Humanoids From the Deep / When a Stranger Calls (1980 / 1979) UK Quad DB Poster #New

If you’re going to follow the boss’s orders, and make a film where the monsters ’kill all the men and rape all the women’, then you might want to head off the inevitable critical backlash by hiring a woman to direct. Barbara Peeters had previously made Bury Me an Angel (1971), a gritty biker chick revenge movie that’s due a reappraisal.

Roger Corman (for it was he) was very happy with how she’d shot her male death sequences, but thought the rape scenes were too ’shadowy’ (they shot the film under the title Beneath the Darkness after all) and lacked the required exploitative zing – so he had his second unit director reshoot more explicit sequences, only some of which were used. This, plus the title change made several cast members very unhappy. Ann Turkel and Peeters asked for their names to be removed – Corman refused. Screens showing Humanoids were given a feminist red paint attack on its original release, but it was still a hit for New World Pictures.

Fred Walton’s brilliant When a Stranger Calls was an expansion of his short The Sitter, based on the urban legend of ‘the babysitter and the man upstairs’. It utilises Carol Kane and Charles Durning in superb performances (Walton’s sequel When a Stranger Calls Back (2006) amplifies these characters in a unique way) and Brit Tony Beckley as the deranged killer, who died just six months after the film’s release.

Aka: Monster / Terreur sur la ligne

Condition: VERY FINE

Cast: Doug McClure, Ann Turkel, Vic Morrow, Cindy Weintraub (next was The Prowler / Rosemary's Killer (1981) and then nothing), Rob Bottin (playing one of his own Humanoid makeup designs) / Carol Kane, Charles Durning, Colleen Dewhurst, Tony Beckley, Ron O'Neal, Rachel Roberts