Nov 27 2008
DON’T ANSWER THE PHONE
You never know who might be on the line…
PLOT
Dr. Lindsay Gale has a call in radio show where she offers help and support to those in the LA area. She starts getting phone calls from a man who claims he suffers from severe headaches and uses the name Ramone. She grows concerned, but has no way of knowing that Ramone is actually a photographer named Kirk who just happens to love raping and mutilating women. He even rapes and kills a woman she knows, but there’s nothing she can do. Then Kirk has a prostitute he’s with call into the show and proceeds to kill her while on the air. She seeks help from two detectives, including Chris McCabe who she launches a ridiculous romance with later in the film. Once she does this, Kirk decides to come after her himself.
TRIVIA
The original title of the film was The Hollywood Strangler. However Crown International, which distributed the film, made the producers change the title.
THOUGHTS
I went into Don’t Answer the Phone without a lot of expectations and damn it if I wasn’t entertained! This movie is exactly what I mean when I say I like bad horror movies. It isn’t very good, the acting isn’t that great and the death scenes are fairly tame. Yet I put it in one night before I went to bed and ended up staying up to watch the whole thing.
There’s a great scene where a caller phones the show and tells the detective that her young son keeps tying up his action figures and throwing them against the wall. The kid also cut up his goldfish with a pair of scissors and she wants to know if she should do something. In a response that I found hilarious, Gale offers her the number of a support line. Another scene involves a bunch of addicts flushing all their drugs down the toilet because they heard a cop was in the building. This is the kind of movie you’ll find here.
Don’t Answer the Phone isn’t a classic and most of you won’t like it, but I found it pretty entertaining and well worth the $5 I paid for it off Amazon!
