A Stranger Is Watching

Greetings And Salutations, and welcome to my review of A Stranger Is Watching. Before we get into it, here are my ratings:

Story - 1.25 Direction - 1.25 Pace - 1.25 Acting - 1.25 Enjoyment - 1.25

TOTAL - 6.25

Based on a Mary Higgins Clark novel, A Stranger Is Watching is an insidious dark thriller. The one thing that stayed with me was how cold-hearted and viciously cruel the killer was. Granted, that's par for the course in this style of story. Though, what makes Artie Taggart stand out is the gritty realism of his character. Artie wouldn't stand out in a crowd as a man to worry about. In fact, most of the time it's Artie who is marked as a target by other criminals. Usually to their detriment. Even if he loses the fight he wears his scars and bloodstains with an apathetic pride. It takes the writers, the director, and the actor to construct Artie into the human monster that he is. And they all do it superbly.

The one good thing Stranger has going for it, and what caught my attention, was the director, Sean Cunningham. He of Friday 13th fame. This guy knows how to use his locations to the max. The murder at the beginning takes place in a large sitting room by a roaring open fire. Though, when he shows Julie, the daughter, witnessing her mother's abuse and murder, you can't help but feel trapped and claustrophobic. He shoots Julie behind the bannister of the stairs. It looks as though she's imprisoned with nowhere to run. And, of course, her fear has done just that. Then when we get down under Central Station, he shows the audience a darker and dirtier side to the city. Discarded rubbish is left to rot in the enclosed tunnels, where the lost, homeless, and rats roam. It's an ideal place for a villain's lair. Who in their right mind would venture down there?

As for the performances, as I said before, Artie Taggart is the foremost character. And boy, was I surprised by this because he is played by Rip Torn. He is one actor who never made it onto my radar because he's never been so good. If I had watched stranger when I started watching movies seriously, I would have hunted out Rip Torn movies. Only to be let down. Rip Torn in this film is like Ted Levine as Gumb in Silence Of The Lambs.

However, the rest of the cast is a tad hit and miss. The worst is James Naughton as the kidnapped girls' father. He is so laid back it's unforgivable. His wife was murdered, and then the last of his family was abducted, surely, he would be out of his mind and pulling his hair out. But this dad is so cool, you can call him SMEG.

Nevertheless, A Stranger Is Watching is an above-average and enjoyable dark-thriller. If you like your bad guys dark and deadly then this film is for you.

Feel free to check out my Killer Thriller Chillers lists to see where I have ranked A Stranger Is Watching.

Take Care & Stay Well.

Thirteen years before sitting in a Star Fleet captain's chair and going up against such alien homicidal monstrosities as the Borg, the Kazon, the Hirogen and Species 8472, Kate Mulgrew did battle with a homicidal monster of a much more mundane nature, in 1982's "A Stranger Is Watching." Based on Mary Higgins Clark's best seller of 1977 (which, to be honest, I've never read), the film shows us what happens when 11-year-old Julie Peterson (well played by Shawn von Schreiber)--who had seen her mother brutally raped and killed two years earlier--is kidnapped along with the woman (Mulgrew) who is dating her widower dad. The thuggish lout (Rip Torn) hauls the pair to the underground labyrinth beneath Grand Central Station, a hellish world unto itself, where he caches them and schemes to acquire his ransom. The film is a fairly taut thriller, into which director Sean S. Cunningham manages to generate more suspense than he had two years earlier in the overrated "Friday the 13th." A background score by the great Lalo Schifrin adds immeasurably to the tension on screen, and all four principals--including James Naughton as Julie's understandably desperate dad--turn in fine performances. Unfortunately, the story is a tad too simplistic for this viewer's taste. We never learn anything about the nutjob Artie Taggart, other than the fact that he wants to raise horses in Arizona; his background, and why he's chosen this particular moment to kidnap Julie, remain mysteries. If only the film's screenplay were as multilayered as Grand Central Station itself seems to be! Still, despite the unfleshed-out nature of the picture's most interesting character, the film does manage to keep the viewer riveted. Kate, post-"Ryan's Hope" here but still hardly a household name, is always wonderful to watch, and looks quite beautiful in this early screen role. And while Artie Taggart may not be as relentless as one of the Borg, he still manages to give the old girl a pretty tough time....

A Stranger Is Watching is a half way decent horror/thriller movie. directed by Sean Cunningham director of the first Friday The 13th movie. when the psycho guy pops up its a little creepy, and the suspense is good to, but at times the movie is kind of slow, Sean Cunningham shows he has some skills, but i feel he did way better in Friday The 13th, in that the directing was real good, A Stranger Is Watching is an average film from an Average director, i give it 5/10

I remember when I watched this movie in the late 80's in my country on TV, many years after it got released, I was around 6 or 7, and I remembered some scenes that totally freaked me out. After that, my mother didn't let me watch the rest, and then I could not find it anywhere because I didn't remember the name. I finally found it a couple of days ago, and I stared remembering the scenes that frighten me when I was a kid. Right now that we have movies like A Serbian Movie, Hostel, The Human Centipede, and on and on, where everything is super explicit, and hardly ever any survivors, same as perfect makeup effects, so watching a vintage movie where there is no blood at all, where you see always a way to escape (I tend to do that in all the movies where someone is trapped), perhaps you won't find it really thrilling, but if you consider the time period where it was made, with the effects that were available at that time, and the time when the action happens, 1980, with no cellphones, no internet, no DNA tests, and many other details, it is scary, and still believable.

This film is sleazy and exploitive in the extreme. That's not much of a surprise, since it was directed by the man responsible for the (inept) first "Friday the 13th" film. What I DID find mildly surprising was the director's ability to shoot some reasonably suspenseful scenes in the middle of all the sleaze, proving that, when he doesn't overuse gore, he is competent enough. For a low-budget exploitation film, this isn't too bad.