(1978) TVM ***
Leigh is ecstatic when she purchases a beautiful high rise apartment with a magnificent view in downtown L.A. Her good fortune continues when she is immediately hired to work at a local television station as the station’s director. Her seemingly charmed life starts to unravel as she begins to receive strange, anonymous phone calls and worse, odd little gifts. The phone calls and gifts suggest that her unknown assailant must be someone living in the high-rise across from her building. When the police prove to be useless she decides to take matters into her own hands.
Someone’s Watching Me is John Carpenter’s Rear Window. Shot before Halloween and debuting a month after Halloween was released Carpenter’s stamp can be seen all over this teleplay. Leigh resembles the Laurie Strode “victim” and Carpenter’s POV camera work will remind you of his famous slasher. For a television movie this is a nice little thriller with above par acting and terrific cinematography. Still, it offers little in the way of originality and the big reveal isn’t all that interesting.
One minor quibble; I hate ringing telephones. There is a lot of ringing telephone in this film. I understand that movies such as Someone’s Watching Me use ringing telephones to ratchet up tension – in a sense the phone becomes another character in the film, however a ringing telephone is like nails on a chalkboard to me. At times I muted my television when the phone started ringing. I found myself yelling at the screen, “Just take it off the hook, dummy!”
