A Stranger Is Watching (1982)

Seeking out "A Stranger is Watching" was somewhat of a new experience for me… I'm a big movie fanatic and I hardly read any books, but in this case I was familiar with the work of novelist Mary Higgins Clark before I ever saw a movie that was based on her writings. Clark certainly isn't the greatest suspense fiction writer in the world, as her books are often clichéd and predictable, but at least everything that I read from her was easy to digest, unpretentious and occasionally very tense (like for example the novels "I heard that song before" and "Two girls in Blue"). I haven't read the novel on which "A Stranger is Watching" is based, but it sure had an interesting synopsis that fits right into her area of expertise. The film is directed by Sean S. Cunningham, whose name is irreversibly linked to the slasher pioneer "Friday the 13th". Although often also quite sick and very exploitative, "A Stranger is Watching" is totally different and incomparable to "Friday the 13th", since the story centers on just a handful of people in a devastating situation, whereas "Friday the 13th" is simply about horny teenagers getting slaughtered. 9-year-old Julie Peterson traumatically witnesses how her mother fiercely gets murdered in her own house. Two years later, when an innocent person is about to be sentenced for the crime, the real killer returns to kidnap both little Julie as well as her father's new girlfriend Sharon. The psychopath, Artie Taggart, imprisons the two ladies in a hideout place underneath New York's central station and demands a 180k$ ransom. Julie's father and the police attempt to collect the money, while Sharon – as well as a couple of observing New York homeless people – battles her repulsive kidnapper. "A Stranger is Watching" is mostly tedious and not at all suspenseful, mainly because the identity and lame motives of the kidnapper are immediately revealed. Some sequences are quite grotesque, like for example when Taggart calmly walks across the crowded train station carrying a large bag on his shoulder with his sedated victims in it, but most of the time the film is overly talkative and dull. The surprise twists in the plot come across as forced and implausible and – as a viewer – you feel very little affection or compassion for the two damsels in distress. The killing sequences are vile and nasty, though, and the underrated Rip Torn depicts an extremely sadist & menacing villain, so "A Stranger is Watching" definitely holds some interest for 80's horror fanatics.

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.

My class just got finished reading A Stranger is Watching. I didn't like the book. First off I think the Name is Horrible. A Stranger is Watching?! Come on how corny! I didn't really care for the characters at all or the story. Now Don't get me wrong I love reading but I just couldn't get into this book. Anyway for the past two days it has been my misfortune to watch this film. There are so many changes from the book. First there is no Julie Peterson. It's suppose to be a little boy named Neil. This is a small spoiler but NEIL'S (not Julie) mother is suppose to be killed by being strangled with her scarf not hit in the head with a hammer (it's a really bad scene). The movie leaves out important characters and keys to the plot. The movie isn't even a mystery. And some of the things that happen leave you saying "Well what the heck did you think was going to happen?!". I don't like the book but it's a whole lot better than this. 0/10

(*** out of *****) Two years after directing the first "Friday the 13th" movie, Cunningham came back with this more serious (but only slightly less exploitative) thriller based on the novel by Mary Higgins Clark. "The Larry Sanders Show"'s Rip Torn (with that name, he was bound to play at least one role like this) plays a murderous psychopath who kidnaps a young girl(Shawn von Schreiber) and a TV news reporter (Kate Mulgrew, from "Star Trek: Voyager") three years after raping and killing the girl's mother. He keeps them in a smallroom deep in the subterranean bowels beneath Grand Central Station. There are several suspenseful attempted-escape and chase scenes throughout the last half of the movie before it ends in typical, bloody slasher fashion. James Naughton (from "The Paper Chase" and the "Planet of the Apes" television series) plays the girl's father and Mulgrew's boyfriend, and Barbara Baxley and James Russo also appear. Old, whiney character actor William Hickey pops up briefly as an ill-fated bum. There's kind of a weak twist towards the end of the movie, and, with the high body count, Cunningham was apparently still getting 'Friday the 13th ' out of his system, but, otherwise, this is pretty good.HIGHLIGHT: In an unexpected turn of events, Torn is attacked in a public restroom by a gang of thugs and beaten up. Even though he's the bad guy (and a nasty one at that), for a brief moment, you're tricked into thinking, `C'mon, Rip, kick their asses!'