Don’t Answer the Phone!, the cinematic equivalent of finding moldy pizza in your freezer, except the mold has an existential crisis and a fondness for necrophilia. Robert Hammer apparently thought, “Why stop at murder when you can sprinkle in amateur psychology, softcore porn, and enough melodrama to make a soap opera blush?” The result is… well, it exists.
Nicholas Worth as Kirk Smith is supposed to be scary, but instead he comes across like a gym-obsessed manchild with Daddy issues and a Snapchat filter permanently set to “creepy.” He strangles nurses, stalks women, and has imaginary chats with his dead father, which sounds like a profound tragedy until you realize it’s mostly a lot of grimacing and melodramatic crying. He kills with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer at a tea party, leaving the audience alternating between nausea and awkward laughter.
Flo Lawrence’s Dr. Lindsay Gale is supposed to be our hero psychologist, but watching her flounder between shrieking, romanticizing one detective, and crying over phone calls from a serial killer makes her less a beacon of intelligence and more a cautionary tale for anyone trusting strangers on the line. And the detectives? Hatcher and McCabe are less crime-fighting duo and more two guys wandering Los Angeles wondering, “How did we get paid for this?” Their incompetence borders on slapstick — which is funny, if the murders weren’t so uncomfortably graphic.
The plot is a meandering mess of random porn photos, murder set pieces, and McCabe’s convenient heroism. One minute Smith is committing grotesque atrocities, the next he’s explaining his daddy issues mid-murder, as if the audience needed a TED Talk while trying not to vomit. The pacing feels like a bad roulette game: spin the wheel, and see which moral boundary gets obliterated next.
Technically, it’s a marvel of low-budget chaos. The acting is patchy, the dialogue is cringe-worthy, and the cinematography seems to have been inspired by a drunken chess player who only understands three angles: wide, tighter wide, and close enough to see the pores. The murder scenes are gratuitous, unsettling, and yet somehow laughably amateurish — a true testament to horror in the era before effects departments had budgets.
Don’t Answer the Phone! isn’t just a movie; it’s a full-blown warning label on the human condition. It’s like watching a car crash in slow motion while the driver explains the mechanics of the crash in a monotone voice. You can’t look away, but you’re constantly questioning why anyone thought this was entertainment. The only real advice it gives? Don’t answer the phone… unless you want to witness 90 minutes of unhinged, grotesque absurdity that somehow survives on cult notoriety.
