Fleeing a bad relationship in New York, Leigh Michaels (Lauren Hutton) takes a job as a live TV director in Los Angeles and moves into a high-tech apartment in a mammoth high-rise. Soon she begins receive strange phone calls at home and at work and a non-existent travel company starts sending her strange gifts ostensibly as part of a contest (starting with a telescope). Her stalker seems to always know where she is and seems to be in control of the computer systems controlling the lights of her apartment as well as the elevators. Her new boyfriend Paul (David Birney) gets the police involved but nothing the caller has done so far qualifies as a threat and Lt. Hunt (Charles Cyphers of Carpenter's HALLOWEEN and his other first five films) thinks Leigh is paranoid. When her co-worker Sophie (Adrienne Barbeau, THE FOG) spots someone with a telescope in the apartment across the way, the police arrest the man but seasoned viewers know that things will get deadly once everyone lets their guard down... James Murtaugh (THE HOWLING) and Len Lesser (SEINFELD's Uncle Leo) also appear. Produced by Richard Kobritz (who also produced Carpenter's TV movie ELVIS and would go on to produced his adaptation of CHRISTINE), John Carpenter's SOMEONE'S WATCHING ME is one of those classics of seventies genre TV that has remained largely unavailable. Hutton is fine in the lead, making her character's tendency to think aloud (and converse with herself) and other quirks believable. There are some references to Hitchcock but they are comfortably couched in Carpenter's assured scripting and direction (although you can see the reverse REAR WINDOW set-piece coming here just as easily as in Ken Weiderhorn's EYES OF A STRANGER [also out from Warner as part of the TWISTED TERROR COLLECTION]). Harry Sukman's orchestral score is a fine accompaniment (Sukman also scored another memorable Kobritz TV production around this time: Tobe Hooper's SALEM'S LOT adaptation) but one wonders how it would have played with one of Carpenter's own synthesizer scores (one also wonders what elements from this film's script were also present in his script for EYES which later became Irvin Kershner's EYES OF LAURA MARS). Fans of seventies horror TV will want to track this one down (and thankfully it is more accessible now that it's on DVD).

Eric Cotenas

Disc Size: 47,620,677,824 bytes

Feature: 220,741,584,896 bytes

DVD: Although shot for and shown on American television, SOMEONE'S WATCHING ME had theatrical play abroad and is presented here in an anamorphic widescreen version. The progressive image seems faithful to the ones perception of seventies TV (the film is flatly lit but cinema standards but quite well photographed even though it lacks the Panavision scope of Carpenter's theatrical pictures).

The mono audio is clean and strong (although the sudden telephone rings won't make you jump the way they are meant to in stereo and surround films). English, French, and Spanish mono audio and subtitles are available. John Carpenter provides a six minute interview on the film which is the sole extra. The film is also available from Warner in a set with THE HAND, DEADLY FRIEND, DR. GIGGLES, SOMEONE'S WATCHING ME, and EYES OF A STRANGER.

 - Eric Cotenas