| When a Stranger Calls Released: 1979 MPAA Rating: R Genre: Psycho-thriller Nuts and Bolts: Curt Duncan is wily old psychopath freshly arrived from England. He doesn’t have a job. He doesn’t have any friends. He doesn’t even have any family. This leaves good ole Curt with a lot of time to KILL! Summary: Jill Johnson (Carol Kane) is a pretty blonde high school student who has been hired by the well-to-do Mandrakis family to baby-sit their two children leaving the parents time to go and do what rich elitist snobby pricks usually do. The children have been suffering through a cold however, and Mrs. Mandrakis instructs Jill not to disturb them. As they leave, Doctor Mandrakis tells Jill to help herself to some diet yogurt in the fridge. I guess the Doc thinks Jill’s getting a little chunk-heavy about the thighs or something. Anyway, about twenty minutes later Jill is doing homework and bullshitting on the phone with her friend. She hangs up and the phone begins to ring almost immediately after. Jill answers the phone but there’s nobody there. A few minutes later the phone rings again. Jill answers it and a dry voice says, “Have you checked the children?” Jill’s a little freaked and hangs up on the guy. The goofball calls back two more times asking the exact same question. Not only does Jill NOT answer this clown, but she doesn’t even check on the friggin’ kids! As the evening continues, she begins to hear strange noises. She looks outside but sees nothing. Checking around the house, she finds the sounds are coming from the ice cube maker in the kitchen refrigerator. Phone rings again. Same guy. Same question. Jill hangs up. The phone rings a fifth time. But this time NOBODY answers. (Maybe it was Silent Bob) She tries calling the restaurant that Mandrake the Magician said he was going to be at. Apparently Mandrake must have done his old disappearing trick, cuz he ain’t there. Dicklicker calls a 6th time. This time he asks, “WHY haven’t you checked the children?” Jill is completely freaked out now. She calls the cops, but they’re about as useless as tits on a bull. She calls them a second time and Sgt. Sacker agrees to put a trace on the phone. She only needs to keep the wing-nut on the line for at least a minute. Like before, wing-nut calls back. Feeling rather chatty, Jill and he bandy words back and forth. Nutty-buddy tells her that he wants her blood all over him. Yummy. The cops manage to get the trace and we realize that the obscene phone calls are coming from INSIDE the house. Jill escapes from the house just as the cops arrive. The police arrest Curt Duncan who was hiding inside an upstairs bedroom. He had murdered the Mandrakis children hours earlier and was trying to bait Jill to come upstairs. Naturally Curt is taken to a mental hospital. Now we flash forward seven years. We find that Duncan’s arresting officer John Clifford (Charles Durning) is now a private eye rather than a cop. They likely kicked him off the police force for eating too many God damned chocolate covered donuts the sloppy fat fuck. He learns that Curt Duncan has escaped from the mental hospital and is at large. Doctor Mandinko-mon hires Clifford to track Duncan down. The first place Clifford stops is the old insane asylum that Duncan used to stay at. Well…this is actually probably the SECOND place he stopped at. I’m reasonably certain the first place he stopped was McDonalds so he could get the 2 for $2.00 quarter pounder sale. Super-sized of course. He interviews the lead physician who tells him of Duncan’s history with the hospital. Not only is Detective Clifford a fat tub of lard, he’s also an obnoxious fucker on top of it. He yells at Doctor Monk for letting Duncan escape and threatens to eat her family. At this point, we cut to a San Francisco pool hall known as Torchy’s. Curt Duncan walks into the place and tries to pick up some dried up old bitch whose sitting at the bar. Her name is Tracy Fuller. She is completely not interested in him, but he keeps pressing the issue. He offers to light her cigarette, buy her a drink…the whole nine yards. Hell, he’d probably offer to suck the wrinkles out of her ass if he thought for a second that she would let him. She sends out every possible warning signal to this loser, but he is completely clueless. Finally one of the other patrons decides to intervene. He beats the shit out of Curt and halls him out the back door. Tracy eventually leaves the bar, and Curt follows her back to her apartment. He pretty much lets himself in. Tracy feels bad for the way he’s been treated and Curt tries the ole ‘pity’ routine in an effort to score. But once again, the mean ole bitch ain’t having it and she ushers him out the door. She locks the door behind him, but Curt tries to break in moments later. Giving that up, he takes to the streets and mingles with the other homeless. The next day, Curt and some wino get kicked out of a bar. The wino tries to befriend Curt, but the psychopath just ignores him. At the same time, Mayor McFat himself is casing the streets looking for Curt. Along the way he comes upon a basket of kittens and swallows them all in one bite. (Okay, I lied about that last bit. But it WOULD have made the movie more interesting.) He actually comes upon the wino and asks him if he’s seen Curt. The wino says “Yeah” and points him in the right direction. He eventually works his way down to Torchy’s. From there he learns that Curt was there the previous evening and was harassing a patron. Clifford gets the patron’s name and tracks Tracy back to her apartment. He knocks on her door, but Tracy isn’t real receptive. She doesn’t believe that he’s really a private dick. She just thinks he’s a dick. After many obnoxious rude comments, Fat-ass finally finagles his way into the apartment. He shows her pictures of Duncan and describes how he mangled the Mandrakis children with his bare hands. He tells her that he will be in touch and to contact him if she learns anything. Later that night, Tracy slams back a few more drinks at Torchy’s. She returns home only to find that Curt had managed to break into her apartment. Curt corners her and presses his hand against her mouth. He drones on about how he wants to be her friend, but she finally manages to scream for help. Before ya know it, the Belly-that-walked-like-a-man bursts up into the crib in all of his over-inflated ugliness. Curt bolts out the back and escapes through the window. Cliffy tries to chase after him, but finds himself stuck between two alleyways. Guess he shouldn’t have had that third Big-Mac eh? Needless to say, Duncan escapes. That evening, Curt acquires a bed at the rescue mission. He’s having a really hard time of it and finds himself recalling the events at the Mandrakis house. Clifford is tracking him and runs into that wino again. The wino tells him that Curt is at the mission. Clifford probably would have gotten to the rescue mission on time, but he stopped off at Pizza Hut for their hand-tossed cheese-crust specials. He eventually scopes out the mission and finds Curt. Like before, Duncan takes off through the back door and fatty is forced to pursue him. Once again, Curt gets away. Now at about this time, you are probably wondering what the fuck ever happened to Jill Johnson right? Well, Jilly is happily married to a yuppie executive and lives in a really nice home with her two darling kids. Husband Steve Lockart has just received a big promotion at work and wants to celebrate by taking his wife out to dinner. She makes quick plans with the babysitter and the two take off for the restaurant. While in the midst of dining, the Maitre D’ informs Jill that she has a phone call at the front desk. She leaves Stephen at the table to answer it. Upon putting the receiver to her ear she hears a voice say, “Have you checked on the children?” Jill has a total shit-attack and Steve and she rush home to check on the kids. The babysitter doesn’t know diddly-shit and everything seems to be ok. The kids are fine. They call the cops and report the obscene phone call (Clifford learns that Duncan is in the area). That night, Jill awakens with a start. She is really nervous about hearing Duncan’s voice again after seven years. She goes downstairs to get a glass of milk. Finishing the beverage, she returns upstairs to check on the kids. Other than a sticky piece of candy attached to her son’s shirt everything seems A-OK. (Don’t let Clifford see that candy bar. He’s liable to eat the whole child just to get to it.) She gets back into bed and notices that the closet door is open. She distinctly remembers shutting it and begins to get really nervous. She shakes her husband awake. But the man sleeping in the bed next to her is NOT Stephen Lockart. It’s not fucking Goldilocks either. Curt Duncan leaps from the sheets and attacks Jill. He wrestles her down to the ground and prepares to crush her skull with his bare hands. Rushing in to save the day is our champion of justice, The Indefatigable Fatinator! Clifford squeezes off six shots into Duncan’s chest killing him. Acting/Dialogue: Carol Kane plays the role of Jill Johnson-Lockart. She’s always a joy to watch and it’s interesting to see her play a non-comedic role. Carol’s got this funky accent that I can never quite place. As far as I know, she is 100% American, so I really have no idea why she has a foreign sounding accent. Maybe she’s ¼ retard, what do I know? Charles Durning plays the role of John Clifford and if you can find a more annoying actor in Hollywood, I would love to hear about it. Tony Beckley does a fair enough job as psychotic Curt Duncan I suppose. This character is definitely a few fries short of a Happy Meal. And it wouldn’t surprise me to learn if the late Tony Beckley was a little off his rocker either. Guilty Pleasures: Uhhh…we get to see Tony Beckley’s pubic hairs and bald naked ass. That’s probably enough to even make John Clifford lose his appetite. Gore: Uhhh…we get to see Tony Beckley’s pubic hairs and bald naked ass. That’s probably enough to even make John Clifford lose his appetite. The Good: I equate When a Stranger Calls to a premature ejaculation. The first twenty minutes or so are really fucking intense. There’s a really great music score by Dana Kaproff, which reminds me greatly of Henry Mancini’s work on the Friday the 13th films. Dana knows exactly when to hit the right notes during these scenes and I give her full credit for making the prologue to this movie as memorable as it is. There’s a really cool segment, which goes a long way towards illustrating Jill’s paranoia. Jill hears a strange noise and begins to get worried. She scours all about the house checking all the doors and windows. She finally goes into the kitchen where she discovers that the sound was coming from the ice maker in the refrigerator. Now, for those of you who scoff at the idea that an ice maker can be creepy; try spending the night in a strange house equipped with one of the those things. I’ve done it. They’re eerie as all-hell. Director Fred Walton makes great use of the ‘caller is in the house’ motif. Although not exactly original, he succeeds in bringing the suspense to a crescendo when the audience learns that the obscene phone caller is actually just upstairs from his intended victim. This cliché can also be found in the Scream movies produced by Wes Craven in the 1990s. Remember what I said about premature ejaculation? Well, this is pretty much where the movie shoots its load. Hey, they don’t call it a climax for nothing. After you get to the part where the cops arrive at the Mandrakis house, you might as well shut the player off. The Bad: What an over-rated piece of pretentious crap. I can’t believe this film has received the platitudes that it has. Now while I think the intro is awesome, the remainder of the movie fizzles out with the rapidity of one of Wile E. Coyote’s dynamite sticks. You guys probably think that I’m being overly harsh on our friendly neighborhood corpulent detective too eh? I probably wouldn’t be so apt to make fun of him if there were any positive things that I could think of to say regarding this ass-wipe. Now my mother always told me, “If you can’t say something nice, then don’t say anything at all.” Well no offense ma, but if I were to do that, things would get awfully fucking quiet around here. The plain and simple truth is: John Clifford is an asshole. He has this whiny nasally voice that makes you want to pull your own ears off and he’s a complete fucking wanker throughout the whole picture. This guy has ZERO going for him. He’s a dick to pretty much everyone he comes across. One of the biggest issues I have with this flick is that the climax of the prologue is lifted practically verbatim from the 1974 cult classic Black Christmas. (Black Christmas originally established the theme behind the obscene phone caller calling from somewhere inside the house.) Now while, I think WASC does it better, I feel it is really unfair that this film is so renowned for this bit and that no credit is ever given to the source material. It’s a shame that the only decent aspect to this flick is actually just a re-working of somebody else’s material. Now while I find that the last leg of this puke-fest is actually kind of interesting, it doesn’t make up for the hour’s worth of garbage we have to put up with before hand. If you just take the last twenty minutes and re-record it back to back with the first twenty minutes, then you’ve got yourself a pretty cool film. But hey, even the purdiest of apples tend to have a big fat fucking worm in them sometimes. And in the case of When a Stranger Calls, the worm is from the planet Arrakis. Great Lines: “Have you checked on the children?” --Curt Duncan says this to Jill Johnson several times throughout the movie. “What do you want?” “Your blood all over me.” --Another one of Curt’s classic pick-up lines. “*chomp chomp chomp chomp* Hey! Can you super-size that? Yeah. With a coke. *burp* And let me get another one of those McFlurries. Yeah…with sprinkles. And how about…*chomp chomp chomp*…how about some McNuggets. How many? Shit, I don’t know. How many you got in there?” --Super Sleuth Detective John Clifford staking out possible suspects at the local Mickey-Ds. Overall Rating: 4 out of 10 severed heads. |
 |
|
|
|
| Back to Movie List Back to Contents Back to McDonalds |
 |
|
|
 |