When a Stranger Calls (2006)

When a Stranger Calls (2006)

Film review by: Witney Seibold

 

            Dangit, stop remaking horror films! I know part of the genre’s charm is its unoriginality (for example, how many Jason movies do we need exactly?), but it’s perfectly acceptable to be unoriginal in the guise of a different film, o.k.? What do we have now? What’s the score? The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Amityville Horror, The Omen, The Hills Have Eyes, Dawn of the Dead, a whole slew of Japanese retreads including The Grudge, The Eye, Pulse, and The Ring… these have all been remade in the last five years. Some of these remakes have sequels, for goodness sake. At times I get the feeling that the horror genre is eating its own tail. The latest example of this is the remake of the 1979 When a Stranger Calls (itself with a 1983 sequel called When a Stranger Calls Back), with Carol Kane as the hapless teenage babysitter being harassed on the phone by a stalker who may or may not be in the house. O.k. he’s in the house. But we all know this since the iconic line from the film is “The calls are coming from inside the house.”

            The teenager this time is played by the pretty Camilla Belle from The Ballad of Jack and Rose. This is a wise piece of casting, as she actually is a teenager, and can pull off the naïve fear and relationship drama as a real teenager would (most films cast twentysomethings as teens, and, unless the twentysomething is a very good actor, it’s obvious). She is asked to babysit a pair of sleeping flu-ridden children in a posh lakeside house that is so clean and fragile that it’s obvious young children don’t actually live there. Our heroine makes a lot of calls to her estranged best friend and her estranged boyfriend. She eventually gets a call from a mysterious voice asking “Have you checked on the children?” Ooee. A lot of desperate phone calls to the police and running around the house ensue.

            This kind of film is actually kind of difficult to make interesting. I mean, we only have one setting and pretty much just one actress, and a telephone. Director Simon West (Con Air), I cringe to admit, has actually done a decent job of giving us a fairly decent little suspense film with the limited means. There was too much backstory, of course, and the darkly ominous music in the opening scenes made me giggle inappropriately, but I can’t bring myself to call the film bad. It wasn’t bad. We just didn’t need it.

February 3^rd, Screen Gems