Paul Attanasio of "The Washington Post" wrote: "The suspense sequences are stylishly managed, and Walton has attractively cast the movie with a number of natural, if unexciting, actors. There is a suburban princess and a jock and a Junior Achievement type and so forth, none of which qualifies Bach for screen writer of the year, but it's remarkable how effective even these elementary efforts at characterization are in the context of the film." Reviewing the film in "The New York Times" , Vincent Canby criticised the film's dialogue, its plot, where "Nothing in the film is quite what it seems to be, not always intentionally" and the characters, for being "as interchangeable as the actors who play them".