Someone's Watching Me! (1978)

Simply Perfect

Plenty to Like, Plenty to Dislike

How sad is this?

Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

Beautiful, plucky woman, 29 and single after a bad breakup, has relocated to Los Angeles from New York City, where she finds a terrific apartment in a high-rise complex and practically walks into a job as director for a TV station. The trouble is, she has attracted a stalker, who seems to have complete access to her life. After receiving presents, scary notes and endless crank calls, she starts to crack. John Carpenter wrote and directed this well-regarded TV-movie, which was televised in late November 1978, one month after Carpenter's breakthrough hit "Halloween" hit theaters. The far-fetched plot doesn't bear close scrutiny, but Carpenter's flip dialogue (our heroine likes to talk to herself) and arty touches are fun, as are the performances. In the lead, Lauren Hutton's demeanor takes a few minutes getting accustomed to; she's outgoing in an odd, somewhat artificial way, but she's fast on her feet and she's resourceful. Even better are David Birney as a professor Hutton picks up in a bar and Adrienne Barbeau as Hutton's co-worker (she's a lesbian, though the word is never spoken). The finale is a little lax (mild due to the medium), but Carpenter knows how to create suspense, even if that means scaring the audience at the risk of all logic and credibility.

The TV director Leigh Michaels (Lauren Hutton) moves from New York to the fancy apartment building Arkham Tower in Los Angeles to forget a relationship. She is hired by a local television and befriends the lesbian assistant Sophie (Adrienne Barbeau). Then she dates the philosophy professor Paul Winkless (David Birney) and starts a relationship with him. Leigh is a woman that likes to joke and out of the blue she receives gifts and strange phone calls. Soon she realizes that a stranger is stalking her driving her mad with phone calls, gifts and letters. Leigh and Paul decide to go to the police but the police inspector tells that he cannot do anything to help her. Leigh decides to investigate the opposite tower block, she witness the stranger killing Sophie. She calls the police but no one but Paul believes her. What can she do? "Someone's Watching Me!" is one of the first movies by John Carpenter and homage to Alfred Hitchcock's "Rear Windown". Despite the low budget since it is made for television, the story holds the attention of the viewer until the last scene. The cat-and-mouse game between the stalker and Leigh is tense and full of suspense with great performance of Lauren Hutton. My vote is seven.Title (Brazil): "Alguém Me Vigia" ("Someone's Watching Me")

I was so excited to see the 'forgotten' John Carpenter film finally getting a DVD release. He's one of my favorite directors. Unfortunately this is one of his weakest films and probably my least favorite.It's not all bad and has some genuinely tense moments, but they are few and far between. I'm not sure if John Carpenter just wasn't feeling it with this one or if it was due to the constraints of it being a T.V. movie with the constant breaks required for commercials. Whatever it is, the film is a series of peaks and valleys. The pace is off. You just don't get enough of a feeling of building tension. It's funny, because this film was preceded by Halloween and followed by The Fog and both are excellent, suspenseful films.In this movie there are a number of good scenes. The bits with the laundry room, the park at night, the penthouse, the search of a house and the last fifteen minutes are great. But in between there are plenty of dull spots.The music was kind of irritating. I wish John Carpenter had gotten to score this one like he does most of his movies. But he didn't and the music is here seems like a swipe of better music from other suspense movies and at times was just inappropriate for the scene. The best part musically was a scene where Leigh is opening a strange package that was synced to Vivaldi's 'Winter'. That part was very well done, but also pointed out how bad the rest of the music was.Also, Lauren Hutton just didn't seem right for the part. She's a good actress and the part was written well, but the two didn't seem to connect.One highlight of the movie is Adrienne Barbeau. She is terrific in her part. It's easy to see why J.C. used her in his future movies (well, aside from their marriage). I wish she were in the movie more.Also, I applaud him for writing in a positive lesbian character. It must have been scandalous for a T.V. movie from 1978. She wasn't stereotypical, never made any 'sinister' passes at our heroine and also wasn't portrayed as the 'magical gay character'. Kudos to John Carpenter.This movie is worth a rental. But compared to what John Carpenter had done before and would do in the future, this entry was weak.

Leigh Michaels is a young woman newly moved to Los Angeles, who starts receiving crank phone-calls and disturbing mail from some unknown stalker. Convinced he means to kill her, and with the police powerless to act, Leigh takes matters into her own hands ...This is one of the best TV-movies of the seventies (second only to Duel), a crackerjack stalker thriller which exploits all the paranoid young-woman-alone ideas it has to the hilt. What makes it so exceptional is the direction, which is sky-high above the TV standard make-it-cheap and make-it-quick. This little film has lots of dolly shots, nice time-lapse dissolves, carefully composed framing, even a triple-zoom-reverse (when Leigh realises the killer is spying on her from the building opposite). Robert B. Hauser's camera-work is superb throughout, such as in the tense scene where Leigh hides inside an air-conditioning vent and the killer unwittingly walks on top of her. Carpenter may be cribbing a little from Rear Window but he racks and racks the tension and gets a fine performance from Hutton as a woman who is both terrified of her attacker but outraged that he should make her feel that way. The leads are all nicely off-the-wall; Hutton and Birney have the usual female-male leads passive-aggressive traits neatly reversed and Barbeau is a likable, wisecracking lesbian colleague ("Smoking your dinner ?", she quips at one point). For Carpenter addicts there are a plethora of in-jokes; a reference to his birthday and his producer partner Debra Hill, the TV-station is called KJHC and an unseen character is named Elizabeth Solley (Jamie Lee Curtis in The Fog). This is a minor piece in Carpenter's rich back-catalogue (he shot it just prior to Halloween), but a terrific showcase of his talent and sensational work by TV standards.