When a Stranger Calls Back (1993)

Warning: I am going to spoil some details about the killer, because only a saint couldn’t!

Having survived the strange attack of a serial killer during a babysitting gig during which the children she was watching disappeared without a trace, Julia (Jill Schoelen) is still suffering from the psychological fallout five years later.

She’s in college now, after some extensive stays in mental hospitals, but the poor kid still can’t catch a break. She is convinced that somebody, perhaps the killer from the night five years ago, is targeting her by breaking into her apartment and making little changes to her living space only somebody with the PTSD-born need to control her environment like she has would notice. Eventually, Julia is going to the police, but the (inevitably male) detectives are all too willing to laugh her off as crazy.

Fortunately, they have to call in counsellor Jill Johnson (Carol Kane), too. And Jill, having survived her own peculiar serial killer in the original When a Stranger Calls, knows a little about trauma and weird killers and is willing to believe Julia. She calls still-retired cop turned private eye and vigilante for money John Clifford (Charles Durning) for help, and together, they might just solve this increasingly strange case.

Fred Walton’s made for Showtime sequel to his classic When a Stranger Calls is a much weirder film than you’d expect from a TV movie serial killer sequel. It starts out with a wonderfully tense cold open that builds an incredible amount of tension out of one and a half performances, a couple of rooms, and most importantly a door, artfully creating a sense of suspense and of dread out of this minimalist set-up that suggests Walton is thriving on the limited funds a TV gig offers rather than suffering from it.

After, that, once we’ve witnessed Julia’s first ordeal, the film makes one of its many shifts in tone and genre, leaving the thriller for a stay in the land of TV PTSD melodrama, only to leave that place for a bit of slow police procedural action, which it in turn will leave for the realm of the weird-ass thriller, where retired cops are saying stuff like “This is gonna sound crazy, but…we’re looking for a ventriloquist!”. It’s late period CSI bizarre, at the very least.

Being the kind of viewer I am, it’s that last part of the film I found most interesting, even though the cold open is certainly its objectively best part (indeed, keeping with the tradition of the first movie, that one’s so good, the film would have been worth wading through the police procedural bits for it alone). I am constitutionally bound never to even try and resist when a film decides the best direction to take when it is revealing the style and methods of its serial killer is to make him a ventriloquist. A ventriloquist who is working strip joints with the sort of mock-existentialist act that’s actively setting parts of his audience on the run, at that. Even better/more bizarre (which is pretty much the same thing in this context), he’ll also turn out to be a master at camouflaging body paint, becoming your wall with the best of ‘em. That, as well as a pretty great climax in which Carol Kane (well, her stunt double) goes all Buffy on the guy’s behind before Durning kills a wall, is more than enough to endear any movie to me.

Sure, I could have lived with less of the police procedural business (it just isn’t my genre on most days), but even that is made tolerable by Durning’s and Schoelen’s capable and likeable performances and the off-beat air Kane brings to her role, with all the slightly atypical body language and line delivery most other police procedurals alas lack.