11 December 2024
A Stranger is Watching (1982)
92 min.
Directed by Sean S. Cunningham.
With Kate Mulgrew, Rip Torn, James Naughton, Barbara Baxley, Stephen Joyce, Shawn Von Schreiber.
After the success of Friday the 13th (1980), director Sean Cunningham was given the opportunity to make a bigger budgeted thriller.

In this adaptation of Mary Higgins Clark's popular 1977 best seller, a man brutally rapes and murders a woman - a crime made all the more horrific by the fact that her 8-year old daughter Julie (Schrieber) witnessed the whole thing.

Flash forward three years.

As the man is about to be sentenced to death, a totally unhinged psycho named Artie Taggart (Rip Torn) kidnaps the now 11 year-old daughter of the dead woman, along with TV reporter Sharon Martin (Kate Mulgrew of Star Trek: Voyager et al), the girl's would-be stepmom.

Could the convicted man be innocent, and Taggart really have been the man who savaged Julie's mom?

And will Julie and Sharon survive Artie's latest round of demented depravity?

Well acted, with some pretty good scenes in the New York City subway underneath Grand Central where the kidnapper keeps his victims.

Mulgrew and Torn are fun to watch in this solid - if otherwise unremarkable - outing.

© copyright 1998-present | The Terror Trap; www.terrortrap.com | all rights reserved