WHEN A STRANGER CALLS — ** 1/2 — Camilla Belle, Tommy Flanagan, Tessa Thompson; rated PG-13 (violence, profanity); Carmike 12 and Ritz 15 Theaters; Century Theatres 16 (Salt Lake City); Century Theatres 16 (Sandy); Cinemark 24 at Jordan Landing; CinemaStar 5-Star and Gateway 8 Cinemas; Megaplex 12 at The Gateway; Megaplex 17 at Jordan Commons; Westates Holladay Center Cinemas 6.

Here's what we remember from that 1979 horror "classic," "When a Stranger Calls."

A baby sitter, alone in a strange house, gets phone calls. They start out creepy, progress to chilling, and then punch us with "Have you checked the children?"

Memory jogger, horror fans. That's the first 20 minutes of the movie. The middle 70 minutes is boring back story on the serial killer, and too much attention to the dogged ex-cop (Charles Durning) out to catch him. Until the finale.

The new "Stranger" scores over that earlier one as only a post-"Halloween" horror movie can. It strips the tale down to its essentials — girl in a big, strange house, watching two kids she hasn't bothered to meet, getting a succession of prank-to-menacing phone calls.

Simon "Con Air" West's take on the story is bare-bones basic filmmaking. Yeah, the house is a remote showplace (the cops are 20 minutes away) straight out of Architectural Digest. Yeah, the girl is the girl of the moment, Camilla Belle of "The Ballad of Jack and Rose."

But the story is strictly connect-the-dots.

Start with foreshadowing. We meet Jill (Belle) in high school. She runs track. She has broken up with her boyfriend because he was lip-locking with Tiffany, her second-best friend. And she's banned from her cell phone because she went 800 minutes over the family allotment.

Details are important. Remember all that.

Remember, too, everything you're shown about the house: the alarm system, the things that work by remote control, the glass everywhere, the enclosed aviary and Koi pond.

She, and we, settle in for a quiet evening. Until the phone rings. And rings again.

The threats eventually turn explicit. But West has wisely realized that it's not what we see but what we imagine that's scarier.

It's funny how the story's mechanics hold up in the age of cells (static) and caller ID. "Funny" is something the movie could use more of. This isn't "Scream." There are no glib one-liners, few witty visuals — just a pretty girl in jeopardy. Major jeopardy.

Belle is no Jamie Lee Curtis — or Carol Kane, the bug-eyed sitter with the blood-curdling scream of the original "Stranger." But she conveys the pluck and strength and resourcefulness of modern girlhood. The "What kind of kids are we trusting to watch our kids?" subtext is more pronounced, here. But Belle acquits her generation quite nicely.

We know where he's going. We know where he's been. And we know what to do "When a Stranger Calls." So what if the only people surprised by this are too young to have even heard of the original? As "Red Eye" proved last summer, there's a little pleasure to be had just from watching a tale unfold precisely as you know it must, so long as you're in expert hands.

"When a Stranger Calls" is rated PG-13 for intense terror, violence and some language. Running time: 87 minutes.