I wasn’t sure why it was necessary to remake this thriller at first, and while I am now convinced that remaking this movie wasn’t the worst idea since putting jelly in a jar of peanut butter, I still disagree with putting the big plot twist in the trailers for this film. Lots of viewers may know what’s coming in this classic tale of cat and mouse, but why spoil it for the younger viewers who may have never heard of the original starring Carol Kane?

The plot of this film is very simple. A high school girl is babysitting in an enormous house and someone is prank-calling her. The calls are creepy and they keep getting creepier, with the guy on the phone often asking her if she has “checked on the children.” The chills continue as the calls keep coming and the babysitter gets more and more freaked out. In an age where we have caller ID and Star 69, the filmmakers wanted to stress that knowing who is calling doesn’t exactly make you safer.

See, there, I didn’t ruin how this ends.

This isn’t a masterpiece of cinema by any stretch of the imagination, but it works. Director Simon West ratchets up the tension very well and when it breaks, even if only for moments at a time, the audience jumps and flinches. Are there problems with the film? You betcha. To start things off, the opening sequence is a muddled mess where a similar situation occurs in one house, a carnival is raging on the corner (and I mean a huge, ferris wheel and carousel riding carnival) while a woman calls for her children and a “Jesus saves” neon signs blinks on and off across the street from her home. The problem for me was that all of those settings would not be that close together in real life. Nobody’s neighborhood butts up right next to a carnival ride.

Anyway, another problem is that we get introduced to a fat detective who gets a good line in and then we never hear from him again.

Lucky for the audience, there were no problems with the acting. Camilla Belle, who is on screen for practically the entire movie, is easy on the eyes and engaging enough that we are encouraged to care about her and her predicament. She wasn’t bad and that is compliment enough. As for the rest of the cast, they were fine - believable and in the background. It didn’t matter who was playing those parts really, as once the sitting job began, they wouldn’t appear again anyway.

I’d also like to give the film credit for having zero gore. That’s right, none. There are two dead bodies in the film but they aren’t bloody or nasty and that is really cool. That means that it may actually be the first PG-13 movie that is actually suitable for ages 13 and up and if you have a mature 11 year old, he or she may enjoy being freaked out without having to endure splatter, profanity, scenes of nudity or sexual themes.

Be warned though, this is an intense movie and many of the scares are of the things jumping out at you variety. Seeing this in the theater may actually be less scary than watching at home because you aren’t supposed to answer your phone in the theater and in a theater, you know you’re not alone.

**1/2

login to post comments