A Stranger Is Watching (1982) MGM/Horror-Thriller RT: 92 minutes Rated R (language, strong violence, child in peril) Director: Sean S. Cunningham Screenplay: Earl Mac Rauch and Victor Miller Music: Lalo Schifrin Cinematography: Barry Abrams Release date: January 22, 1982 (US) Cast: Kate Mulgrew, Rip Torn, James Naughton, Shawn von Schreiber, Barbara Baxley, Stephen Joyce, James Russo, Frank Hamilton, Maggie Task, Roy Poole, Maurice Copeland, Eleanor Phelps, Joanne Dorian, Stephen Strimpell, David Brooks, William Hickey. Box Office: N/A
Rating: ** ½
For his first post-Friday the 13th gig, director Sean S. Cunningham took on A Stranger Is Watching, a kidnap thriller based on Mary Higgins Clark’s 1977 novel. While serviceable, it suffers from a screenplay that glosses over details that should be key plot points. It’s also rather predictable. However, it benefits from strong performances from a talented cast, particularly Rip Torn (The Beastmaster) as the slimy villain who kidnaps a traumatized kid and holds her captive in the dark caverns beneath New York’s Grand Central Station along with a newswoman working on an important story. It’s genuinely suspenseful at times even if the outcome is a foregone conclusion.
At the tender age of eight, Julie (Schreiber) witnessed the rape and murder of her mother by an intruder who records the whole thing on a cassette recorder. She still has nightmares about that horrible night; otherwise, she seems okay. The deliveryman (Russo, Beverly Hills Cop) she (mistakenly) identified as the killer is now on Death Row just 72 hours away from execution. Unless new evidence comes to light exonerating him, he’s dead. The aforementioned reporter, Sharon Martin (Mulgrew, Throw Momma from the Train), is covering his story and dating Julie’s father Steve (Naughton, Cat’s Eye).
One night, a stranger breaks into their home and abducts the girls. He’s Artie, a violent psychopath with a thing for egg salad. Holding them in a dingy bunker in an abandoned underground section of Grand Central, Artie calls the father and demands $182,000 if he wants to see either of them alive again. While he makes arrangements for the money drop-off, Sharon and Julie try several times to escape. Although I’m sure it’s supposed to be a surprise plot twist, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that Artie is the mother’s killer. It conveniently comes back to the kid during her captivity. It means an innocent man will die unless Julie gets away in time.
You’d think that the race against time to stop the execution of an innocent man would be a major part of A Stranger Is Watching, but you’d be wrong. Cunningham, working from a half-baked script by Victor Miller and Earl Mac Rauch, pays too little attention to this aspect of the story. The scenes with the condemned man’s lawyer trying to speak with Julie lack the necessary urgency. That’s not all. Early on, it’s established that Sharon and Steve are on opposite sides of the death penalty debate. He accuses her of using his wife’s story as a means of arguing against the death penalty. It’s basically forgotten after she’s taken. I know the kidnapping is supposed to be the central focus of A Stranger Is Watching, but why bring any of it up if you’re not going to use it effectively.
The rest of A Stranger Is Watching works fairly well. Don’t be swayed by Cunningham’s name on the label. It’s not a Friday the 13th clone. It doesn’t rely on copious amounts of gore to hold the viewer’s interest. Instead, it provides the viewer with a story intended to build tension around the girls’ predicament. To its detriment, it’s murky on a few details. SPOILER ALERT! Somebody close to the family is in on the scheme. I think it’s supposed to be a surprise plot twist, but the movie tips its hand a little too early. By the time it’s revealed, we’re not the least bit shocked. The movie doesn’t make a big deal of it either. We’re not given any details regarding this person’s involvement. For example, does this person’s involvement mean somebody else is involved too? Does that somebody else even know anything? The movie doesn’t bother to explain.
Mulgrew gives a decent performance as a strong female character who refuses to fold in the face of fear and terror. That’s good. What’s not good is how underdeveloped her character is. Other than her idealism, we know nothing about her. Young Ms. Schreiber, in her one and only acting role, is good. She’s not one of those child actors who confuse cuteness with talent. She definitely has the latter. Naughton is fine as the widowed, worried father. Like all the characters in A Stranger Is Watching, he’s fairly one-dimensional.
HOWEVER, A Stranger Is Watching really belongs to Torn who takes the role of skin-crawl creep to a relatively high level. He’s scary without being unstoppable. Take the scene where he’s assaulted by a gang of thugs in a public restroom. Somebody like Jason Voorhees would have slaughtered the lot of them without breaking a sweat. Artie gets his ass kicked.
The dark underground locations lend a strong nightmarish feeling to the proceedings. It also gives the movie a suitably ugly look to match the unpleasant subject matter. It boosts the uneasy feeling already being experienced by the viewer. The score by Lalo Schifrin is a real asset in how it augments the tension. It’s hardly a great movie, but A Stranger Is Watching is good enough that you don’t mind investing 92 minutes of your life in it.
