Horror Queen

PLOT

Jill goes to baby-sit for the Mandrake family, where she behaves like the typical teenager. She gossips with her friend, studies for a test and ignores the kids who are upstairs with a cold. When she starts to receive threatening calls from someone who tells her to check on the children, she calls the police, but they refuse to help. Eventually they run a trace on her line and discover that *gasp* the calls are coming from inside the house! Of course he kills the kids, gets sent off and Jill disappears. Then we’re treated to a second story where the killer escapes, bothers a new woman and eventually he brings Jill back into the story by stalking her and her children.

TRIVIA

The beginning of this movie was actually a short film called The Sitter. The director realized that he could turn that movie into a full length feature, hence the disjointed feeling to the picture.

THOUGHTS

Have you ever seen a movie that you remembered being so great, but realized it wasn’t years later? That’s kind of how I feel about the original When a Stranger Calls. Even when I reviewed the remake on another website, I pointed out how much I loved the original. Now that it’s sitting in front of me and I’ve seen the whole thing again, it’s actually not so good.

The first 20 minutes or so of the movie is excellent. We get to learn about Jill, feel for her and want her to escape the psycho caller. There’s some nice buildup and great suspense, but then it all just kind of disappears. To invest that much time in a character and have her disappear for most of the movie is just a pain. When she comes back, we’ve lost our little teenage Jill and suddenly have some married with kids Jill and it just doesn’t work. The second half of this movie should have been When a Stranger Calls Back.

When a Stranger Calls isn’t a bad movie by any stretch of the imagination. I still like it, I just think the first 20 minutes or so make an excellent movie, while the rest just feels like filler.