By John Davis

 “The call is coming from inside the House!”  The line from the 1979 movie has resonated with teenage babysitters alone in an unfamiliar house, for years.  The stuff of urban legends, the original movie has a 15 minute intensely terrifying intro, followed by an hour or so of boring filler, leading up to the last 10 minutes or so of another good scare.  The 2006 remake does a good job of stretching out the bumps and chills to the full 90 minutes.

The basic plot of the movie involves a teenager, Jill Johnson (played by Camilla Belle) who has gone over cell phone minutes by 14 hours talking to her boyfriend.  As punishment, she is grounded, has her car privileges taken away, and must work to earn the money to pay back her parents for the outrageous phone bill.  So she takes on a babysitting gig in the suburban mausoleum of a house owned by the Mandrakis family.

As her father drops her off, we learn that the children are already upstairs asleep.  The live in house keeper is tied up dealing with a large number of birds in the wildlife room, and the teenage older brother is asleep in the guest house.  As Jill begins her duties, the phone starts ringing.  The first few calls are red herrings; the ex-boyfriend, the bitchy best friend.  Then the weirdness starts.

The voice on the other end of the line asks, “Have you checked on the children?”  Thus begins a bumpy and suspenseful night filled with shadows, dark corridors, and general pandemonium.  Eventually, after several weird calls, Jill calls the police.  And we get to hear the tag line, “The Calls are coming from within the House”.

The movie is light on gore, surprisingly so given the trend towards blood and guts these days, even on television.  Though there are two murders and allusions to another, that all happen mostly off-screen.  It earns its PG-13 rating for the intense horror, which really is mostly just shadows, the trees outside, the cat or other innocent situations that play on the already worked up mind of young Jill.  But there is a stranger, who is a real threat.

The plot is really aimed at the teenage market (thus the rating), and should make the most fearless babysitter wonder at the unfamiliar sounds they hear in the house the next time they are babysitting.  It should cause a shiver or two up the spine for anyone who is home alone. 

“When A Stranger Calls” is worth seeing for the bump in the dark terror, and it doesn’t disappoint.  It is not a movie that should be expected to be anything new, though it is much better than the original.  It is even refreshing to see a movie that scares without being overly violent, or at least with inferred violence rather than the in your face gore. 

Rating  3.5/5