time before.
Pity, really, because the original “When a Stranger Calls” is a great idea begging to be remade. Sure the ’78 shocker opened spectacularly, but after that initial fifteen minutes the next hour-plus was so bad and asinine “Friday the 13th (insert part here)” looks like Shakespeare in comparison. West does try to make the update sing, using the same techniques of misdirection, imagination, noise, light and subtlety directors like Stanley Kubrick and Robert Wise used when constructing their own terror masterpieces “The Shining” and “The Haunting.” But here the film is so inane and the character at its center so forgettable I’d rather watch championship snail racing, seeing those little guys slither furiously down the track far more interesting than what’s going on here.
It could be worse. I broke a nail yesterday on a file cabinet and as I’ve got a big fundraiser tomorrow that I need to look nice for this really sucks. It also looks like my computer is going to finally break on me, so it’s likely I’m going to have to bite the bullet and plop down a grand for a new laptop. Worst of all, I’m probably going to be driving back from Portland on Sunday smack-dab in the middle of the Super Bowl, and with my Seahawks gearing up to beat down the Steelers this realization has me practically in fits.
What’s this have to do with “When a Stranger Calls”? Nothing, other than the fact all those things are far scarier than anything going on within this so-called horror flick. Needless to say, this movie isn’t worth the price of a long distance telephone call, and if I had my way I’d have hung up on the thing long before the setup for the obligatory sequel. The call my be coming from inside the house, but that snoring you hear is emanating from inside the theater, and if a viewer listens carefully they’ll probably discover it’s their own.
Film Rating: ê1/2 (out of 4)
