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When a Stranger Calls (2006)
After going over her cell phone minutes and costing her family some money, Jill Johnson is forced to miss the big high school bonfire in order to babysit for the Mandrakis family. Everything starts out fine, as the Mandrakis' have a huge house and the children are already asleep by the time Jill arrives. Unfortunately for her, things start to take a turn for the worse when a stranger begins calling her repeatedly, sometimes saying nothing and other times asking her if she's checked the children. Jill checks on them and finds that they're safe, but then the caller phones again and Jill realizes he's somewhere nearby, perhaps even closer than she thinks.
As a pretty big fan of the original 1979 film, I had long avoided this remake since I was genuinely concerned that it would suck and just piss me off. Somehow in all that avoidance, I had never even bothered to read up on what the remake was actually about! Thankfully [MENTION=35]The Viper[/MENTION] clued me in to the fact that it wasn’t an actual remake but more of an expansion on the first 20 minutes of the original film. After realizing I wouldn’t be pissed off that they blew the strong character study in that film, I went into the remake with an anticipation of seeing just how they would manage to expand a short segment into a feature length film. Now that it’s over, I can honestly say that I feel the filmmakers here did manage to succeed at certain aspects of that expansion, although they also totally failed at others. Unfortunately, they also failed to turn in a film that had the same scare factor of the original but at the same time still managed to keep things relatively interesting throughout. It’s by no means the worst remake of a horror film that I’ve ever seen and it does have some strong points; I just wish it had been a little bit scarier is all.
"When a stranger calls...at least you could be in this fucking awesome house!"
As soon as I saw the name Simon West pop up as the director of this film, I was a tad worried. Not because West isn’t a serviceable director mind you. I mean, he did make Con Air and The General’s Daughter after all. The problem I had with him is that he’d never worked in the horror genre before (or since for that matter) and so I immediately prepared myself for the worst. Thankfully West didn’t screw things up too much in terms of pacing, which I think is a minor miracle given the miniscule events that take place in the film. He shoots this movie as more of thriller than a horror picture, and while that does tend to work it also takes out a lot of the real scares, but again I think that may have been his intention given the PG-13 rating of the film. While I think West did a pretty good job here, the same cannot be said for the writer, Jake Wade Wall, who’s screenplay here is worse than the one from the remake of The Hitcher that came out just one year after this. Oh shit, hold the phone, Wall actually wrote that one too, so it all kind of makes sense. Anyhow, yeah, this screenplay is unbelievably bad, with almost no plot to speak of, exposition that leads absolutely nowhere (why even mention the son at college if he has no part to play) and dialogue that sometimes sounds like it was written by a three year old. Luckily the film isn’t driven by this horrible script, so it doesn’t suffer too much from it.
"When a stranger calls...don't answer the fucking phone!!!"
As far as the acting goes, there’s really only one person to mention since she’s the focal point of the film and the person that’s on-screen for almost all of it. Camilla Belle is that actress and she doesn’t do too badly of a job with the role. She’s certainly come a long way from her star turn as the kid that the little dinosaurs (I’m too tired to look up their names right now) attack on the beach at the beginning of Jurassic Park 2. It helps that she’s pretty fucking hot, but in all honesty she’s also quite adept at displaying the emotions required of her character, from annoyance at her friend and cheating boyfriend to terror at the thought of a madman loose in the same house as her. Belle also comes across as a convincing heroine, proving more than capable of handling herself thanks to her athletic background, which by the way is also one of the only pieces of plot exposition in the film that Jake Wade Wall wrote properly. Tommy Flanagan and his scarred up face appears as the stranger in the title, but doesn’t really get to do a whole lot until the last 10 minutes or so. It’s too bad because he’s got the perfect face for a film villain (which is why I find it odd that he most often plays heroic sidekicks in films like Braveheart and Gladiator) but I get why he was kept hidden for the majority of the picture. Outside of those two, I’d like to give a quick shout out to Agent Coulson or S.H.I.E.L.D himself, Clark Gregg, who makes a brief appearance here as Jill’s father.
"When a stranger calls...don't go for a fucking swim!"
As I mentioned earlier, the script is so poor here that it really becomes a detriment to the film from the get go. For example, two characters have an exchange of dialogue that goes like this…”guys, this is so high school” to which the other one replies “this IS high school”. Dialogue like that actually makes the shit George Lucas turned out for Attack of the Clones look like Oscar-worthy material and no, it does not get much better from there. Thankfully once Jill gets to the house there’s barely any talking at all, which is probably for the best since there’s no way in my mind that Jake Wade Wall was magically going to bust out anything worth listening to in the second or third acts of the film. Another major problem in this film is the total lack of scares, which I think hurt it more than even the horrible script in my eyes. I didn’t jump once, even when the musical cues were obviously warning me that something bad was about to happen, and that’s not a good sign for a movie of this sort. Let’s face it kids, when there’s a body in the water and you don’t give a shit, that’s not a good thing. Speaking of that body in the water, it was the live-in maid, which then of course begs the question as to why the hell the family needed a BABYSITTER in the first place!!?!? Yes, Wade Wall threw in some Blue line about her going to check on her mother or something like that, but in all honesty it’s not like she couldn’t have stayed home for one night and saved everyone the grief that came with Jill showing up at the house. In fact, she probably deserved to die for that, so good on Tommy Flanagan for killing her with the sight of his magnificent scar. So outside of the decent acting and a better than average pace, the movie has enough problems for me not to recommend it, but hey, at least I didn’t think it sucked! The bottom line here is that Camilla Belle is hot, Simon West is not a hack and Jake Wade Wall should have his penis electrocuted; and that’s all I have to say about that. 4.5/10.
"When a stranger calls...you'd better hope it's not this fucking guy!"
