The first 20 minutes of this film have been copied or parodied so many times in the last 30 years, it's hard to look objectively today at the impact of this sequence. However, even stripped of pretensions, the first act of When A Stranger Calls remains one of the most harrowing and effective horror stages ever set.
The simplicity here is key. The voice on the phone that haunts Carol Kane throughout is soft-spoken, not wild and animalistic. Therefore, the words themselves become the source of horror, and this works just fine, since a malevolent timbre asking "have you checked the children?" suggests more menace than film-makers would dare put on the screen. The camera work is likewise sparse: shots of Kane from strange angles that seem to show the camera poised in the darkest, most oblique corners of the house. We don't quite know who is watching her, or from where, but the tension as we are led through the process of discovery is palpable. Kane's performance isn't hysterical or unrealistic, it's actually just as deliberate and cautious as the pacing of the terrors to come. The way director Fred Walton pulls us through this opening salvo is genius, and it's especially fitting that we never lay eyes on the mysterious caller, and that we never get to "check the children".
Given the sublime execution here, it's not surprising that the remainder of the film fails to match the impact of this opening sequence. What is surprising is that the largely inept and dull hour that follows was directed by the same person. In fact, the rest of When A Stranger Calls is so disjointed and unnecessary that we can't help but guess that Walton made a brilliant short film and succumbed to the pressure to flesh out the piece into feature length to ensure that more eyes would see it.
Our second act takes the film into a myriad of directions, none of which ultimately have any point when we reach our finale. Frankly, the stories tacked on to the initial shocking narrative are uninteresting, and despite a great performance from Colleen Dewhurst and a nail-biting sequence in her apartment, the entire middle section is almost tedious enough to make us forget how floored we were by the first segment. In fact, it isn't entirely clear why Dewhurst is even in the film, since she has nothing to do with the opening set-up, nor the climax that concludes it. She simply disappears as we enter the final act, after we've invested 40 minutes of screen time in developing her character, and we're left wondering if we didn't wander into a different movie by mistake. Given that nearly half of the film's running time is devoted to the entirely useless series of subplots found in this awkwardly-paced middle act, it's no wonder that When A Stranger Calls isn't regarded as a classic, despite its immeasurably influential opening number.
Ultimately, the film isn't sure what it wants to be. Is our focus on an overweight ex-cop seeking justice for the horrific murders he was unable to stop seven years before? If so, the presentation of this is so banal, it isn't even worth making a movie about. Charles Durning has less screen presence than the telephone Kane answers so many times early in the film, and his rote performance is about as nuanced as that of the couch Kane sits on. Maybe we're supposed to root for Durning as a hero, but the viewer can't help but imagine that if our lives depended on Durning saving the day, we'd be quite doomed.
Perhaps the point is to study a schizophrenic murderer trying to forge a normal life after bottling up the atrocities that led to his institutionalization? Okay, I'll bite, and this is certainly a lot more interesting than watching Durning show the killer's mugshot to everyone in the city in a vain attempt at pursuit. However, if this is a character study of a psychopath, we're offered very little pathos here. Aside from a brief scene where Tony Beckley remembers his past and breaks down in a homeless shelter bathroom (which, subsequently, is a rare moment of impact during the plodding second act), this element isn't really touched on with any sincerity.
70 minutes into the film, we finally rejoin the story we started watching to begin with, and having Kane back on the screen again certainly helps matters, since we feel like we're about to make sense of the lengthy diversion we've just endured. However, despite a great scene where Kane takes a call and hears the dreaded catch-phrase once again, the film's climax is as anticlimactic as the dreadful second act. The suspense generated at the beginning of the film is abandoned for a timid "boo" as the killer finally strikes. Somehow, despite the ineptness he displays throughout the rest of the film, Durning shows up to save the day, and the film sputters to an unspectacular halt. We're given no further explanation of the significance of the film's middle, and we're offered no hint that the film-makers weren't just padding the run time.
Every horror fan should experience the original sequence at least once, for sure. But the wise horror fan will have the sense to eject the disc as soon as Charles Durning appears on the screen. It's truly a shame that the film doesn't live up to the promise it offers from the outset, because the first scares of this film are certainly worthy of the attention and emulation they've received. The rest of When A Stranger Calls is only scary when you consider that you'll never get back the additional hour you spent following this road to nowhere.
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