Don’t Answer the Phone (1980) Crown International/Horror-Thriller RT: 94 minutes Unrated Version (language, strong brutal violence including rape, nudity, sexual content, racial epithets, drug use) Director: Robert Hammer Screenplay: Robert Hammer and Michael D. Castle Music: Byron Allred Cinematography: James L. Carter Release date: August 1980 (Philadelphia, PA) Cast: James Westmoreland, Ben Frank, Flo Gerrish, Nicholas Worth, Denise Galik, Stan Haze, Gary Allen, Michael Castle, Pamela Bryant, Chris Wallace. Box Office: N/A
Rating: ***
Let’s take an informal poll. Which title do you like better, The Hollywood Strangler or Don’t Answer the Phone? [Imaginary hand count] Wow, okay. I think we can all agree the latter one sounds cooler while the former is too generic a title.
The only problem is Don’t Answer the Phone isn’t accurate. It doesn’t describe the premise. It’s not about a killer who calls his victims to make sure they’re home before he strikes. The only time something remotely close to that happens is when he kills his first victim immediately after she finishes talking on the phone. That’s the scene I remember seeing on the TV ads for Don’t Answer the Phone. If I had to guess, I’d say the producers got the idea for the new title from that scene and built their ad campaign around it. It’s a cheap trick designed to attract more viewers, but such is the nature of exploitation filmmaking.
As indicated by its original title, Don’t Answer the Phone deals with a series of stranglings in the Hollywood area. The killer is Kirk Smith (Worth, No Way Out), a burly, deranged Vietnam vet who picks up his female victims, usually in the guise of a professional photographer, and strangles them in their homes before sexually abusing their dead bodies. He uses a stocking with a Vietnamese coin it. He practices his art on nurses, hitchhikers, hookers and models. When he’s not killing, he’s either lifting weights or holding conversations with his dead father. In brief, he’s a loon.
Two goofy detectives, Lt. McCabe (Westmoreland, The Undertaker and His Pals) and Sgt. Hatcher (Frank, Death Wish II), are assigned to track down the Strangler. They always seem to be several steps behind the hulking psycho, a frequent caller to a radio talk show hosted by psychologist Dr. Lindsay Gale (Gerrish, Over the Top). Calling himself “Ramon”, he complains of debilitating headaches. The cops pay her a visit after one of her patients becomes one of his victims. Initially hostile and uncooperative, Gale starts to fall for McCabe after he helps her with a suicidal patient.
As the bodies pile up throughout Tinsel Town, the detectives blunder their way through the case. At one point, they cause a huge ruckus at a massage parlor when they show up looking for a possible witness to one of the slayings, a pimp named Adkins (Haze, Alligator). He’s conducting drug-related business when he gets word that a bust is in progress. In a moment of hilarity, a prostitute attempts to snort the evidence from every surface in the room including the pimp’s bald head.
Don’t Answer the Phone is a total exploitation flick. It has all the necessary ingredients: bad acting, dopey dialogue, cheap production values, not-too-bright cops, attractive but dumb young women, lots of naked breasts, drugs, sleazy characters, the nighttime streets of Hollywood Boulevard, a killer with vague motives (religion fits in somehow) and sadistic violence.
In the middle of it all is an effectively campy performance from the late Worth as the psycho Kirk. It’s not his fault the screenplay only hints at the reasons for his character’s murder spree. There’s one scene where a police psychologist offers up his diagnosis to the cops on the case, but all he really does is throw a lot of terms at them. All we know for sure about Kirk is he’s completely wacko. Westmoreland and Frank have an easy rapport as the two barely competent detectives on the case. Their idiocy is a nice comic touch. Gerrish does a decent job as Dr. Gale. It’s obvious she will be Kirk’s last attempted kill before the inevitable finale where he and McCabe face off in a fight to the finish.
The odd thing is, for all its trashiness, Don’t Answer the Phone is actually pretty good. One-movie wonder Robert Hammer does a good job creating suspense and a lurid atmosphere. Sure, the script he co-wrote with Michael D. Castle is a collection of recycled ideas from other exploitation thrillers. It has a lot of sadistic violence, but not a lot of gore. Hammer manages to inject more humor than one would expect in a movie like this. In a movie filled with dumb dialogue, the best exchange has to be when a drug dealer calls the pimp “a dumb n*****“. The pimp replies, “Hey! Who the f*** are you calling dumb, a**hole breath?” I think Don’t Answer the Phone is a great deal of fun. What can I say? I like a good “Don’t” horror movie. Who doesn’t?
