When A Stranger Calls

Released in 1979, When A Stranger Calls, directed by Fred Walton, sent a chill down the spine of every teenage babysitter.

The premise was simple: A girl is terrorised by a nuisance telephone caller, who keeps asking her to check on the children in her care.

For the remake, screenwriter Jake Wade Wall expands those terrifying, opening 20 minutes of the original film into a trashy, full-length game of late-night hide 'n' seek, pitting a high school student against a psychopath who seems to be watching her every move.

Director Simon West struggles to sustain the tension, resorting to a couple of cheap scares - such as a pet cat springing from a dark nook - to raise our pulse rate.

He abandons the claustrophobic confines of the main house for a brief jaunt to a guest cabin, located at the end of a spooky woodland track: Hardly very welcoming.

Production designer Jon Gary Steele is the film's star performer, creating a wondrous main set: A chic, modern architectural triumph with floor-to-ceiling windows, the open-plan house allows the cameras to catch important details, like motionsensitive lighting which suddenly illuminates a room in the background.

After running up an extortionate bill on her mobile phone, teenager Jill Johnson (Belle) agrees to the demands of her father (Gregg) that she babysit for Dr Mandrakis (de Lint) and his wife (Jennings Grant) in their remote lakeside house.

Settling down for the night while the two Mandrakis children sleep soundly upstairs, Jill is disturbed by a series of nuisance phone calls.

At first, she presumes her ex-boyfriend Bobby (Geraghty) or one of his knuckleheaded friends is playing a prank. But then the caller (voiced by Lance Henriksen) speaks: Have you checked on the children?

When A Stranger Calls unfolds with few surprises, apart from an unsettling reveal of The Stranger (Flanagan) in the closing minutes.

Newcomer Belle does an admirable job of contorting her face into a variety of grimaces to convey concern, confusion, terror and constipation as the damsel in distress.

The heroine shows flashes of quick, clear thinking but too often she takes ridiculous risks and puts herself in unnecessary peril.