Everything Is More Important Than My Dissertation Part 2 – When A Stranger Calls
So there was no need to do a remake of When A Stranger Calls. It’s a story as old as time itself, it’s practically on the modern folkloric level of that one about the escaped lunatic with a hook for a hand, and a couple find the hook hanging from their car door, and I think someone gets decapitated, but there are a lot of versions. But everybody knows the story about the babysitter who gets a bunch of threatening phone calls and then the police are like THE CALL IS COMING FROM INSIDE THE HOUSE and then she gets attacked and sometimes dies but usually is saved, depending on who tells it. There was no need to run us through this again. But for some reason whatever film studio decided this was a good idea.
And props to them, for some part. The first three quarters of an hour or so were pretty creepy. The music worked, the house (VERY like the house in Chloe actually, all plate glass and clean lines again) was perfectly unnerving with its floor-to-ceiling windows on all floors, a creepy guest house, and weird aviary-slash-aquarium in the middle of the structure. But then action happened that was meant to be scary and everything just went terribly.
This film suffered from key problems three. First off, I have never seen an actress so uncommitted to her climactic scream. Most slashers, the heroine finds her first body and it’s like “yyyeahh my time to shine, I’mma scream my lungs out”, but this girl just seemed slightly embarrassed doing it which really retracted from the effect. Secondly, throughout her time babysitting she hadn’t met the children. She then finds the children in a BOX and they’re all “hello stranger, a different stranger locked us in a box, but sure, we’ll do everything you say”. For a brief second I thought the children had been murdered, which would’ve been so …refreshing almost. Controversial, thought-provoking, and much more horrific, but SPOILER obviously children do not die in films like this.
But the biggest problem with this film was the reaction of the authorities. Sure, OK, girl phones up about prank callers, it happens, they did all the standard stuff really, monitored the line and all that, and the policeman she talked to just seemed pretty indifferent about the whole situation which, fair enough. Teens will be teens. Yet during the ending montage we’re told that this particular killer has been attributed to the deaths of fifteen – that’s FIFTEEN – young girls in the area who had been terrorised with threatening phone calls the night of their death. You’d maybe have thought the police would’ve caught onto the trend and bucked up a little by this point, even if they didn’t know that THE CALL IS COMING FROM INSIDE THE HOUSE just yet.
But really, who gives a shit? We all know the story and don’t particularly need some pretty American girl in a tight t-shirt to act it out for us. Short and sweet conclusion: failure once again for mainstream American cinema.
Though just to show you how tight a t-shirt, here’s a quick frame of what was pretty much the entire film:
“Oh Em Gee stop calling me I’m waiting for my ex who cheated on me to call and you’re blocking the line” – actual thing this girl said. Sort of.
