The 2006 remake of “When A Stranger Calls” clocks in at just under 90 minutes. This means that if you spent the standard $8 for your ticket, you paid about $1 for every 10 minutes you were sitting in the theater. One can only imagine that there are phone sex lines with better rates than that, and it’s almost a guarantee you’ll get as much, if not more, intellectual stimulation from having a stranger talk dirty to you.

If you’ve ever heard the urban legend about the babysitter who receives menacing phone calls that originate from inside the house, you know the basic plot of “Stranger.” This time around, the babysitter is Jill Johnson (Camilla Belle), who is as interesting as her generic name implies. A last-minute babysitting job sends her to the home of the Mandrakis family. The two children are fast asleep and Jill is bored; luckily, the titular stranger begins calling, breathing heavily and dropping hints that he may be closer than Jill thinks. Soon enough, the power goes out, the children start screaming and Jill comes face to face with the murderous monster.

The part of the film that really matters—Jill’s game of cat-and-mouse with the killer—takes up only about 30 minutes of “Stranger’s” running time. So, in an effort to pad out an incredibly thin story, screenwriter Jake Wade Wall takes his time in setting up a series of elaborately constructed coincidences and misdirections. Jill and her silly high school friends play phone tag, and the Mandrakis’ live-in maid plods around the house, making weird, but not unexplainable, noises. One or two false scares are par for the course in a scary movie, but after the sixth or seventh red herring, it gets pretty tiresome. The only thing director Simon West manages to contribute are some lively shots of the Mandrakis’ labyrinthine house, a domicile that has both a koi pond and aviary under its roof. West works the camera in such a way that you’d swear you were watching a slickly produced real estate video.

“Stranger” would be OK if there were some mildly interesting characters. Failing that, even quirkily annoying characters would suffice, if just to give the viewer something to watch. Such is not the case, though. Jill and the rest of the characters are terminally uninteresting, and calling them cardboard is demeaning to corrugated paper products. As for the scare-factor, well, a game of mini-golf is more suspenseful than “Stranger.”

The list of cinematic offenses perpetrated by Wall, West and the cast pile up high, and by the end, “Stranger” abruptly collapses under its own awful weight. An unnecessary dream-sequence makes up the final 10 minutes, a last-ditch effort to stretch out a film that exhausted its creative energy just after the opening credits. “Stranger” is cinematic masturbation of the worst kind, a soulless, unnecessary remake that doesn’t try to move even slightly beyond its tired urban legend premise. Once the credits roll, you’ll feel cheap and used, maybe even disappointed that you fell for the film’s ill-fitting horror movie disguise. Say what you will about those phone sex lines, but at least they’re honest about their intentions.

starring: Camilla Belle, Rosine Hatem, Derek de Lint and Tommy Flanagan
directed by: Simon West
rated: PG-13 for intense terror, violence, and some language