When A Killer Calls

Obviously, direct-to-dvd horror is more miss than hit when you're just pulling titles off the shelf based solely on how much the box can convince you you're about to watch something scary/exploitative.

Obviously, I didn't grab "When A Killer Calls" expecting anything even remotely resembling a good movie. The title's a complete rip-off, the cover blurb talking about 'America's Most Horrifying Urban Legend' says it's a rip-off -- this is not a movie aiming to do anything but sell to people who will buy ANYTHING in this sort of genre. (Yes, yes -- people like me.)

So I don't really watch a movie like this expecting the movie to be good -- I watch it more just to see how it's made, how it looks, how it's written, how it's acted. The hope is you'll find something - be it an actor, director or writer that's got some sort of spark beyond the bottom levels of the genre.

Does 2006's "When A Killer Calls" deliver anything inspired, original or interesting? Nope. It's pretty much exactly what you expect to find when you pick up a movie called "When A Killer Calls."

You know the joke -- hot girl alone babysitting is tormented by a faceless caller who says horrible, ominous things to her while she debates calling the police and going upstairs to check on the girl she's watching. It's been done a million times. It'll be done a million times more. It'll be done better and worse, I'm sure.

Unfortunately, "When A Killer Calls" is really badly done. The direction is fairly standard-issue most of the time and he tries to go for a weird visual effect from time to time, I guess to imply when the killer is watching but it doesn't really work and at one point he uses the effect when the girl is making popcorn -- not exactly adding tension to the moment. In fact, we'd be better off left to guess when the killer is watching because when the director tells us it actually lessens the suspense. The two drunk teens wandering off to have sex are being watched -- gee, you think so?

We have a seviceable screenplay, that's not to say it's good but at least it doesn't make you shake your head. The scenes with the teenagers especially manage to keep their heads above water by having functional dialogue that doesn't try too hard to sound hip. And given the fairly wooden performances from the actors, the dialogue could easily have been left out to dry.

Movies like this worse when a feeling of claustrophobia takes over. We need to think/believe the girl in peril is trapped and that the situation is worse than she believes. But this movie doesn't really have any tension. People wandering off alone doesn't put us on edge, it just reminds us that we're watching a dumb horror movie.

Whereas good movies in this genre use suspense and subtlety to build tension, this movie basically uses violence to try and create horror. Not to sound like a broken record, but if no one cares about the characters -- or even the actors -- it's tough to get any sense of tension, no matter how gruesome the visual attacks.

It doesn't help that the main girl's a pretty dreadful actress and is presented really badly by the material. Her top is preposterously low-cut, even though we're led to believe this is his first babysitting gig in some time and thus she'd probably want to make a good first impression on her new bosses. She's also wearing shiny lip gloss on her bottom lip that the lighting of the movie catches non-stop. Did no test her look on camera before shooting? Like most of these movies do, rather than make her interesting or fun, since she's supposed to be the emotional core of the movie, she's turned into a drip. Of all the characters she'd probably the one we'd least care to see die, at least the drunk kids are funny. At least her boyfriend can act.

And is there anything less than a lame maniac? The psycho-babbling sexually-repressed killer is SO over-played. At least Jason had some charisma.

What kills a movie like this, though, is its complete lack of charm. Slasher movies used to have a sense of manic glee, a sense of there being young bucks throwing everything out to see what sticks. A movie like this is so safe, so predictable and so generically realized that all you end up doing is wondering why anyone involved even bothered.

Or why I bothered watching.