Originally written by Prof. Aglaophotis
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Plot Outline: Our movie opens with a murder scene in Los Angeles;
as a young nurse is preparing to unwind from her shift in her home at night, a local serial
strangler/sex assaulter attacks and strangles the nurse and has intercourse with her corpse. After
immediately associating ourselves with the killer, we soon discover he keeps himself up to date with
his deep-seated psychosis by tuning in and calling up Dr. Gale, a practicing psychiatrist who runs an
hourly radio talk show for individuals with mild problems (sort of like Travesty Ltd.’s Rock and Roll
Doctor, just not funny). In any case, she deals with various people in person and over the phone as the
killer somehow gains some sort of attachment to her and he shows this by killing one of her patients as
according to her discussed-in-person problems as well as performing his killing rounds. In the
meantime, the police are on to our bulky killer with various help, but even with their mounting
evidence, they run into consistent dead ends until the killer finally kills a caller for Dr. Gale to
hear live over the air and she insists on aiding in stopping the killer. |
One of the past selling techniques alluring me to
various horror movies is when a horror movie communicates a warning to the audience with its sole
title: Don’t. I feel as though just using that word for a horror movie works out wonderfully. But of
course, just like everything else in this silly world, one can find something good and bad from the lot
and this just happens to be one of the worse ones, but for a different reason than one might imagine.
You see, a horror movie is NOTHING without something horrific to offer; even if its mere exploitation,
it can still be harrowing and it will keep you involved in a somewhat serious way. That being said,
Don’t Answer the Phone offers something terrifying, but delivers poorly in keeping us attached. It
seizes the chances it has in the departments of sleaze and the seedy life of a strangulating death
rapist, but everything else is just too reprehensible: the all-around bland acting intertwined with the
occasionally coherent acting that is inundated with trite and boring comic relief is perhaps the
biggest deterring part of this movie, but more over, it’s ultimate lack of potential and simultaneous
slanted use of dated clichés. We have a title that concerns us about answering the phone, but after a
manly voiced mother calls her daughter, the warning of the phone answering seems almost entirely
irrelevant, despite calling the doctor on her radio show! Apparently, this movie was based off a screen
play called Night Time, so it’s obvious that the switching title was a big mistake, but I’m rushing in
too deep. Let’s find out what works first:
As mentioned earlier, the sleaze of the film was rather well done in the sense that our killer was also
a photographer (forgot to mention that earlier, but that’s what a movie like this does to you) who
would photograph his victims defiled corpses and would sell them for a good sum of money (because they
were strangled, I guess no one would suspect, but it still gives you the creeps). We watch the killer
enter this seedy Holly Wood underworld of pimps and drug pushing nonchalantly like a scene of social
acceptance, most of the fellows not knowing/caring whether this guy was the local serial killer or not.
Also, killer is fairly well acted. Now I know, I consistently give kudos to actors playing convincing
killer roles, but I feel that the actors deserve it; it’s no easy task playing the antagonist,
especially when the character requires the actor to perform odd deeds and forms of murder and make them
convincing. I don’t know how long the guy who played as the rapist in Deliverance had to put up with
people walking by him in airports singing the banjo & guitar song under their breath, but the guy
deserves credit for his role as it challenges your social life regardless and may impede or advance
your acting career. With my analogous digression in place, Nicholas Worth as Kirk the killer was
exceptionally good, seeing that the exposition and credibility of his character was really all up to
him in an inferable manner. There were no expository flash backs regarding his trauma and there wasn’t
enough time or lines for him to completely express his character’s feelings lucidly, just three out of
eight spots of exposition that adhere closely to his problems that in some small way, one can relate. I
wasn’t expecting a character study out of this mind you, but just enough depth of the character so he
is not just some faceless villain that kills SOLELY because it feels good and makes us want to watch
him die faster…the character is still icky and hateful, but not enough to emit so strong a feeling of
vindictive utilitarianism for his actions that doesn’t question understanding, which brings me straight
into what doesn’t work in the movie…man oh man, where to start?
First off, if you’re going to have a perverted killer strangling young women, make sure not ALL of the
victims are stupid and/or mentally challenged with little exceptions; give em’ a chance to struggle and
evade the killer so the audience gets a feeling of fear or terror (at least The Toolbox Murders gave
three out of the four victims a fighting chance)! Second, if you’re going to have a police force
dedicated to catching the killer, make sure they’re competent! Before murdering a second victim, Kirk
followed her five times, enough for her to see his face, recognize his car from the previous three
drive-bys and act upon the stalking. On top of that, Kirk left his hand and finger prints all over the
side door knob of the victims house, before he battered the front of it down. They may have found a
Viet Kong coin in the stocking used for strangulation hinting he must’ve be a Vietnam war veteran, they
may have found pubic hairs and semen samples, but they never dusted for finger prints or made any other
conclusions from the samples rather than another link up to a similar murder?! Another brilliant
emphasis of this type of police work was character Lt. McCabe being wry, being highly one dimensional
(just like COUNTLESS low budget Science Fiction films) and pulling off Joe Don Baker tactics,
intertwined with gunning down your only living witness and shooting an unarmed man dead simply because
he’s too strong to be contained (and they don’t get points for ripping off tidbits from the climaxes to
Eegah or House on the Edge of the Park neither [betcha’ that guy isn’t gonna fall in the pool])! If a
case is really THAT perplexing, call in the FBI, not a clairvoyant or a phony professor! Third, if
you’re going to hurtle forth cannon fodder, make sure they don’t always act so impetuously dumbfounded
that once their own house is being bombarded by a human tank, they just crawl out of bed and crouch
down in a bright inconspicuous corner of their room or never think of escaping through the side door of
their own home instead of running for the obviously blocked door!! Fourth, in lieu of the incompetent
police force, make sure your other helpers such as psychiatrists aren’t so unbelievably fake (this
includes the lead doctor!) that we believe more of the incompetent officer’s straight-forward, black
and white rhetoric rather than the professionals as they are either too derivative or dead pan stoic to
be believable! Fifth, if the movie wanted atmosphere, they should’ve made sure that the music didn’t
belong more appropriately in a Nintendo fighting game!! Sixth, I know some movies desire padding, but
intertwining it with a huge assault worth of sexual comic relief made me forget I was watching a horror
movie…that’s not good.
Continuity shots were terrible, the content was surprisingly lacking, the depth of our characters were
more shallow than the killer’s, it was hard to find someone believable or smart (with the exception of
the psychic, but even he was too clichéd), leaving an innumerous amount of loose plot threads dangling
like nooses hanging from a glass-less green house, lack of using a phone as a sign of danger for the
victims…the list just goes on. I know bad movies are easily commendable at times because some of them
are so bad they’re good or have bad acting that surprisingly makes the movie more believable in a
realistic form, but the worst part about all of this was that it was more boring than it was
entertaining, harrowing, frightening or easy to take seriously unless you’re easily offended by a woman
killer/partial racist, which is highly understandable, but there’s more serious cinema out there than
this; this is just dumb. There were at least two of these bad scenes I found hilarious, the first being
the obvious digressional sexual comedy where a supposed drug bust is going on and we run into several
outrageously dressed bondage fellows in a panic and the second is where the doctor is talking to a
drug addict, but the scene starts with a close up of the addict’s blonde hair and the both of them in a
room with flowery wall paper, then we see the doctor talking to the addict in another shot in front of
white walls and the addict’s hair is brown. I was not looking for quality in this movie, for cinematic
quality is almost as hard to define as whether someone is normal or not, but I was looking for effort.
I feel sorry giving it a one because I saw potential in it with our traumatized killer, and I’m sure
director Robert Hammer did too, but any form of redeeming factor was lost in the fat of lingering
insipidness. This movie made me wish the lighting was just as worse as it was in The Demon, this way it
would’ve been harder to see the ennui that is Don’t Answer the Phone. Memorable Stinger: “McCabe and
Hatcher! Those bozos! If it were up to me, I’d fire em’!”
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