When a Stranger Calls

(the above pic is Carol Kane in the original version)

I'm fucking furious. The original When a Stranger Calls is one of the scariest movies I've ever seen.

A babysitter is alone in a house, she's getting freaky phonecalls, she find out the calls are coming from inside the house. The kids get slaughtered. The guy escapes. The killer is pursued. The babysitter grows up. He comes after her. Oh my Lord, it's scary shit.

And one of the reasons it's so freaky is because it feels real.

So what the fuck does Hollywood do? They remake it! Fine, I have no problems with remakes but they fuck this thing up so bad I sat in the theatre shaking my head. By the end of the movie I was actually enraged.

What they've done is taken the premise of the first 20 minutes of the original and expanded it to 90 minutes leaving out the rest. The original had one of the best endings ever, did the new filmmakers even watch the original? And they've cast one of the worst actresses I've ever seen in a lead and they've set it in the most ridiculous house ever filmed. The whole house is high-tech, lights come on when you enter the room, the fireplace is on remote control...who lives like this??? Certainly not ordibary people and that's what made the original so scary, the horror was happening to ordinary people in an ordinary home in an ordinary neighborhood.

How can you remake a movie without understanding why the original worked?

And the actress: truly awful. Talks like a valley girl. She doesn't act she pouts. I assumed it was her first acting job then i looked her up on IMDB and she has credits. Unbelievable. We are entering a frightening phase in Hollywood where so many of the actresses seem to be completely unintelligent. No one ever questioned the intelligence of Jamie Lee Curtis but these new girls actually seem to want to appear to be morons. Is moron the new sexy?

Women should be outraged.

There are actresses like Rachel McAdams who are sexy and funny and seem extremely intelligent but so many others these days come off as idiots who can't even fucking speak. I digress.

This movie simply sucks. And now I read on Box office Guru.com that it's going to do like 28 million this weekend. What the fuck????? It may wind up grossing more than Munich.

PS While waiting to see When a Stranger Calls i bought a ticket to Hoodwinked and watched the first hour. I actually got involved. Maybe, I should go back and see the ending.