film | Dial B for blunder

Another unnecessary notch in the Hollywood bedpost of pointless remakes, WHEN A STRANGER CALLS reworks the 1979 stalker thriller that's remembered somewhat fondly, less for actually being good — it really wasn't — than for its bravura first 15 minutes, in which the shocks of the old babysitter-in-peril campfire tale are staged with harrowing gusto. How ineffectual is this new Stranger? Well, the original got down to nasty business incredibly quick while parlaying a couple key lines of dialogue into the lexicon of all-time great scary-flick quotes. Version 2.0 completely jettisons the rest of the story, then stretches the first film's initial scene to fill an hour and a half. By the time Stranger's anonymous psycho phones his nubile young female victim with the immortal threat of "Have you checked the children?" — more than halfway into the freakin' movie — you'll heckle, "Screw the damn children, I'm checking the hell outta my watch!"

After a clunky opening-credits montage of ominous imagery — never good signs: solitary red balloons floating into the night sky and carnival carousels shot from low angles — When a Stranger Calls dutifully and dully introduces Jill (The Ballad of Jack and Rose's Camilla Belle), our teen heroine, who's about to keep an eye on the brood of a wealthy doctor at his swanky upstate mansion for the evening. Director Simon West (Con Air) utilizes the perfunctory early scenes to telegraph the continual frights that pop up straight through the film's delayed climax: Here's the family cat, she might unexpectedly leap at you from the darkness soon, and the ice machine, it totally sounds like an intruder's trying to break in! Oh, and the motion-sensor room lights, they're going to come in handy when we need to generate suspense from an unseen but menacing presence moving through the house, and the live-in maid, you'll find her floating in the fish pond later on. (And speaking of the live-in maid, why isn't she minding the kids? Sheesh.)

In the underwhelming finale — which follows the insanely overdue "the call is coming from inside the house!" moment — Jill finally faces her harasser (Tommy Flanagan, with a gritty vocal boost from Aliens' Lance Henriksen), but it's only exciting because you know the end of this unscary dreck is near. Until then, Jake Wade Wall's script doesn't provide Belle with much to do beyond intently ogling the caller ID and nervously peering in the direction of sudden clatter. She does what she can mostly acting opposite an LCD panel, but the real star of the show is Jon Gary Steele's lavish set design, which might make you wish you were perusing a Mikasa catalogue in lieu of enduring When a Stranger Calls. That way, you'd get all of the visual splendor with none of the restless twitching. D