From the get-go this is one scary film. The daytime skyline of L.A. dissolves to nighttime accompanied by spooky music. Then, inside some room, a man's hand turns on a tape recorder and dials a telephone number. He wheels around a telescope pointed toward the window of his female target, Leigh (Lauren Hutton). After a brief vocal exchange, the man tells her: "Come to the window; all those windows out there; and I'm behind one of them".So begins "Someone's Watching Me", a suspenseful thriller about an attractive female TV broadcaster stalked by an unknown man. One of the scariest sequences has Leigh coming back to her high rise apartment and finding the front door unlocked. She calls the manager who tells her that although maintenance men were in her apartment earlier he personally locked it behind them. She sounds innocently skeptical. As the camera slowly pans around to the living room behind Leigh, a man suddenly and silently darts across the living room carpet ...Suspense is heightened by the fact that Leigh lives alone, and by the fact that much of the plot takes place at night. There's an effective use of silence in a couple of sequences toward the end that further enhances suspense.Despite the obvious suspense, the script has some problems, most notably the inanity of Leigh choosing to re-locate to a more secure residence that's exactly like the one wherein she was previously stalked ... a high rise apartment that looks out toward another high rise with lots of windows. Also, some of Leigh's specific actions and some dialogue are silly and unrealistic. Further, I was quite disappointed by the film's ending.Film direction and cinematography are fine and contribute to the suspense. Casting is acceptable. Overall performances are average. I thought Adrienne Barbeau, as Leigh's friend Sophie, gave a particularly good performance.If the viewer overlooks the script's defects and doesn't expect too much from the story's ending, this can be an absorbing film to watch. Females might not want to watch it at night while alone.

John Carpenter directed this TV(intended for cinema first) movie about a beautiful woman(played by Lauren Hutton) who finds herself harassed first by annoying phone calls, then by the realization that her stalker is watching her with a telescope from the opposite tower block from which she lives. He also sends notes, and when none of these things bring her closer to him, he escalates things... Cast also includes Adrienne Barbeau, David Birney, and Charles Cyphers.Well directed by Carpenter, but story is pretty routine and predictable, with little else to distinguish it or make it memorable. Saw this because of the DVD, which contains a good interview with John Carpenter(though no commentary track).

Leigh Michaels (Lauren Hutton) moves into a beautiful apartment building in LA. She also gets a new job, makes friends with lesbian coworker Sophie (Adrienne Barbeau) and makes a new boyfriend with charming Paul Winkless (David Birney). But she starts getting threatening phone calls and letters by a man who seems to know her every move. Sophie and Paul try to help her but they can't and it seems he's getting more and more dangerous.A good movie for Capenter that's obviously made for TV--there are blackouts every 20 minutes or so. It's not as good as "Halloween" but how could it be? It's more like Hotchcock's "Rear Window" than anything else. It's well-directed by Carpenter with a few nicely placed scenes that will make you jump. The script is very good too with believable characters and a fairly intricate plot. Also it's unusual that Carpenter got a lesbian character in the movie. There's nothing wrong with that at all--it was just a fairly gutsy move for a 1978 TV movie. Hutton is surprisingly very good in her role. You slowly see her character crumble under the pressure. Barbeau is also excellent in her role. Only Birney is off--he seems a little uncomfortable in his role. Still this is a good suspense film from Carpenter. Well worth catching.

I have been a huge fan of EARLY John Carpenter ever since I was a kid. From the absolute awesomeness of Halloween, the grungy thrills of Assault on Precinct 13, the intense paranoia and pessimism of The Thing to the sheer junk heaven of Big Trouble in Little China, his early films are sheer cinema bliss. So when I recently saw that Someone's Watching Me, a TV movie he made right before Halloween, had been finally released on DVD a couple of years ago, I raced out to get it. The film stars Lauren Hutton as a young woman who moves to Los Angeles and finds a job at a local TV station. She moves into a high-end, high-rise apartment building that faces another high-rise. Soon after moving in she is stalked by someone in the other apartment building, although she is initially unaware that anything is amiss. Alright, I admit that this story outline makes this sound like a lame direct-to-DVD potboiler, but the fun in the film comes from its less predictable, even bizarre elements. First off, Hutton's character is really unlike any other main character I've seen; a real goofball, she happily chatters away to herself walking down the halls of her apartment building and makes jokes that other characters don't get or that cause them to squirm. The strange way in which she is stalked, which involves a series of gifts sent by a fictional travel agency asking her to guess the destination of her prize trip so that she can win it, also adds to its unpredictability. I also adore the scene where Hutton, sitting by herself in her car, is approached by a man who leans in and says "It's a hell of a life, isn't it?" then stumbles away, never to be seen again. Sadly the plausibility starts to take a steep dive in the final scenes as the inevitable confrontation is nothing you haven't seen a million times in many other movies. Still, I found the movie highly entertaining (enough that I watched it a second time the next night, something I never do).