Post by slayrrr666 on Feb 8, 2007 11:05:36 GMT -5
“When a Stranger Calls” is an unsurprisingly disappointing teen-film.
**SPOILERS**
After a fight with her boyfriend, Jill Johnson, (Camilla Belle) is forced into taking a baby-sitting job in a huge mansion on a lake-side front. Given the run of the house, she takes to studying, snooping and looking after it, but is soon called every so often by a mysterious stranger, (Tommy Flanagan) calling and hanging up. Trying to make sense of the repeated calls, she searches the entire house and adjoining grounds but can find nothing at all. Becoming more and more terrified at who is out there, she discovers that she is not alone in the house and that the mysterious calls are from inside the house. Gathering up her charges, she launches a ruthless campaign to save them from the lunatic.
The Good News: There isn’t a whole lot to like about this one. The huge mansion here is quite impressive. Plenty of rooms that make for good hiding places, an indoor pool-sized aquarium-pond, large windows, lots of glass and sculptures, which are quite frightening, as well as motion detector lights, which just contribute to the scares with the manipulation of lights and shadows. The best example is a scene early on, where Jill sees one of the motion-sensor controlled lights come on and cautiously goes to see who might be there, but finds it’s the family cat. While most of the attempts at suspense fall flat, two do ring true. As a visiting friend leaves and walks toward her car, she hears footsteps somewhere around her. Trying to find her keys in her bag, she does but drops them under the car as howling noises from the wind are around her. She eventually grabs them and gets in the car, but it won’t start. It finally does, but her route down the driveway is blocked by a fallen branch and she nervously gets out of the car to try to move it. It’s a huge cliche but it works. After getting the call from the police that they traced the call and that it’s coming from inside the house with her, the film becomes quite creepy as the final battle with the stranger is quite excellent. From the first confrontation, where he comes through an-air part of the ceiling and towards her, to the struggle on and off the open staircase, with her trying to run away and he repeatedly grabs her legs and pulls her down toward him each time she tries to escape, it’s all good. The fight inside the aquarium is especially good. She hides inside an ornamental pond as the killer comes in and searches for them. Going underwater, she comes face to face with a dead body down there. She resurfaces under a small platform, with the killer suddenly reaching down at her from one side and then the next, trying to grab her. She eventually overturns the platform, dumping him in the water and she races to get out. She then runs back to the house and tries to close the door, but he grabs part of her hair as she locks the door, meaning he can’t get in but she can’t escape due to his grip. She eventually tears away leaving him with a fistful of hair and tries to find the missing kids. It’s a really decent showing and deserves some special mention. Otherwise, this one really falls flat and could’ve been much better.
The Bad News: This here is a really weak film. The fact that the film’s main selling point comes so late in the film, as we don’t get to see the killer until the final fifteen to twenty minutes of the film, is a lot of dead space to fill, and is instead padded into a full-length feature, by assaulting us with one phone call after another. If these calls had escalated into something genuinely horrific, it may not have been as bad as it currently is. Instead, we get lots of heavy breathing, cryptic messages, and dead air. It was supposed to be suspenseful and to help create tension, but is doesn’t work. Instead, we fear the ringing phone because we know it will ultimately lead nowhere. The incessant ringing of a phone will only remain spooky for so long until it just becomes irritating and that point occurs here long before the end credits begin to roll. In order to stretch things out further, and to also provide both red herrings and potential corpses to pop out of nowhere in the final reels for cheap shocks, some additional characters, including a housekeeper, a slutty friend, and a faithless ex-boyfriend, are brought in and their business only serves to lessen the tension even further. It doesn’t help that the film ultimately paging through every thriller gag in the book. It is quite obvious that they were trying to make so much out of absolutely nothing here, as long passages drag by without anything occurring. Sequence after sequence simply finds Jill entering a room, getting spooked, and leaving that room. It can only happen so many times until it wears out it’s welcome and becomes just a groan-inducing moment in a long sequence of many. The other part of the film that really drags it down is the really sanitized atmosphere here. The children are in danger the entire time but never really are as it’s the babysitter who’s the target. Even more hard to believe is that the killer has ample subjects to dish out punishment to, but all the kills are off-screen and are left for the heroine to discover prior to the final showdown. There’s nothing in here that’s creepy about him, and it’s almost a “clean” killer in that he isn’t threatening. Plenty of time could’ve been used in the beginning to show us this aspect and get some suspense working on his favor, but it doesn’t and suffers because of this. This is a really poor film in most respects.
The Final Verdict: With a good setting and a couple of good scenes, this is hurt mainly by the extreme inactivity and really half-hearted attempts at suspense. Most of what goes on will only appeal to the youngest members of the audience, which is really stretching it, and the older ones will be thoroughly bored with it. Really hard to say with this one.
Rated PG-13: Language and Mild Violence
