 |
When A Stranger Calls |
|
|
  |
| Use the darkbrown scrollbar to the right to scroll down for the review. |
Jill
Johnson is your average teenage girl with
typical high school problems and a boyfriend that
doesn't treat her right. Tonight Jill is baby-
sitting while all of her friends are off to an
annual bon-fire party. Jill thinks that it will
be a quiet evening by herself but soon enough,
she starts receiving strange phone calls which
will make her so scared that she is forced to call
everyone in her address book.
In the middle of the horror remake hysteria, this
strange remake appears and I didn't really know
what to expect when I started watching this flick.
While most of the recent horror movie remakes
have been quite awful (The Fog and Dark Water
comes to mind), some have actually been quite
good and as much as I hate remakes, I have to say
that the late 70s thriller that this is based on
definitely had its flaws and could use a good
remake. Unfortunately, this was not the result
that I had hoped for.
The original movie is mainly famous due to the
first 17 minutes with Carol Kane as a babysitter
so naturally they have chopped away the rest of
the original story in this remake and stretched
the first 17 minutes from the original into a
full length feature. As you can hear this doesn't
sound too promising but at least they threw in
bunches of unnecessary and strange elements to
extend the movie to its fullest.
The house that this remake takes place in is
ridiculously high-tech. Every time you enter a
room the lights go on, and when you leave it,
the lights go off. Sure this is a pretty neat
way to create some atmosphere but it doesn't
take long before the light-effect gets repetitive
and dull. To extend the story even more they
threw in a weird and very short subplot concerning
a guest house and I'm still not sure what this
had to do with the movie, nor do we ever get an
explanation to what takes place in the guest house.
It's amazing how many plot holes there actually
are in this movie since the plot itself is so
incredibly bare-boned. There were just so many
obstacles in this movie that I couldn't overcome.
I mean, sure the climax is pretty good but is it
worth waiting 75 minutes before anything actually
happens? I think not. If you've seen the trailer
for When A Stranger Calls, you've seen the entire
movie. There is nothing more in here, seriously,
the entire movie was just a ridiculously extended
version of the trailer. This might have satisfied
its core audience, the PG-13 teenyboppers, but
this tired Scream copy is not a movie I will be
picking up on DVD.
PG-13 gore, nothing worth mentioning.
Standard stuff here, manages to create a couple
of good suspenseful scenes but not even the best
soundtrack could have saved this movie.
With an incredibly low body-count for a slasher
flick, dull PG-13 gore (I assure you, there will
be a pathetic Unrated Widescreen DVD of this as
well), and an incredibly bare-boned story, this
remake will most likely fail to impress any true
horror fan. Stick to the original, it might have
its problems but it still is a whole lot better
than this teen slasher flick.
Review By: AnthroFred
