When A Sutton Blogs

I just returned from seeing When A Stranger Calls, and frankly, it was quite an experience. The projector was off-balance numerous times (which ended up swapping the top and bottom halves of the screen), and there was one point near the end where the movie just stopped for absolutely no reason. So we got a ten-minute intermission for no reason, while half the audience left to complain and ask for refunds.

So enough about the crappy theater, let's talk about the movie itself. The movie is ostensibly a remake of the 1979 horror film starring Carol Kane, yet it takes the original film's somewhat famous first act and stretches it over a 90-minute frame. The remake would have made for a wonderful short film, but it starts to wear itself thin as it tries to squeeze in every "mysterious killer on the loose" cliché it can. And even if the big twist wasn't given away in all the commercials and advertisements, it would still be painfully obvious that the killer is in the house the whole time. Lead actress Camilla Belle is flat, running a gamut of emotions ranging from A to B while the movie itself relies too much on false jump scares. However, there are a handful of genuinely scary moments in the movie, while the stranger in question (whose over-the-phone voice belongs to Lance Henriksen) does manage to be quite creepy at times. But all in all, I'm going to give it a thumbs-in-the-middle with three stars. It's not horrible, but it's not going to set the world on fire either. And with that ending, I bet they're going to remake the second two-thirds of When A Stranger Calls, and release it as When A Stranger Calls Back. I would.