Director – Peter Mervis, Screenplay – Steve Bevilacqua, Producers – David Michael Latt, David Rimawi & Sherri Strain, Photography – Mark Atkins, Music – Mel Lewis, Production Design – Silja Sturludottir. Production Company – The Asylum.
Cast
Rebekah Kochan (Trisha Glass), Robert Buckley (Matt), Mark Irvingsen (Madman), Sarah Hall (Chrissy), Derek Osebach (Frank), Carissa Booner (Molly Walker), Chriss Anglin (Mr. Walker), Tara Clark (Mrs. Walker), Louis Graham (Charlie), Isabella Bodnar (Mrs Hewitt)
Plot
Trisha Glass is hired as babysitter for young Molly Walker while the Walkers go out to a function for the evening. As she settles in and gets Molly to bed, Trisha starts to receive a series of anonymous calls on her cellphone and the house’s landline. At first thinking it is her boyfriend Matt, the calls become increasingly threatening in nature. The mystery killer then starts to kill people, including the Walkers, the neighbour and Matt’s friends, while promising to leave Trisha for last.
The Asylum is a company that has had some success since the mid-2000s specialising in low-budget films that come out mimicking the titles of big-budget, high-profile releases in the hopes that people won’t look too closely or notice the difference. It is a strategy they call Mockbusters and has produced titles such as Transmorphers (2007), Allan Quatermain and the Temple of Skulls (2008), The Day the Earth Stopped (2008), The 18 Year Old Virgin (2009), Paranormal Entity (2009), Battle of Los Angeles (2011), Abraham Lincoln vs. Zombies (2012), Age of the Hobbits (2012), among others.
Fred Walton’s When a Stranger Calls (1979) was one of the earliest films of the 1980s slasher movie fad. It came with the classic twist where babysitter Carol Kane discovered that the calls that were taunting her were coming from inside the house. There was a spate of remakes of 70s/80s horror films in the mid-2000s. As part of this, When a Stranger Calls was remade as When a Stranger Calls (2006) starring Camilla Belle. When a Killer Calls was The Asylum’s mockbuster version that was released to video around the same time.
Both When a Stranger Calls films were labelled as Slasher Films but aren’t quite. The 1979 film was about a babysitter being stalked but was more of a psycho film that was labelled as slasher because of its proximity to Halloween (1978) and the wave of films that followed. The 2006 film blew the essentials up and was more of a stalker film riding the wave of 70/80s remakes.
With When a Killer Calls, The Asylum take the essential plot of When a Stranger Calls and make much more of a slasher film out of it. This is evident from the nasty opening scene where the killer pursues a woman (Isabella Bodnar) up the stairs of her home and then has her, clad in her underwear, tied to the bed and impales a kitchen knife through her mouth and out the other side. We then segue into a repeat of the familiar scenes from When a Stranger Calls with babysitter Rebekah Kochan being taunted by the killer by phone (both cellular and landline) and the twist where the police trace the call and inform her that the calls are coming from inside the house.
In order to play up the slasher side of things, When a Killer Calls adds a whole bunch of supplementary deaths, including the killer stopping the parents on their way out for the evening with a faked accident and then killing them; the weird next-door neighbour (Louis Graham); and having Rebekah Kochan being visited by her boyfriend Robert Buckley, along with his obnoxious friend Derek Osebach and his girlfriend Sarah Hall, all of whom get attacked and/or killed.
Neither of the When a Stranger Calls films pushed the material too much beyond the stalker-by-phone element and its main twist. However, When a Killer Calls goes for the throat with a climax where Rebekah Kochan and boyfriend Robert Buckley are tied up and tortured. This also does the slasher standard and suggests a backstory connection between Rebekah and the killer.
Director Peter Mervis had previously made Dead Men Walking (2005) for The Asylum and went on to make The Da Vinci Treasure (2006) and Snakes on a Train (2006).
