When a Stranger Calls
(1979)
[DVD Info]

Jill (Carol Kane) is babysitting a couple kids for the night. Everything is going well until she starts receiving strange phone calls. The first call is just a hang up. The second and third call, a man is on the line. “Have you checked the children?” he whispers threateningly. She then begins to hear strange noises. After some investigation, she finds nothing. The phone calls keep coming. Scared, she calls the police who tell her they can’t do anything about it. After a few more calls, she alerts the police again, who tell her that they’ll try to figure out where the calls are coming from. She gets another call. It’s the man again. He tells her he wants her blood all over him. When he hangs up, she begins to head up the stairs to check on the children. The phone rings. It’s the police. They’ve traced the call, and it’s coming from inside the house! Seven years later, the man who called her that night, escapes the mental institution. After seeing her picture in the newspaper he decides to finish the job he started 7 years earlier. Will he succeed?

British accents aren’t scary.
It’s hard to woo an ornery bar fly.
It’s okay for a cop to kill criminals because it makes up for an entire career of sucking.
Some people will go to any lengths for a friend.
Never send a fat man to do a healthy man’s job.

"It’s probably some weirdo, the city's full of them." ~Police Officer when Jill calls him about the weird phone calls.

Nothin’ really.

I remember hearing this urban legend as a kid. The baby sitter is downstairs and is getting the phone calls from inside the house. This is such a creepy concept. The movie took that legend and then took it further. They could’ve had an entire movie just based on the legend. This was predictable but sort of creepy. The fact that the killer was British kind of bogged the movie down. There’s nothing scary about British accents. I wonder why Jill never went upstairs to check on the children. If someone called me and said that, I would’ve gone upstairs to check on them…but after watching this movie I wouldn’t! The creepiest part of the movie is that you don’t know who’s calling. When they showed the killer, it wasn’t that scary anymore. He wasn’t crazy looking or scary looking. He just looked like some British guy who gets his ya-ya’s from calling teenage babysitters and freaking them out. The best parts of the movie were the beginning and the end. The whole middle part where the killer escapes the mental institution and tries to befriend that woman and the cop trying to kill him slowed the movie down a lot. Unfortunately this was the meat of the movie. Then end was pretty creepy when he’s lying in her bed. Oooh. The funny thing about this movie was every time something “creepy” was about to happen, the music sounded like the THX theme. Heheh.

I couldn’t take this movie completely seriously since always think of the comedian Dane Cook who talks about this movie. “If someone calls the house saying ‘have you checked the children’…fuck that I quit. My shift it officially over. Or, if they call…you can fuck with them. When they say ‘have you checked the children’ I’d say ‘I’ve already killed them!’” Heheh. It was a pretty decent movie; it had its moments for sure. Because of this, the jury gives this flick:

(Fine)

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