Someone's Watching Me! (1978)

3 Stars (out of 4)

Scope Creep

By Jeffrey M. Anderson

Written and directed by John Carpenter, this fairly entertaining NBC TV movie aired just about a month after Carpenter's Halloween began shattering box office records in theaters. Sexy Lauren Hutton stars as Leigh Michaels, a confident single woman who moves to Los Angeles, finds a great apartment, and gets a job directing live television. She meets a nice man, Paul (David Birney), and everything seems to be going great, until she starts getting annoying phone calls and receiving strange packages. Before long, she realizes that the stranger is not only coming into her apartment, but also watching her from another window. The clever voyeur never leaves anything incriminating behind, and the police can't help, so it's up to Leigh, Paul, and Leigh's co-worker Sophie (Adrienne Barbeau) to set a trap. Lacking Carpenter's usual widescreen composition as well as his own music score, Someone's Watching Me! doesn't always feel like a Carpenter film, but it definitely has moments of inspired suspense. Better still, it actually takes time to set up the characters so that we're involved before anything terrible happens. Carpenter and Barbeau were married after this, and she went on to appear in his films The Fog and Escape from New York (and provided voicework for The Thing).