When a Stranger Calls (1979)
When a Stranger Calls is a movie that’s known more by reputation than by actual viewing. Most people are familiar with its retelling of the classic urban legend, loosely based on a real murder from the 1950s, of a stranger (Tony Beckley) who keeps calling a young babysitter (a very young Carol Kane) who reports this harassment to the police only to find out that the phone calls are coming from within the house she’s staying.
What a lot of people don’t realize is that those events are only the first 20 minutes of the movie. The babysitter escapes but not before the killer murders the children and is institutionalized, we then jump ahead 7 years where the detective who was on the case (Charles Durning) hunts down the killer after he escapes from a mental institution, eventually culminating in a showdown with the now-adult girl.
It’s really a character study, more Maniac meets Vigilante (though not as violent or trashy as either) than a slasher movie. It’s a bit of an acquired taste, a slasher-type movie without many of the elements that made the sub-genre popular, I call these movies Non-Slashers and When a Stranger Calls is a fairly solid one so long as you can engage with it on its own terms.
When a Stranger Calls (2006)
The When a Stranger Calls remake addresses a common complaint of people who saw the original movie. They were there for the babysitter story, the movie may have made the whole thing come back around beautifully in the climax but it was still surprising to have so much time lapse between the first and second act. So the entirety of this movie takes place within the confines of those first 20 minutes of the original movie.
Camilla Belle plays Jill, the character Carol Kane played in the original who this time is babysitting at an opulent Art Deco lake mansion complete with a glass-walled aviary that features a coy pond. A baby Tessa Thompson doing a lilting falsetto voice for some strange reason informs Jill that her boyfriend has been cheating on her with another friend and she intends to sort it out at a party, but thanks to the boyfriend issues she has used up all the minutes on her cell phone and as punishment her father (Clark Gregg) is making her babysit to pay the bill.
She tiptoes around this cavernous house doing normal babysitter stuff like snooping around and getting creeped out by the weird sounds in an unfamiliar house. It doesn’t help that the people she’s babysitting for have a maid who comes and goes without warning and an adult son who apparently pops in unannounced to the guest house down the shore. The place is really just asking for a serial killer to target it. So naturally, one does.
Is it a good remake?
It’s decent, as I said this is really just a remake of the first twenty minutes of the original movie. There is a character standing in for Charles Durning who we see at the beginning of the movie and the ending does tease a sequel that could easily be the events of the remaining hour of the 1979 version. There’s really no reason for this movie to be so slavishly dedicated to the scant details we’re given in that opening scene but it is nonetheless, it follows that plot to the letter until the third act when it goes for a much bigger third act.
Really the only necessary connective tissue to the first movie is for the audience to be expecting the children to be dead because they died in the original movie, though the setting of how we don’t see them until nearly an hour into the movie (the movie is surprisingly patient in pulling the trigger on that “Have you checked the children?” line) and because we see the look on the detective’s face when he sees the killer’s previous victims at the beginning of the movie.
Does it stand on its own?
Let me just get this out of the way now, this movie is for children. It’s not for small children but I would say this is targeted specifically at girls somewhere between the ages of 11 and 15. That’s not to say that the movie isn’t well-made or that its childish, it depicts a pretty serious threat and it’s not toothless in its tackling of that subject matter but it works exclusively on suspense and implication. There’s not a drop of blood in this movie, though it does have a body count, and while there’s violence it’s mostly implied rather than shown. This isn’t really a big deal, the original movie wasn’t violent or bloody either but to someone who watches a lot of horror this is going to seem small and stripped down. This is an entry level horror movie for someone young and inexperienced within the genre and for that it works fairly well, it just isn’t going to be worth much to someone who’s a seasoned vet of the genre they’re going to find it fairly unremarkable.
Watch, Toss, or Buy?
This is a perfectly fine film but unless you’re the target demographic or have a child who is there’s no point to buy or even watch this. Toss it.