This thriller starring Carol Kane as Jill, your average neighborhood baby-sitter, Charles Durning as John Clifford, a determined, heavy-set detective, and Tony Beckley as Curt Duncan, the chilling voice over the phone is not what one would hope for.  Before I delve into the review, let's layout the basic premise first.

Jill comes over to the Mandrakis household to baby-sit their children while Dr. & Mrs. Mandrakis go out for dinner and a movie.  Innocent enough, but sometime after the parents leave, Jill starts getting unsettling phone calls from a man simply stating, "Have you checked the children?"  This goes on for hours.  Now, this is the juicy part of the film.  This first 15 minutes or so are the main attraction here.  Now, if you haven't heard of this urban legend yet, the police contact the phone company to put a trace on the next call (which actually runs for about a minute).  The phone company immediately phones Jill to tell her to get out of the house because the calls are coming from INSIDE the house!  Needless to say that the children are dead.  Now, I knew all this before I watched the film (aside from the dead children), but it still delivered a suspenseful sequence.  The whole film really comes together here because everything works from the performances of Carol Kane & Beckley to the direction to the musical score and more.

Then, the film flashes ahead seven years to where Beckley has escaped from the hardly secure mental institution, and this is where the film lags.  After such a suspenseful opening, this turns into a bad episode of "Cannon".  A very overweight detective trying to track down the escaped killer.  A decent chase scene between the two through the urban streets & alleyways happens, but not a highly dramatic sequence.  Only when we return to Carol Kane's character, who is now married with two small children, does this film get anywhere near the level of tension demonstrated in the opening sequence because Duncan now returns to terrify her and her family.

Some praise this film, others say it's only worth a few minutes of tension and suspense.  I say that anything that this film did with tension was done TEN times better in Black Christmas!  In Black Christmas, the caller is exponentially more disturbing as there is no method to his madness.  The killer is deranged, and has completely broken from reality.  In actuality, Black Christmas and When a Stranger Calls are two different styles of film.  The first is a bona fide horror flick.  The one that inspired Halloween, which inspired Friday the 13th, which inspired every other slasher flick in the world!  When a Stranger Calls is simply a thriller, and isn't really horror.  When there's merely two off screen kills (not that you'd want to see two innocent kids get beaten to death beyond recognition), a group of mildly disturbing phone calls, and basically, everything sandwiched in between is like some boring cue out of"The Rockford Files" or what not, you're not gonna reach the level of a Halloween or Black Christmas or Friday the 13th.

We follow the killer, Curt Duncan, around so much that he doesn't seem very dangerous or disturbing (aside from one, late moment inside an apartment).  Mostly, he's just wondering the streets looking for food, money, and shelter.  Simply put, it's boring.  The video box cover may label it as "The Terrifying Classic", but I certainly don't agree.  The first 15-20 minutes of the film are suspenseful, and would've made a great short film!  But like I said, Black Christmas pull it off GREATLY better, and throughout the entire film, at that.  When a Stranger Calls just doesn't cut it for me.  I give a it 4.5 out of 10.  You sit around, waiting for this film to pick up for so long that you may lose interest.  The ending is even shorter than the beginning, and isn't quite as well done.  Basically, if Carol Kane isn't involved in the scene, the film doesn't work.  It's not about her, it's just the simple dynamic of the storytelling.