Vomitron_G 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.

jseger9000 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.

ShootingShark 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.

disdressed12 while i admit there is lots of tension in this movie,it's almost too much.the problem i found is that(to me at least)the movie keeps building to a climax which is less exciting than the rest of the movie.there is one pretty thrilling moment in the movie,but for me,that's about it.this is by no means a bad movie.in fact,think it was very well done and the acting is top rate.i just felt it was too drawn out.this is John carpenter's third picture,and was intended for the big screen at one point.but somewhere along the line,it was decided to make it into a TV movie.it's not overly violent and certainly not very graphic.even though i thought the movie was drawn out,it was still entertaining enough o watch until the end.if you don't mind a really slow build up,you will probably enjoy this one.by the way,this movie also available as part of the Twisted Terror collection,which also includes five other horror movies.anyway,for me,Someone's Watching Me is a 6/10