A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Friday, December 8, 2023

When a Stranger Calls Back (Fred Walton, 1993)


Cast: Carol Kane, Charles Durning, Jill Schoelen, Gene Lythgow, Kevin McNulty, Cheryl Wilson, Jerry Wasserman. Screenplay: Fred Walton. Cinematography: David Geddes. Production design: Chris August. Film editing: David Byron Lloyd. Music: Dana Kaproff. 

I haven't seen When a Stranger Calls, Fred Walton's 1979 film, but I gather that it helped launch the horror movie trope "the phone call's coming from inside the house!" There are no calls coming from inside or outside the house in Walton's sequel, When a Stranger Calls Back, because the phone line has been cut. (The film was obviously made before the ubiquity of cell phones.) The setup is a standard one for horror movies: A babysitter is terrorized by a mysterious stranger. In this case, Julia (Jill Schoelen) is a high school student called in at the last moment to sit for a couple's two small children, who have already gone to bed by the time she arrives. As she settles in, there's a knock on the door, which she cautiously answers from inside, not unlocking or opening the door. The voice outside explains that his car has broken down and he'd like to use the phone to call for help. She volunteers to make the call herself, and after some back and forth, he reluctantly agrees, giving her the information she needs. But when she goes to the phone, the line is dead. Still wary, she lies to the man outside, claiming that she made the call, but hoping he'll go elsewhere for help. Walton handles this part of the film efficiently and effectively as things gradually escalate until Julia realizes that the man is inside the house. Fortunately, the parents arrive just in time to save her, but they discover that the children are missing from their upstairs bedroom. Then the film falls apart. Five years pass, and Julia is now a college student. Still suffering the effects of the earlier incident, she begins noticing strange things happening in her apartment. The police are dismissive, but they call on a counselor from the college to help. She turns out to be Jill Johnson (Carol Kane), who was the victim in original film. Jill has good reason to trust Julia's instincts and calls in John Clifford (Charles Durning), the detective from her case. But the convergence of the separate experiences of Jill and Julia muddles the narrative, as both women become terrorized by the new bad guy. And then the movie comes to a thuddingly ridiculous end, as Clifford figures out that the guy must be a ventriloquist. As any 10-year-old kid who has ever tried it knows, ventriloquists rely on visual misdirection: moving the dummy's mouth while keeping theirs nearly motionless. They can't really "throw" their voices, as the movie suggests the guy outside Julia's door did. When a Stranger Calls Back was made for television and first appeared on Showtime, then was released on video. Despite some creepy moments, I suspect that it would have been laughed out of theaters. 

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