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| The days before caller I.D. were indeed terrifying. |
While there have been plenty of thrillers and horror movies built around scary phone calls (Sorry, Wrong Number; When a Stranger Calls; Scream) and a few where the phone is a conduit to an evil force (976-Evil and The Ring-with-a-wireless-plan One Missed Call), to my knowledge the Canadian-made Murder by Phone (a.k.a. Bells) is the only movie to feature, well, murders by phone. And there may be a reason why there have been no other killer phone movies afterwards: Phones just aren’t all that scary, especially when potential victims can simply hang up.
Despite a silly concept, director
and co-writer Michael Anderson (Around the World in 80 Days, Logan’s Run,
Orca) managed to turn out an engaging-in-spite-of-itself thriller. Helping sell the story is the late Richard Chamberlain at peak fuckability (it’s bearded Richard Chamberlain, which is the best Richard Chamberlain), who stars as a college science teacher/environmental
activist Nat Bridger. While attending a conference in Toronto Bridger investigates
the death of one of his former students at the request of her father. The former
student’s death was ruled a heart attack, but Bridger and the girl’s father
aren’t buying it since she was only 19. We know from the movie’s opening scene
that what killed her was her answering a ringing pay phone [link for younger
readers] that then emitted a high-pitched whine that, apparently, immobilized
her while she bled from her nose and eyes before shooting a blast of electricity
directly into her ear, sending her flying across a subway platform and onto a
nearby escalator.
Several more people
die this way, with some of the kills being unintentionally hilarious, like when
an executive is sent flying through an upper floor window of an office high
rise, still seated in his desk chair. Bridger pieces together that the calls
are being perpetrated by a person who has somehow devised a way to send high-voltage
blasts through the telephone lines (just go with it), but phone company execs
stonewall him when he goes to them with his concerns, turning Murder by
Phone into an awkward conspiracy thriller. Bridger’s trip to the phone
company isn’t for naught, however. While there he meets R.T. (Sarah Botsford),
an artist creating a mural in the lobby of the phone company’s headquarters, who assists
him in his investigation as well as becoming his love interest.
I first learned
about this movie when the Glorious Trash blog reviewed Phone Call, Jon Messmann’s novelization
of this movie’s script published a full year before the movie was filmed in
1980, and three years before its release in the U.S. Glorious Trash described
the book as “sluggish” and “more deadening than thrilling,” before launching
into a tirade about Bridger being written as a hardcore environmentalist <sigh>.
Even dismissing the right-wing complaints, the book sounds like a chore to
read. The movie, though, is well-paced and entertaining. Chamberlain and Botsford,
besides being easy on the eyes, keep things grounded by playing it straight, while
supporting actors John Houseman, as Bridger’s pompous mentor, and Gary Reineke, as a
skeptical police lieutenant, give more outsized performances befitting a B-movie. Anderson’s
stylish direction also helps, even wringing (or is that ringing?) some genuine tension from the goofy premise.
Though I’d be among the first to buy this movie if Vinegar Syndrome ever got ahold of it for a Blu-ray release (hint, hint), I’d also be the first to admit that it doesn’t fully work. The movie’s story would’ve been easier to buy had there been a supernatural/paranormal cause behind killer phones. No matter how much science-y sounding dialog the movie throws at us, it just can’t convince us someone could kill via landline. Even more far-fetched: Bridger, who has a Ph.D., allowing people to address him Mister Bridger without once correcting them. I call bullshit.
