WHEN A STRANGER CALLS. 1979. DIRECTED BY FRED WALTON. STARRING CHARLES DURNING, CAROL KANE, COLLEEN DEWHURST, RUTANYA ALDA, CARMEN ARGENZIANO AND TONY BECKLEY. REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©
'The calls are coming from inside
the house...'
The first
twenty minutes or so of this film make for pure, perfect cinematic
horror. Pretty American babysitter Jill Johnson has no more on her
mind when she goes to babysit for a doctor and his wife than whether
or not her crush, some guy named Bobby, will give her a tinkle on the
old dog and bone. That's cockney rhyming slang for phone, me old
china plate. That's slang for mate, by the way. Oh, never mind. Let's
get to the film.
Jill
does get a call while
she's babysitting, as it happens. In fact, she gets several, but none
of them are from Bobby. They're from a sick and twisted psychopathic
killer who phones every few minutes to ask Jill:
'Have you checked the
children...?'
Jill is such a
bad babysitter, however, that not once in the whole time she's there
has she so much as peeped in on the two little cherubs. They could've
gone off clubbing for all she knows.
I wouldn't hire her to watch my precious
rugrats, that's for sure.
Any-hoo,
while Jill has been creeping nervously around the darkened house- the
best darned darkened
house I've ever seen on film, by the way- the killer has been doing
away with the doctor's two little sproglets in a particularly
gruesome way which we definitely don't need to go into here.
Jill is
saved by a cop named John Clifford and the killer, Curt Duncan, who's
a dead ringer for Hugh Cornwell from The Stranglers, is incarcerated
in a mental asylum. I wonder if Hugh Cornwell has ever seen this film and,
if so, what he thinks about being a doppelganger for
a murderer in a 'Seventies horror film...! Anyway, that's the end of
that chapter. Or is it...?
Well, no,
it's not, because we're only twenty minutes into the film at that
point. It's these opening twenty minutes that have garnered this
superb film its cult following, by the way. Also, these same twenty
minutes are considered by many horror fans to contain some of the
scariest, most nerve-wracking scenes ever to be committed to
celluloid. I absolutely agree. There's no
ghost, but then there doesn't need to be.
What
could be more frightening than the thought that there's someone in
your house, an alien being, someone who's not supposed to be there?
Even if you're only the babysitter and it's not your own house, that
doesn't make the idea any less chilling. If anything, maybe it's even
more scary to have this happen to you in a strange gaff.
Some
years later, the evil Duncan escapes from the mental asylum in which
he'd been incarcerated after his grisly deeds. The lovely cuddly John
Clifford, now retired from the police force and working as a private
detective, is hired to recapture him by the doctor whose kids were
killed by Duncan.
John
Clifford, by the way, is played by Charles Durning who a few short
years later falls heavily for Dustin Hoffman dressed as a middle-aged
feminist in the comedy movie TOOTSIE. Boy,
was he red-faced when he found out what that feisty little 'popsy'
was packing in her pantyhose...!
We get
to follow Curt Duncan around for a bit then as he kips in hostels for
homeless men and tries to pick up embittered, lonely, middle-aged
women in bars. Well, one middle-aged
woman, anyway. I love the scenes in which he's following the
aforementioned lonely single woman home through deserted streets and
tunnels and into her crappy apartment in the dead of night. They're
just so seedy. This
part of the film is really quite sleazy and even sad. There are a lot
of lonely, dysfunctional people
out there, and that's one of the saddest facts of life there are.
We
catch up with Jill the babysitter then who, in the seven years since
the murder of the children in her care, has gotten married and and
acquired two sproglets of her own and also quite a decent life for herself. Nice
posh house, charity work and prospects of advancement in her hubby's
job. Huh. Well, let's just hope she takes better care of her own
kids than she did of the
doctor's. Snigger.
Anyway,
all-grown-up Jill and her husband Steven go out to dinner in a fancy
restaurant to celebrate Steven's getting a raise at work. I got the
most terrible feeling of déja
vu when they headed off in their
fancy duds leaving the teenaged babysitter in charge of their napping
nippers...
You
guessed it. Duncan's tracked Jill down through a newspaper cutting
and so poor hysterical Jill gets a call at the posh restaurant from a
male caller who says:
'Have you checked the children...?' Well, as you can imagine, the
s**t really hits the fan then.
I won't
tell you the ending so as not to spoil it for you, but I will
say that there are plenty of
shocks and tension along the way and lots of lovely spooky shots of the
interior of Jill's darkened house.
This
director does bloody brilliant shots
of darkened houses at night. I honestly think that they're among the
best I've ever seen and I've seen... well, a few, anyway. However, I
did keep wanting to
scream at the screen: 'Why don't you turn on some feckin'
lights, you brainless bimbo...?'
I
enjoyed every second of this horror film, especially the legendary
first twenty minutes. It was a great ninety-minute romp through some
of the best horror movie clichés ever.
The babysitter being scared half
to death by the anonymous caller. The calls are coming from
inside the house.
The retired
cop who could never quite get that one horrible murder- and murderer-
out of his mind and who won't retire easily until he's settled old
scores and avenged the innocent. You should watch this film. Alone. In the
dark. While babysitting. Oh, hang on, listen, is that the phone...?
Can you get that? I've just done my nails...
WHEN A STRANGER CALLS- THE REMAKE.
2006. DIRECTED BY SIMON WEST. STARRING CAMILLA BELLE, TOMMY FLANAGAN,
LANCE HENRIKSEN, KATY CASSIDY, DEREK DE LINT AND KATE JENNINGS GRANT.
REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©
'The calls are coming from inside
the house...'
The original film of WHEN A STRANGER
CALLS (1979), directed by Fred
Walton, has one of the best opening sequences of any horror film I've
ever seen. The first twenty minutes, with the babysitter alone in the
house getting increasingly frightening phone calls from an anonymous
psychopath, is pure cinematic perfection. The rest of the film is
good too, but it's those first twenty minutes that really grab you by
the throat and scare you witless.
I was
surprised to find out that such a great film had been remade. But
hey, unnecessary remakes of brilliant films are seemingly where it's
at these days. This time round, Camilla Belle- what a pretty name!-
plays Jill Johnson, the high school student who has to babysit for
the super-rich doctor and his wife as punishment for running up a
massive bill on her cellphone gabbing to her boyfriend.
Jill
isn't too keen on the prospect as all her friends are at the school
bonfire party and she would much rather be with them, obviously. She's also
fed-up because her so-called boyfriend has recently been caught
snogging her bezzie mate, the slutty blonde alcoholic Tiffany. Ouch.
Dontcha just hate it when that happens...!
Her dad
drives her to the doctor's fantastic big house, with a lake and tons
of polished decking and a little forest and a posh guesthouse and
everything. He drops her off without even checking that it's the
right house. He could have been dropping her off at the Manson
compound or even Ted
Bundy's gaff for all the attention he pays, the self-involved git. It's
not like he was even keen to
get to that chamber music concert his wife's making him go to, haha.
The
filthy-rich doctor and his glamorous missus toddle off to their
swanky soirée
and Jill is left all alone in
the huge, remote house in the middle of nowhere. Then the phone
starts ringing and the anonymous caller starts asking:
'Have you checked the
children...?'
They've done
a few things differently this time round. They've added in a live-in
maid, a son who may conceivably return from school at any time to the guesthouse
where he lodges, and a completely implausible visit from a
school friend, incidentally the one who got off with Jill's boyfriend.
I mean, this
chum (the slutty blonde alcoholic Tiffany) is apparently able to find this out-of-the-way house in the
arse-end of nowhere in the dark without any difficulty and get
herself inside the doctor's fortress of a house without setting off the alarm. A
bit far-fetched, if you ask me. They've also gotten the children up
and about and running around the place like mad things, something
which didn't happen in the original film.
Mind
you, in this re-make the killer isn't remotely interested in the
children, thanks be to God. They've changed him into your average
sex-killer this time round. Young women are his focus and he's
concentrating his energies on tormenting, terrifying and tracking
down the vulnerable Jill with a view to doing (presumably)
you-know-what to her when he gets her in his clutches.
God
love her, though. She's a nice enough girl but she's sooooo
dumb. She says every stupid
wrong thing imaginable to the anonymous phone-caller.
'Who are you? How do you know my
name? Why are you doing this to me? Are you trying to scare me? Can
you see me? How do you know I'm here? Why won't you leave me alone?' And of
course, the classic 'victim' line:
'Why are you doing this to me...?'
And so on and so forth.
That's
right, love. Keep saying the stuff he wants to hear. Keep reacting to
him and feeding his ego and letting him know how scared you are. That
way, he's bound to
stop. He'll probably be all contrite and all like:
'Oh, I'm sorry, I totally
didn't know I was scaring you! I am sooooo sorry, I'll just toddle
off right
away to the nearest cop-shop and turn myself in. Goodnight now and,
once again, a thousand apologies for the misunderstanding...!'
That reminds
me of that funny post that's doing the rounds on Facebook at the
moment. You hear an intruder in the darkened house at night (or
whenever) and you call out:
'Who's there? Who is it?'
The joke is,
of course, that the killer or intruder is hardly like to call back:
'Oh hi, it's only me, I'm just in the
kitchen making a sandwich! Would you like me to fix you one...?'
The film-makers have basically expanded the first twenty minutes of the original film and
made an entire movie out of it, which I suppose is good because after
all those were the best twenty
minutes of the whole thing. There's
plenty of scope for a good horror flick in a scenario like that. You
could come up with probably a million variations on 'The
calls are coming from inside the house' and
some of them could actually be quite effective. Remember the horror movie BLACK CHRISTMAS? Such a good film.
They've left out the killer's back story,
though, and the bit where Jill's a grown woman with kids of her own
and a husband. They've also left out the sub-plot which sees the
detective searching for the killer on the orders of the bereaved Dr.
Mandrakis. They've
literally just concentrated on the babysitter's night of horror alone
in the house with the killer and the sleeping children. Fair enough, I suppose.
The
ending is good and the atmosphere throughout is actually pretty
spooky, thanks to the amazing house with all its creepy little nooks
and crannies, so this is by no means a bad remake. It's really more a
question, I feel, of whether the remake was strictly necessary
in the first place. Some might
say it wasn't. Others probably feel that anything that's out there is
fair game for a remake.
And
me...? I love 'em both, but the original edges it for me a bit
because of the era in which it was made. That was a great era for
horror. You can make up your own minds, though. There's a lot to be
said for both films.
Let me know what you think. Don't phone me, though. For the love of
God don't phone me. I've been scared off phones for life thanks to
these two films. Send me an e-mail instead. Or write me a letter. No
harm ever came from reading a letter, did it? Did it...?
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY OF SANDRA
HARRIS.
Sandra Harris is a Dublin-based novelist, film blogger and movie reviewer. She has studied Creative Writing and Film-Making. She has published a number of e-books on the following topics: horror film reviews, multi-genre film reviews, womens' fiction, erotic fiction, erotic horror fiction and erotic poetry. Several new books are currently in the pipeline. You can browse or buy any of Sandra's books by following the link below straight to her Amazon Author Page:
http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B015GDE5RO
You can contact Sandra at:
http://sandrafirstruleoffilmclubharris.wordpress.com
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