This 1979 horror/thriller is a great short film that is turned into a feature length movie to uneven results.

The film opens with Jill, played by Carol Kane, a teenaged babysitter arriving at the home of anxious parents trying to get out the door for date night. Jill is told that the kids just went to sleep and not to wake them up if she can help it. Jill spends the night like all babysitters doing homework and calling friends. When suddenly she receives a phone call from a mysterious male voice asking her if she’s checked on the children yet. These calls grow in frequency and strangeness. She calls the police who can’t really help her. The man continues calling and reveals that he can see Jill. The evening culminates in the famous realization that the call is coming from inside the house.

This first section of the film is dripping with atmosphere and terror as the calls become more unhinged, and Jill is trapped in this huge empty house all alone with no one to help. It’s a gripping twenty minutes of film and a great urban legend that I can hear teens telling each other around the campfire.

The problem is that it is only 20 minutes out of a 97 minute movie. Where does the story go from there? Is there a story here after that initial night of terror? The answer sadly is… kind of.

The film shifts focus and follows John Clifford, played by Charles Durning. He was the police detective on the original case and is now a private detective working for a doctor. He is tasked with tracking down the mad man responsible for the calls and the original night of terror. This section doesn’t work nearly as well as the first. It’s kind of a long drawn out 70’s style crime thriller with a tough and on the edge detective working the scummy means streets of a big city in order to track down a psycho.

There isn’t enough character development to really connect me to this part of the story. I love Charles Durning. He always did great work. But his character is thinly drawn and his quest is a little ill defined. The psycho he’s chasing also never jumps off the screen as a compelling or menacing figure. He’s just kind of a generic 70’s movie psycho.

The movie does kick back into gear in the final twenty minutes, but that still means you have almost an hour of runtime that feels disconnected and disjointed from the main story line. I will say that when the movie works it really works. It is suspenseful and frightening and well made. The biggest weakness in this movie is the script. The actors are game. The filmmaking is up to par. The script that is supposed to support the movie just never lives up to the elements within it.

This movie is a half a cup of tea for me. It’s a solid B overall, but not much more than that.