Starring: Camilla Belle

2 out of 10 stars: Even by today's admittedly low horror movie standards, the remake of When a Stranger Calls qualifies as pure dreck, a movie so unsatisfying and so derivative it could provoke a hostile reaction from its audience. All tease with no payoff -- in fact, "tease" is too sympathetic a word -- it's a movie that exists purely as a concept with no fleshing out of any kind. There certainly are numerous surface details, including a lakeside mansion that qualifies as high-echelon real-estate pornography and is probably the most expressive character in the movie, but it's the cinematic equivalent of an unfinished sentence. By the end, the movie just trails off with no real resolution or justification for its existence.

If it seems I'm being too hard on a little horror movie, it's because the movie is based on one of the great urban legends of all time: the one about the babysitter getting threatening phone calls that are coming from inside the house -- you know, the "Have you checked the children?" story. The 1979 version of When a Stranger Calls, starring a wide-eyed, trembling Carol Kane, turned this scenario into a chilling chamber piece that culminated in a grisly, horrifying payoff. In the original movie, though, it was something of a 30-minute prologue to a movie that found its heroine again beleaguered by a mysterious caller long after her nightmarish babysitting gig. The new Stranger, starring a fetching if blank Camilla Belle as put-upon babysitter Jill, is that initial set-up extended to 87 minutes -- which means everything is stretched out to the nth degree, every fake scare is treated with an expectant gravitas, and it takes our heroine a good long while to call the police for help. Were it filmed in something like real time, it might have been nerve-jangling fun; as it is, it's just stress-inducing and frustrating.

Kudos of a kind should go to screenwriter Jake Wade Wall, who forgoes the recent post-modern wink-wink horror movie approach and manages to incorporate such 21st century technology as cell phones, caller ID, multiple extensions, automatic lights, and ice makers into the story, but he forgot to put in any plausible scares either. By the time Belle comes face-to-face with her stalker, director Simon West subjects you to every fake scare in the book, including the secretive family housecat, so that to see something actually threatening amounts to anti-climax -- somehow that sputtering light was more terrifying than the jack-in-the-box psycho. And the mere fact of updating this movie to PG-13 studio-friendly territory immediately eliminates the nihilistic elements that made the original so fascinating and haunting (in concept, at least, if not in execution -- the last half of the first Stranger is coma-inducing in its dullness). Granted, When a Stranger Calls might make you think twice about taking a babysitting job in a remote forest location, but overall, the only scare it'll induce is a worry that your cell phone plan isn't up to par. Where's Catherine Zeta-Jones when you need her?