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When a Stranger Calls Review |
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Mar 25, 2008 at 03:11 AM |
 Director :
Simon West
Starring : Camilla Belle
Trailer for When a Stranger Calls
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The plot of When a Stranger Calls
During an otherwise routine babysitting gig, a high-school student (Belle) is harassed by an increasingly threatening prank caller.
When a Stranger Calls Review
Review by Brian Orndorf:
Jill Johnson (Camilla Belle) is a teenager looking for a little extra money through babysitting to pay her extravagant cell phone bills. Taking a job for a rich couple in their luxurious, isolated home, Jill settles in for an easy evening in a cavernous location. Trouble arrives with a seemingly prank phone call that urges Jill "to check the children." What starts as harmless fun soon erupts into violence, with Jill fighting for her life against a mysterious killer in unfamiliar surroundings.Not surprisingly, "When a Stranger Calls" is a remake, this time of a 1979 chiller that starred Carol Kane. The story is a simple exercise in suspense filmmaking, and the producers have updated the script to include more modern touches, since the world of telephones hasn't been all that frightening since Bush Sr. was in office. One might even suggest that this idea has been rendered obsolete in an era of caller ID and "star 69. Review By Walter Chaw:
There's nothing patently, obviously offensive about Simon West's abominable remake of the already awful "thriller" When a Stranger Calls: it's neither misogynistic nor racist nor really anything more than exactly what you'd expect from a project like this, dumped as it has been in the wasteland of another early-February. It's so studiedly inoffensive, in fact, that you could take an elderly nun to it and there would be nary a flutter in her rigidly tender sensibilities. It tittles no ates, manufactures no suspense, and no one in a packed audience of four-hundred folks at the preview screening rustled an inch when the cat--not once, but twice--provided the false jump before the "real" one, though I confess the reason for that might be that by the time West and company get around to actually having something happen, most anyone with any kind of sense is asleep or halfway home. I've failed to mention that it's acted by heavy-browed lead Camilla Belle (as babysitter Johnson, Jill Johnson) like a toy robot with her key only half-wound. Were she to have run out of juice negotiating a wall and leaned there motionless, I wouldn't have batted an eyelash. |
