REVIEWED - WHEN A STRANGER CALLS: THE reputation of the first When a Stranger Calls, a tolerable Halloween rip-off from 1979 starring, of all people, Carol Kane, rests on the uncomfortable revelation that the sinister phone calls disturbing the babysitter are coming from inside the house.
Simon West, director of such waste matter as Tomb Raider and Con Air, surely faced quite a few dilemmas while planning his useless remake. Most revolve around advances in telecommunications: the ubiquity of mobile phones; the availability of caller ID; ring tones which sound like jolly frogs rather than morbid tolling bells. These he either brushes away with boringly pedantic plot nodules or points up using the same jokes Wes Craven devised for the opening scene of Scream.
A more stubborn problem is how to fill the time before we discover the calls are coming from inside the house. In the original, the chilling disclosure arrived after just 20 minutes, thus rendering the film's second two acts dull and redundant. West, preferring grinding repetition to redundancy, allows one hour and 15 minutes to pass (trust me, you'll be looking at your watch too) before the police finally trace the call.
We are, as a result, saddled with endless sequences in which young Camilla Belle, the innocuous gummy bear from The Ballad of Jack and Rose, answers the phone, grimaces, then stares nervously out the window. What's wrong with her? Doesn't she realise the calls are coming from inside the house?
Most people who, like this poor fool, work from home get enough of this sort of thing in their daily lives. "I want your blood all over me," the stranger growls. More tenacious phone pests say more terrifying things. "Can I speak to the person who pays the bill?" for one.
