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When a Stranger CallsRating:
Release Date: 09 October, 2001 Retail Price: $14.94 OUR Price: $10.99 You SAVE: $3.95! Cast: Complete Cast (9 total) |
When a Stranger Calls Reviews
A True Horror Flick
When a Stranger Calls is everything Black Christmas wasn't. Even though WASC steals the phone concept, its much scarier. The calls are more creepy without being annoying like Black x-mas. This film is as creepy as any on film to date. Great performances throughout and truly a must see for any horror flick guru. Word of advice, if you get spooked easy don't watch it alone in a empty house. You'll be calling the neighbors by the end.
One of the Scariest
This is one of the scariest movies of all time, second only perhaps to Black Christmas and Psycho. It literally brings the terror home to the viewer.
I was motivated to check it out again after watching the 2005-2006 re-make. This original is much better than the recent Camilla Belle version. It has a tripartite shape that I hadn't remembered. Two profoundly frightening in-the-house sequences bookend a middle section that follows the gritty, exterior lives of a couple of jaded adults who cross paths with the killer.
Many people said they found that middle section to be a drag and a distraction. I felt exactly the opposite. The opening and closing are fright; the middle section gives weight and dimension to the terror. This inset features Colleen Dewhurst playing a world-weary woman whom the killer tries to befriend in a bar. Charles Durning plays a policeman-turned-private-eye who is tracking the escaped killer in order to wreak his own atoning revenge.
But maybe someone can help me. I remember a version of this original movie that developed the relationship between Dewhurst and Durning more, that included a sort of existential scene of them reaching out to each other, then retreating into their respective shells. In this scene, Dewhurst utters one of the saddest, cruelest lines of resignation I've heard on film. As Durning tentatively tries to get closer to her, she balances a moment, between love and aloneness. Then she chooses the latter. She replies that proffers of love are past her now - that all she hopes to do is somehow "make it through to the end." For me, this was Dewhurst's most memorable, heartbreaking screen moment.
However this key scene was absent in the VHS tape version I just checked out. And in its place are some scenes I don't remember, such as a scene in which Durning chases the killer through the storage basement of a homeless shelter. So can someone explain this to me? Were there several, quite different versions of the original "Stranger?"
In either case, even though this original "Stranger" is itself in some ways two movies, or maybe even three - there are crucial links between the panels of action. There is the presence of the killer threading his way along, exercising his deadly aptitude at bringing the outside inside. Then the scenes are linked by the fact that they are all illustrations of different ways in which people react to and fight the pathos of their essential isolation. The killer fights back with savage violence. Durning and Dewhurst strike out with what are perhaps the even crueler twists of revenge and rejection.
Therefore, this original "Stranger" really has very little in common with the re-make, except an initial premise. So you can watch both and not feel you are wasting time duplicating yourself. The recent re-make delivers some chills, that's all. In contrast, this original is truly a complex, adult version. And I don't mean "adult" in the usual sense that there is more graphic sex and violence here. There's actually almost none of either. This version is adult in the sense that it scares us with the ultimate reality of being shut inside a shadowy, claustrophobic setting, unable to make meaningful contact with any of our fellow beings. And it challenges us to GET OUT OF THERE! Or not.
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