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THE CALLER
Rating:  ½
USA. 1987.
Director – Arthur Allan Seidelman, Screenplay – Michael Sloan, Producer – Michael Sloan & Frank Yablans, Photography – Dannielle Nannuzzi, Music – Richard Band, Makeup Effects – Mechanical and Makeup Imageries Inc (Supervisor – John Buechler), Production Design – Giovanni Natalucci. Production Company – Altar Productions/Empire.
Cast:
Madolyn Smith (The Girl), Malcolm McDowell (The Caller)
Plot: A woman at home alone in her forest cabin is interrupted by a stranger who says his car has broken down and needs to use her telephone. She finds some elements of his story suspicious. He then reveals that she sabotaged his car so that she could lure him here to murder him. A psychological battle between the two grows in which he reveals that he is a police officer come to investigate her probable murder of her husband and daughter. But she pulls holes in these claims too.
The Caller is surely the strangest genre item that Charles and Albert Band’s Empire Films ever released. The film is ostensibly a psycho-thriller. Madolyn Smith and Malcolm McDowell circle around the other playing peculiar psychological games. Nothing is ever what it seems. Both seem to know things they aren’t meant to – he seems to know they are on Cutter’s Ridge despite her revelation that the sign blew over; he peculiarly seems to know the tow-truck number off by memory; she seems to know that his tire was blown by a broken bottle and that it was his front tire. The plot continually pulls everything out from the audience – she suddenly reveals that she may have deliberately set his accident up so as to lure him here to murder him; he reveals that he may be an undercover cop and hinting that he knows that she may have killed her husband and daughter. Although, each time enough doubt is left to suggest that such may not necessarily be the case. By the end, the two are openly acknowledging it as a game between them and counting points against the other as they expose holes in the other’s story. The games get so weird the film becomes truly fascinating.
The end twist, which unexpectedly takes The Caller from the realm of a psychological thriller into science-fiction, comes as a completely left field. It is one that only makes a limited degree of sense, nevertheless has a outre wildness and ingenuity to it.
Copyright Richard Scheib 1999-2012
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