When a Killer Calls

What do you get when you cross “When a Stranger Calls” with a movie that has even less money? The answer my friends is “When a Killer Calls.” From everything I read, the people behind this movie rushed it into production to compete with the remake of the aforementioned movie. Unfortunately, this movie falls way flat.

The movie picks up with a man sneaking into a house to kill two kids and their mom. Since this is one of those “modern” horror movies, he has to take some pictures with his cell phone. The movie then abruptly jumps to another house and our poor sitter Trisha. Trisha thinks the little girl Molly is adorable, but she had a bad experience on a past sitting job. She meets the creepy next door neighbor and Molly tells her that he's a nice guy. This totally reminds me of the teeny bopper book The Babysitter from R.L. Stine.

Anyway, we learn that someone killed Molly's parents, but the movie just glosses over that before we go back to Trisha who starts getting creepy phone calls in the middle of the night. This guy is even ballsy enough to send her text messages. Personally, that takes some balls. For some reason, she thinks that it must be her boyfriend Matt. Um, okay. If your boyfriend thinks it's fun to send you threatening and harassing messages, you might want to think about dating someone new.

Matt shows up at the house with two of his buddies, and they promptly start making out. Matt and Trisha, not the two friends. They hear a noise, go upstairs and find one friend beaten near death and the other friend dead. Matt gets slammed over the head and tied up. Trisha apparently doesn't think it's odd that he's missing because she kicks back to watch some TV. That's when she realizes that Molly's parents are dead. After getting another phone call, the cops tell her that the calls are coming from inside the house.

She rushes upstairs and finds poor Molly dead and lying with the dead dad from the earlier family. Huh, I totally would have expected the kid to make it to the end. She trips and gets knocked out, only to wake up dangling from a rafter. Let's cut to the chase. The killer is actually the not dead guy from the beginning. He raped Trisha one night and he's crazy about her. Matt tries to kill the guy and winds up dead, which lets Trisha get outside, find a gun that one of the friends kept hidden in his truck, and she kills him. Then she wanders off without trying to get help or check on her boyfriend nice.

The Best Death

Nothing really comes to mind. We really don't see anything except for the death of the killer and the poor boyfriend.

Do I Know You From Somewhere?

Rebekah Kochan (i.e. Trisha) didn't look familiar at all, but she's been in the horror flicks “Halloween Night,” Freakshow,” “The Telling,” and “Flu Bird Horror.” Robert Buckley (aka Matt) was the young guy on “Lipstick Jungle” and had a role on “One Tree Hill.” Straight-to-DVD horror fans might recognize him from “Killer Movie.”