Someone's Watching Me!

John Carpenter's SOMEONE'S WATCHING ME! is an undisguised homage to REAR WINDOW, with nods to BLACK CHRISTMAS (an avowed favourite of Carpenter's) and the Italian Giallo genre, specifically Argento's DEEP RED. One elaborate scene, wherein the anxious heroine drops a knife through a grate, and then squeezes laboriously into the crawlspace beneath to hide, is a clear riff on giallo scenography.

The material is stale, but the execution is not. Carpenter's virtuoso use of gliding camera shots, shadow detail, composition, and mise en scene, ratchets up the suspense even during what would otherwise be incidental scenes in another director's hands. On occasion, TV-movie limpness creeps in momentarily, but, in the main, the picture's production is very professionally handled.

One major irritant is Lauren Hutton's protagonist, Leigh. She is endlessly spunky, constantly talking to herself, always rushing headlong into situations. It's grating right from the start, but as events unfold, her happy-go-lucky ebullience morphs (in the viewers' eyes) into a kind of blithe stupidity. Most thinking people would have closed their curtains, locked their doors, taken the prank calls more seriously, or perhaps moved away (pride be damned), much sooner than did she. Certainly most people wouldn't have walked knowingly into the stalker's trap, as Leigh does at the very end. "Someone's Watching Me" is nerve-wracking enough for one to suspend one's incredulity, and good enough to belong in, or just below, the rarefied sphere of Carpenter's two best, HALLOWEEN and THE THING.

An early TV movie by director John Carpenter about Lauren Hutton who's being stalked in her apartment, you know the sort of thing. This is pretty good actually and it still plays well today. Definately one of my favorites, Halloween was made shortly after, I think.

Leigh Michaels (Lauren Hutton) moves into a beautiful apartment building in LA. She also gets a new job, makes friends with lesbian coworker Sophie (Adrienne Barbeau) and makes a new boyfriend with charming Paul Winkless (David Birney). But she starts getting threatening phone calls and letters by a man who seems to know her every move. Sophie and Paul try to help her but they can't and it seems he's getting more and more dangerous.

A good movie for Capenter that's obviously made for TV--there are blackouts every 20 minutes or so. It's not as good as "Halloween" but how could it be? It's more like Hotchcock's "Rear Window" than anything else. It's well-directed by Carpenter with a few nicely placed scenes that will make you jump. The script is very good too with believable characters and a fairly intricate plot. Also it's unusual that Carpenter got a lesbian character in the movie. There's nothing wrong with that at all--it was just a fairly gutsy move for a 1978 TV movie. Hutton is surprisingly very good in her role. You slowly see her character crumble under the pressure. Barbeau is also excellent in her role. Only Birney is off--he seems a little uncomfortable in his role. Still this is a good suspense film from Carpenter. Well worth catching.

John Carpenter's "Someone's Watching Me!" is a stylish thriller and I don't care if it's supposed to be heavily influenced by Hitchcock. Point is, Carpenter made a very decent thriller. You can clearly see there was a young director with a lot of talent at work here. The way he makes the camera move and how he chooses his angles. Good stuff. Even though the film doesn't really move along at a fast pace, it never gets boring. Carpenter uses good timing to inject certain scenes with a lot of suspense and he keeps the whole thing steadily going until the rather abrupt, but solid ending (with a very short & sweet – well not that sweet – climax). Decent lead by Lauren Hutton and a fun supporting roll by Adrienne Barbeau as her lesbian colleague. Someone will be watching this film again some time in the future. Someone else will be watching it too, because it's a Carpenter film I'll recommend to anybody who wants to hear about it.

From the get-go this is one scary film. The daytime skyline of L.A. dissolves to nighttime accompanied by spooky music. Then, inside some room, a man's hand turns on a tape recorder and dials a telephone number. He wheels around a telescope pointed toward the window of his female target, Leigh (Lauren Hutton). After a brief vocal exchange, the man tells her: "Come to the window; all those windows out there; and I'm behind one of them".

So begins "Someone's Watching Me", a suspenseful thriller about an attractive female TV broadcaster stalked by an unknown man. One of the scariest sequences has Leigh coming back to her high rise apartment and finding the front door unlocked. She calls the manager who tells her that although maintenance men were in her apartment earlier he personally locked it behind them. She sounds innocently skeptical. As the camera slowly pans around to the living room behind Leigh, a man suddenly and silently darts across the living room carpet ...

Suspense is heightened by the fact that Leigh lives alone, and by the fact that much of the plot takes place at night. There's an effective use of silence in a couple of sequences toward the end that further enhances suspense.

Despite the obvious suspense, the script has some problems, most notably the inanity of Leigh choosing to re-locate to a more secure residence that's exactly like the one wherein she was previously stalked ... a high rise apartment that looks out toward another high rise with lots of windows. Also, some of Leigh's specific actions and some dialogue are silly and unrealistic. Further, I was quite disappointed by the film's ending.

Film direction and cinematography are fine and contribute to the suspense. Casting is acceptable. Overall performances are average. I thought Adrienne Barbeau, as Leigh's friend Sophie, gave a particularly good performance.

If the viewer overlooks the script's defects and doesn't expect too much from the story's ending, this can be an absorbing film to watch. Females might not want to watch it at night while alone.