David Cassidy Video:

		List Price: $14.94		Label: Sony Pictures Salesrank: 16444 Released: May 16, 2006
		Our Price: $2.73
		Used Price: $0.33
		MPAA Rating: PG-13 (Parental Guidance Suggested) Media: DVD

Editorial Review:
DURING AN OTHERWISE ROUTINE BABYSITTING GIG, A HIGH-SCHOOLSTUDENT IS HARASSED BY AN INCREASINGLY THREATENING PRANK CALLER.

Description of When a Stranger Calls:
The smartest thing about the remake of When a Stranger Calls is that it strips the original 1979 version to its bare essentials as a primal exercise in stormy-night terror. While taking the original film's suspenseful first act and expanding it into an 87-minute cat-and-mouse game, screenwriter Jake Wade Wall adds a few clever updates involving cellphones and home-security services, as well as the maze-like menace of a lavish modern home that serves as the setting for mayhem when cute teenager Jill (Camilla Belle, in the role originated by Carol Kane) takes on a babysitting job that she may live to regret. Someone is stalking her in the big, expensive glass palace that her employers call home (a splendid set designed by Jon Gary Steele), and that creepy voice on the phone (belonging to Lance Henriksen, master of doom-laden threat) should've been her first clue to grab the pair of terrified kids she's supposed to be protecting and leave the house ASAP. But no, the script, the overwrought score, and the uninspired direction of Simon West (Con-Air, Lara Croft: Tomb Raider) insist that poor Jill be put through a Halloween-like night from hell, complete with a black cat as an omen of nasty things to come. Kudos to Wall and West for attempting to generate horror through suggestion (by keeping the homicidal stalker mostly off-screen), but let's face it: the original film is hardly a classic (its TV-movie sequel, When a Stranger Calls Back, is considerably better), and the remake takes too long to yield minimal rewards. Maybe Jill should've just unplugged the phone. --Jeff Shannon

When a Stranger Calls Reviews:
0 stars actually
2009-06-28 - Does not bring anything new to the table. Acting is flat and uninspired. Situations are predictable and contrived...such as...Jill is knocked to the floor by the killer, Jill grabs a bottle of booze and throws it at the fire place, killer throttles Jill as she also managers to grab the remote control for the fireplace, find the right button, presses it, and light the fireplace all the while getting the life choked out of her. There are other instances throughout the film where Jill, who didn't even know how to get to the house she was to baby sit at knew how to work instantly the phones, the security system, the fire place, the watering system...but the owners never even met her before or took time to show her how this stuff worked.

And, as for parents, why do you put your kids down for a nap right before bedtime? Wouldn't you want them tired so they would sleep through the night?

My advice...AVOID

When a psycho calls
2009-03-18 - When 16 year old Jills' boyfriend kisses her best friend she spends an excess of about 700 minutes on her mobile discussing it with him and so her parents make her get a baby-sitting job to pay the money back. And (surprise, surprise) the house she is babysitting at is a deserted mansion in the middle of (the woods?) nowhere.

At first the babysitting is a pretty enjoyable experience for Jill - the house is massive and full of fun and impressive gadgets and furniture, plus the children are already asleep in bed when she gets there so she hasnt really got any work to do either. But then the creepy phone calls begin and she cant contact any of her friends for help because they are all at this bonfire-party on the top a hill somewhere in town. At first she dissmissed the calls as a sick joke but then she discovers that the caller is watching her and he asks if she's checked the children...

This horror movie is more suspencefull than scary because nothing really happens for quit a while apart from her receiving creepy calls. In the last 20 minutes there is some horror and action as she discovers dead bodies and tries to escape the caller etc and the ennding is pretty chilling, too.

Overall this is quite a good horror movie (especially if you prefere suspence over gore) that I would reccomend if you are looking for a good horror/thriller movie.

Unplug the d##n phone already
2009-02-15 - This is without a doubt the first movie i have ever watched in my life that actually irritated me. From the beginning of the movie all the way to the end, it was the phone constantly ringing. I didn't count how many times the phone rang at the house where ( Jill ) was babysitting or how many phone calls she made, but it was in the dozens ! By the time the phone call came from the police to tell Jill that the creep was in the house, i was ready to turn the movie off and throw away the dvd.
This movie has so many flaws in it, they are beyond counting, just like the number of phone calls. The loud screeching music, the black cat jumping into a scene and the birds loudly fluttering about were just a few of the also irritating and over used bits to try to muster up a scare. I even found myself getting sick of hearing Jill's panting as she ran all over trying to get away from El-Creepo.
I only paid one penny for this dvd and the shipping was $2.98. I thought i made a good purchase, but after having to sit through this poorly made movie and the bad acting and all it's flaws, i regret the purchase. Bottom line : if you see the previews to this movie, you've seen the best of it and all you need to see. Save your money and don't rent or buy it.

God forbid she takes the phone off the hook.
2008-12-17 - WHEN A STRANGER CALLS is about a guy who likes to make obscene phone calls to teenage girls and then eventually break into their house and kill them. His victim in particular for this movie is Jill (Camilla Belle), a high school girl who is babysitting at a home out in the middle of nowhere. She's been grounded for a month (no cell phone and no car) which sets up the fact that she's REALLY stuck at this isolated house when all heck breaks loose toward the end. Honestly, I wasn't expecting much out of this movie and only saw it because I found out Camilla Belle was in it. Other than that, it probably would have been added to the list of the other lame PG-13 Horror movies that I would have entirely skipped altogether (PULSE, ONE MISSED CALL, PROM NIGHT, etc.).

So with that being said, I think my low expectations were met in full. WHEN A STRANGER CALLS was about an hour of Jill overreacting to nothing and about a half an hour of her getting chased around. Nothing special. There's no real explanation as to WHY the "Stranger" in the film did what he did or what the motive for his past cases was. And on a personal level nothing in the movie struck me as being scary and I think that the fact that I'm not a high school girl could have played a part in that, because I'm pretty sure any adult will watch this film and automatically pick apart its flaws and come up with solutions to many of Jill's problems. And even when you look at this film from the perspective on someone suspending their disbelief and just accepting it for what it is... it's still not very entertaining. WHEN A STRANGER CALLS is not necessarily a remake, per se, but more of a different version of an older film called WHEN A STRANGER CALLS BACK. In the original film, it used a lot of different things to create suspense and terror, such as plot twists, weird characters, atmosphere, etc. and most importantly it let you KNOW who the antagonist was and what kind of person he was, where as this film doesn't do that. You don't know anything about him other than the fact that he killed a girl in the beginning of the film.

Overall, I didn't like this movie at all. I would watch it again if it was on TV and nothing else was on. It's not entertaining, but it's not COMPLETELY unbearable. The film quality is great, the photography is really nice, and the cast is pretty. It's also not necessarily a Horror film, it's more of a Drama with elements of Horror (a damsel in distress, a psychopathic killer). Ultimately, I think my handicap with this film is that I don't fall into the whole PG-13 demographic. This is a movie for teenagers and that's all there is to it. So if you're a teen, you may like this or if you're smart enough you may see past it's stupidity. If you're an adult looking for something creepy, you should just skip this one and not think twice about it.

2 stars

When A Stranger Hits Redial
2008-11-17 - "What are you going to do tonight?" a friend of mine asked.

"I'm going to watch a movie, an old scary one. When a Stranger Calls. It's supposed to be good."

"Is that the one with the babysitter?"

"I don't know. I haven't seen it."

"Yeah. I know that one. It's famous, right? It's the one where you find out he's calling -- "

"Shut up shut up shut up! I don't want to know anything about it. I like to go in fresh."

So I went in fresh, and ten minutes in, I realized that I already knew the creepy twist. And if you've been told at least three campfire tales in your life, I'd wager odds that you know the twist, too. Even if you've never seen the movie in question.

That's not so bad. The first twenty minutes of the original manage to be tense without trying the patience. The elfin Carol Kane stars as a babysitter named Jill who finds her night plagued with strange phone calls. The caller never says much, but what he does say (voiced with fragile menace by the late Tony Beckley) can melt the nerves. It's the kind of powerful scene that is usually found at the climax of a movie.

And therein lies the problem.

WHEN THE STRANGER CALLS (1979) has a neat idea, but nothing to go with it. After the First Act scare, the movie becomes philosophical and ponderous. The camera follows two men: Charles Durning as the dispeptic private detective John Clifford and our resident serial killer, Curt Duncan. "He's from England."

It's not unheard of for a "horror" movie (that's where you'll find this title shelved, but the genre is misapplied) to reveal some of the basic humanity of its villain, but this flick goes a step further and exposes his tenderest vulnerabilities. He is made more human, brittler, his actual madness becomes a place for pity. All of this while Clifford pursues him with squinty-eyed persistence and a lock needle in his pocket. (If you've never heard of a lock needle before, it is a long, pointy thing that you would never, ever want to carry in your pocket.)

Trying to reverse the roles like that -- murderer becomes society's whipping boy versus the man trying to get vengence beyond the law -- makes for an interesting social studies lesson. But it's not hard to get the picture within the first fifteen minutes, and yet there are roughly forty more to go. After this, the finale is a welcome burst of energy, but it doesn't linger with quite the smack that the intro offers.

Certainly a movie that could use some renovation, right? So thought Simon West, whose directorial debut was Con Air. And thus a remake was born.

Watching the remake immediately after the original might have been a bad idea, but it did make a few things very clear to me.

First of all, West must've been aware of the first film's shortcomings, because he only sticks to what worked for the original: the first twenty minutes. Granted, the first twenty minutes would make a GREAT episode of The Twilight Zone (I could've sworn it already was), but a feature-length movie? Errrmmmm.

And there's the unfortunate part. West's re-do steals some scene direction and a lot of lines from the original. But to pad the film out, he has added the tricky maze of a doctor's absurdly large house, along with all of the doctor's weird gadgetry (automatic lights, a greenhouse built in the center of the house, a remote controlled fireplace). He also gives us a few unnecessary characters (a ridiculous visit from a friend and a live-in maid ... why are these people hiring a babysitter if they have a live-in maid?). This plus a very fragile sub-plot involving jogging.

West moves fast once the movie has finally exhausted it's key line ("He's calling **** ****** *** *****!"), which is wise. It gets a little awkward when the kids get involved, but only because they are such poor actors that West films them mostly in obscurity and gives them no lines whatsoever. And whereas the first film shows the killer in a shadowless spotlight, West keeps him as murky as his voice, this time around the over-done gravel of Lance Henriksen. It's a predictable trade-off, and it has predictably mediocre results.

It's a movie that knows what it has going for it. Even after fullfilling the necessary wrap-up, though, West can't resist one last stinger, a completely unnecessary but totally understandable last moment zing that, of course, concludes with the greatest thing about either of these movies:

"HE'S CALLING ...

No. I'm not going to be the one to spoil it for you.