When a Stranger Calls
(2006)
review by Big McLargehuge

The MPAA has classified this film as PG-13 for "intense terror, violence and some language." They forgot to ad "if your IQ is over 13, this film will bore you senseless."

Not only is "When a Stranger Calls" a remake, and therefore totally and completely pointless, it's "updated" to better relate to today's teenage sensibilities, thus following the decade of upwardly mobile parents raising fucking artifact children (i.e. sheltered to the point of social retardation) we have a film featuring an artifact teenager taking care of two literal artifact children.

The dumbing down and unnecessary softening of American horror films is perhaps the saddest trend in Hollywood today. The whole idea of horror films is to shock and frighten the audience, yet increasingly, like the news reports in Orwell's 1984, classic horror films are remade and updated, stripped of everything that made them horror films in the first place, and presented to an eager public. Look at the spate of crap remakes in the last five years as an example —

Texas Chainsaw Massacre – 1974. Stunningly nihilistic film about a crazy cannibal family who terrorizes and slaughters a bunch of teenagers.

Texas Chainsaw Massacre – 2003. MTV Music video featuring Jessica Alba. Gore removed, annoying kinetic-camera direction and editing in full effect.

Dawn of the Dead – 1978. Extremely gory horror film that is both nihilistic AND clever social satire. The effects in the original DOTD still elicit gags and grimaces from the audience.

Dawn of the Dead – 2004. Another film that abandons good film making technique for jump cuts and swoopy action camera garbage that renders almost everything visceral about the film incoherent. The 2004 DOTD is virtually gore-free and with the entire social satire aspect of the original sanitized for your protection.

I say "sanitized for your protection" factor, because, god forbid, some 15 year old see a prosthetic wound and some fake blood. Oh the horror…

Now we have When a Stranger Calls that, irrespective of the MPAA warning, contains no terror, intense or otherwise, no violence, and one swearword, "asshole", and in its current form, could air on primetime without even a single edit for content on broadcast television.

We open with a carnival taking place right outside someone's yard (I guess licenses for amusement rides are REALLY easy to get in Colorado). Anyway, in the midst of annoying jump cuts and calliope music, we glimpse a shadow in the top bedroom of the house.

Cut to the police arriving the next morning. Everyone is dead. The murder weapon? "That's just it… there wasn't one." Oh, okay, so our mystery guy killed everyone with his hands, so logically, the hands ARE THE GODDAMN MURDER WEAPONS you idiots! Thank god for movie police…

125 miles North —

Jill Johnson (Camilla Belle) has gone over her monthly cell phone plan minute allocation (gasp! The horror!!!) because she's fighting with her idiot boyfriend Bobby (Brian Geraghty) over a drunken kiss from her bestest friend ever Tiffany (name not listed at IMDB… LOL!) and is grounded by her parents. We learn this via two throwaway scenes of her in high school interacting with her ignoramus friends Tiffany, Bobby, and Scarlet. They all have plans to attend a drunken bonfire in the woods but because of the over the limit thing, and being grounded, Jill won't be going. Instead, Jill is forced to baby sit the invisible children of multi-billionaire Dr. Mandrakis and his wife Mrs. Mandrakis (she has no name other than Misses… Take that National Organization of Women!) in their enormous modern home in the middle of nowhere.

In the midst of her babysitting gig she begins receiving spooky phone calls in between the vacuous and idiotic calls from her friends to further the romance with Bobby subplot. I mean, honestly, why should we give two shits (or one shit even) about her relationship with Bobby or the petty, puerile, relationship triangle between her and her friends? We don't know these people, they don't even have one dimension and certainly no dramatic reason to exist, let alone care at all about any of this teenage romance bullshit.

The house is super special. The interior lights are motion sensitive so that if you, say, walk into the kitchen, then the kitchen lights come on. It has a security system too, and a glass enclosed canary sanctuary and Koi pond. There is also a small guesthouse used only when Dr. Mandrakis' other kid comes home from college. They also have a live-in maid, Rosa.

Since the film needs to find a way to make Jill too stupid to simply not answer the phone; the only piece of outdated technology in the film is the living room telephone where she spends all of her time, it has no caller ID. It's also a VTECH phone, the brand of which we will see prominently displayed every single time the telephone rings. There are also a shitload of remote controls, one even for the gas fireplace (which will be important later, as if you didn't already know that). Jill isn't smart enough to figure out how to turn on the TV. She does manage to make the stereo blare part of a Mozart symphony at ear splitting volume (yet not enough to wake the kids).

A note about having kids and the houses in which they live from an actual parent, me, of two, Ian and Margaret. Kids have toys. Kids have lots and lots of toys and no matter how often you pick them up, there will be toys on the floor. The Mandrakis' kids, since they are props in a movie, have no toys. The house is pristine, which is impossible, with narry a pile of laundry, coloring books and markers, or Hot Wheels cars, or even a Lego block to be seen. This is completely impossible. The only hint that kids live in the house at all is a few crude crayon drawings on the door to their bedroom hidden way upstairs and out of the way.

In real life when Jill turned on the stereo by accident it would have played Kidz Bop or The Wiggles at ear splitting volume, but not Mozart. Believe me, I know this from life experience.

Anyway, the weather turns nasty at the house with lots of wind and rain (that still fails to wake the kids) yet the bonfire party is clear and pleasant. We see the miniscule Burning Man festival twice as Jill calls Bobby, then Scarlet to ask if either of them are making prank calls.

The calls continue, most of them are just heavy breathing. Jill is freaked out. But her "intense terror" is broken when tequila-loving floozy Tiffany stops by on her way to the bonfire. Yeah, like this wasn't added in to pad the runtime… Anyway, Tiffany shows up, takes a bottle of tequila from the Mandrakis' wet bar, delivers a couple of lines of dialogue, then leaves. Something in the woods makes enough noise to scare her. How she can hear anything over the howling wind is a question best left to the philosophers. Anyway, her car, a BRAND NEW Mazda, fails to start (yeah, okay…). Worse, a tree branch has fallen across the driveway so she has to get out of the car.

Back inside the house Jill hears someone banging on the door, but as she opens it the entry is clear.

Jill calls the cops by dialing 0 and asking the operator to connect her. The officer on duty reassures her that she's fine and the calls are probably pranks from her friends. He also tells her that he'll be on all night in case she gets scared again.

Jill goes looking around for Rosa, but she's vanished.

You can see where this is going right? She finally calls the cops who dispatch a patrol car which will take 20 minutes to reach her. The officer also tells her to keep the guy on the line for 60 seconds so they can trace the call.

Yeah, this might have been a dramatic twist in, oh I don't know, 1980, but today the police can trace a call (in fact, so can you) as soon as the phone rings. It's called CALLER ID. The technology that makes for fast digital switching, known as the Signaling System 7 network, has been around since 1981 or so and carries all the location information of the calling party in something known as an Initial Address Message, which is the same information you see displayed in the caller ID window. What the script meant to suggest was that the police wanted to know where the caller was physically since he was using dead Tiffany's cell phone. To do this the officer says he will get a "GPS TRACE" that, since the standards for implementing GPS location technology are still incomplete, is a total and complete fabrication. The police can't, not yet at least, determine the precise location of a cell phone. They can, with the assistance of the carrier, determine in which cell the person is located, but a typical digital cell is 5 miles wide.

Jill manages to keep the guy on the phone for 60 seconds and is told by the police, who call back, that "THE CALL IS COMING FROM INSIDE THE HOUSE!!!!!" Gasp! Faint! Swoon! See above paragraph as to why this is impossible.

Immediately after that we get our first glimpse of the guy who's been out in the woods making calls. What does he look like? Good question. Simon West keeps the guy backlit (even in rooms we know have no backlighting) so all we can see are black overalls and a silhouette. He chases her around the house for a few minutes so she can rescue the kids, find the bodies of Rosa and Tiffany, and escape just as a police arrive.

The officer reassures her that the killer is under heavy guard. As the cruiser rolls by Jill gets her first glimpse of the killer's face, it looks like Robert Patrick with a big scar on his left cheek. He stares at Jill as they pass.

We learn then that she's essentially defeated a serial killer who has killed no less than 14 other baby sitters after tormenting them by phone.

What the fuck? If that's the case then don't you think the cops would have send a car right away as soon as Jill made the first call to the police? Also, how the hell does Jill know the officer's number if she was first connected through the operator? Did she learn it via telepathy? Osmosis? You decide…

Finally, Jill is in the hospital. Why? She is uninjured! Still, she has to be there so she can have a dream sequence in which the hospital is empty except for the telephone ringing at the nurse's station. Cut to her being held down and sedated screaming that "he's still here."

Which sets up the sequel, "When a Stranger Calls Back" probably stinking up theaters for you next year at about this time.

Even dumber, how did the killer know that Dr. Mandrakis and his wife had kids and would be out that particular evening? Does he live in the woods? The house is remote so he would have to case the place, or at least, know the Dr. was out. This line of logical inquiry does not appear in the film because it would require dialogue and plot to carry off and When a Stranger Calls has neither.

Seriously, that's the whole movie. When a Stranger Calls is less an actual film than it is a Public Service Announcement warning people to avoid pointless remakes. The script is almost long enough to fit on a bar napkin, and in the absence of dialogue Simon West throws every single spring-loaded anything (cat, three times, canaries, three times, clothes on a coat hanger, once, idiot friend Tiffany, once) into the frame to try and generate cheap thrills. He then tops off his steaming pile of rancid water buffalo shit with a dream sequence. None of it works unless, like the crowd of young teens that choked the cinema last night, you have never been exposed to any sort of film of any kind at any time in your life.

The "children" in When a Stranger Calls, made famous by the tagline "Have you checked the children?" occupy almost 3 whole minutes of screen time, have no names, and no lines (unless screaming is a line). This film could have been about a dogsitter "Have you checked the puppies?" or a housesitter "Have you checked the refrigerator light?" or about a plantsitter "Have you checked the ficus?" and it would have required a single word change in the script and no one would know the difference.

Simon West's direction is pedestrian, and that's a generous description, When a Stranger Calls is shot with Jill in center frame for almost the entire film, which is perfect for full screen direct to TV translation. So not only is the film stupid and boring, it's boring to look at as well. He never manages to convey the alleged terror that his heroine is supposed to feel because he cues every single dramatic change with music.

This is cinema for stupid people.

The acting is universally awful. Camilla Belle is terrible and boring in her myriad one-way phone conversations, and while somewhat pretty to look at, manages to display neither heroism nor courage in the face of danger. She either talks or screams. That's it. The other characters, if you can even call them that, are nothing more than window dressing.

When a Stranger Calls is horror for the Final Destination crowd, and to them I happily leave this putrid exercise of idiocy. Fuck you Simon West. Fuck you When a Stranger Calls. And fuck you to any involved in any future remakes of horror films classic or otherwise.