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Back Shelf Beauties
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When A Stranger Calls If it's Friday, it must be time for Hollywood to roll out another cheaply made horror movie starring people you have seen on The WB or some Nickelodeon program your nephew and niece made you watch during your holiday visit home. When A Stranger Calls had the chance to be better than the others, but the rest of the movie needs to be just as good as the climax. Based on the 1979 movie of the same title, Camilla Belle stars as Jill - a teen girl who needs to take a babysitting gig to pay her cell phone bill (she should have signed up for one of those unlimited plans). On the night of the big bonfire, when all of her friends are out having a wild time, Jill has to head off to a secluded mountain mansion to watch some kids she has never met before. Everything seems to be very cool as the house is huge, there is plenty of food in the refrigerator, and the children are sound asleep. However, our young babysitter starts to receive strange phone calls from someone breathing heavy on the other end of the line, and he starts to ask, "Have you checked the children?" Soon, she finds out the calls are coming from a location much closer than she could have imagined, or feared. Will Jill be able to keep the children safe? Will she make it through the night alive? When A Stranger Calls is a wonderful concept with amazing potential to scare us out of our underpants, but director Simon West and writer Jake Wade Wall miss the opportunity to make it awesome (which means you'll still be wearing your underpants at the end of the movie). West is saddled with a weak script by Wall as more dialogue is needed to build up the tension and flesh out "The Stranger." Heavy breathing is not enough to give us Goosebumps. The movie is much more effective when The Stranger makes menacing statements to scare Jill, which could have led to some interesting cat-and-mouse type interplay between the two. Unfortunately, that level of accomplishment means the writer has to strive for it, and Wall seems to be on autopilot, foresaking complexity for the obvious. When A Stranger Calls lacks memorable dialogue, and Wall awkwardly tries to insert a subplot about Jill and her friends that yields some of the worst dialogue of the year. Either he has no ability to create interesting discussions or he has such a low opinion of teenagers, he thinks they all speak at a second grade level. To compensate, West overdoes it with the ominous music, which is beaten into our heads with a mind numbing constancy from start to finish. If Wall provided better twists and turns, instead of a series of cheap fake outs showing a lack of imagination, the music would add to the ambiance and chills, but West should have realized this shortcoming and focused on a better mechanism to draw in the audience. He does a good job making things go bump in the night, showing us how the lights go on in a room when you enter (which sets up some scary scenes), bad cell phone connections (to take us off the track of The Stranger) and other creepy incidents, and, best of all, makes the climax as exciting, action packed and frightening as you can hope for in a movie like this. However, West takes too long to get the action going. The anticipated chase scene at the end is fraught with peril and danger, but the rest of the movie could have used some of that, too. Belle is fine as the damsel in distress, but some of the cast is so bad it made me wonder if they won some sort of internet contest, or were the fifth caller on a radio station to get their roles. David Denman, usually very effective on The Office (as Pam's dimwitted and unfeeling fiancée), is stiff and lifeless as he makes his character, Officer Burroughs, into the worst cop this side of Roscoe P. Coltrane. It's one of the phoniest performances you will see and hear, even as Katie Cassidy, playing Jill's pal Tiffany, doesn't make her character smart enough to reach the level of airhead. All of this leaves Belle as the shining light in the darkness of When A Stranger Calls. She's been in better movies, like The Ballad of Jack and Rose (where she was super creepy and sad), but likely craves the stardom (and cash) a movie like this can bring. Belle brings the required levels of fear, panting and overall hotness we expect (I can say that without coming off as a creepy pervert. She's 19-years old. I looked it up), and she often exceeds the script's inadequacy with her reactions to the situations presented in the movie. While West and Wade often fail to make the situations frightening enough, Belle makes you believe Jill is on the verge of a mental breakdown, which is quite a challenge in this movie. I can't wait to see her in a better movie. When A Stranger Calls is not a waste of time, and has a great climax, but it needs more help to be a great movie. 1 ½ Waffles (Out Of 4) Copyright 2006 - WaffleMovies.com
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