When a Stranger Calls

On October 15th, as the weather cools and jack o'lanterns appear, it feels like time to go back and revisit some horror hits from the past!

A massive box office hit back in 1979, WHEN A STRANGER CALLS grossed $21 million against a $1 million budget.

Most famous for its opening 20 minutes, which audiences of the time found terrifying, it opens with a young Carol Kane (Taxi, Annie Hall) as a babysitter who starts receiving menacing phone calls.

The heavy breather will only say, "Have you checked the children?", which of course she doesn't do for quite awhile. After about five calls, I started thinking, "you know, you probably ought to check on those kids...." But this is one of those films where very few people ever do what common sense dictates. Every time that phone rings, it's louder than the last time, pretty effective for building tension.

There is no doubt that this opening twenty minutes if the best part of the film.

After that sequence, it flashes forward 7 years and turns into a police procedural drama for the next 60 very boring minutes.

Charles Durning (Sharkey's Machine, Tootsie) is a private detective on the trail of the dialing murderer when he escapes from the mental institution he's been at for seven years. Durning is a great actor, but he's given very little of substance to do here.

Ron O'Neal (Superfly) plays another Detective and he and Durning apparently didn't get along on set, with the consummate professional Durning pissed off that O'Neal was constantly flubbing his lines and didn't appear to be taking the process seriously. Durning showed his frustration by making eye contact with O'Neal and never breaking it. This eventually unnerved O'Neal and stories from the set say he decided to put more effort into his performance.

O'Neal is pretty bad, so I can only imagine what his role would have looked like without Durning's peer pressure.

The killer is kind of boring, fine actors like Colleen Dewhurst and Rachel Roberts are wasted in poorly written roles and ANY episode of "Law and Order" generates more excitement in any ten minutes than this lumbering dinosaur does in its entire meandering midsection.

The film wraps up with a slightly better coda to its opening scene, but it's too little, too late.

"Have you checked the children?"

Yes, I think they died of boredom.

It's amazing this cinematic miss-dial was such a hit. I've been more entertained by robocalls.

I'll give it a D.

Remade in 2006 in a version I'll never see. Fool me once.......