TV MOVIE REVIEW : ‘I Saw What You Did’: A Chiller With an Uncompromising Payoff

CBS’ tense, Hitchcockian “I Saw What You Did,” airing at 9 tonight on Channels 2 and 8, is an artful roller-coaster ride of a film.

A stylish remake of William Castle’s 1965 thriller of the same name, this teleplay by Cynthia Cidre, based on a novel by Ursula Curtiss and masterfully directed by Fred Walton, takes its viewers on a breathless descent into an unrelenting nightmare.

Shawnee Smith, possessed of the mixture of flawless beauty and vulnerability that Hitchcock loved in his heroines, is Kim, a lonely, motherless teen-ager who lives with her little sister, Julia (Candace Cameron), in a remote hillside area.

When her father goes away on business, Kim invites a free-spirited schoolmate (Tammy Lauren) for dinner. In the course of the evening, the three girls, bored, begin playing giggly little phone games. The game becomes deadly when Kim randomly calls Adrian Lancer (Robert Carradine) and says, “I saw what you did.” Lancer, a musician with a history of mental disturbance, has just murdered his girlfriend. Finding Kim becomes his obsession.

Carradine does a superb job. There is tension in every movement; he is sweating and confused, monolithic in his killer’s quest. His real-life brother, David Carradine, looking solidly Establishment, plays his concerned normal brother.

Nothing is quite innocent here, however. The games the girls play, secure in their self-absorption, are unthinkingly nasty. Odd camera angles on doors and windows create an illusory unbalance. Tight close-ups are purposefully suffocating. Every closed door is a threat; the rustling of leaves outside an uncurtained window is a subtle menace.

You can catch your breath (unfortunately) during the commercial breaks and prepare for the deliciously uncompromising payoff. This is not a film about redemption.