My review was written after a January 1983 screening on Times Square.
Filmed in Toronto as "Bells", "Murder by Phone' is a sorry excuse for a horror/sci-fi programmer. Picked up for distribution by New World (and briefly flirting with an alternate moniker "The Calling"), it's due for a quick playoff.
The picture's gimmick is a crazed killer baffling the local police by killing at a distance using a sophisticated apparatus which transmits through the telephone system, zapping victims through their phone receivers. New World's release title for the film unwittingly tips off the age of this hoary plot device, used as the basis for a stilted 1935 movie "Murder by Television".
Richard Chamberlain, sporting a handsome beard and an unsteady country boy accent, toplines ats Nat Bridger, a science teacher investigating the mysterious death of one of his students. Tracking her death to a Toronto subway phone which was found melted, Bridger seeks aid in vain from his former professor Stanley Markowitz (John Houseman), now an environmental consultant for Inter-World Telephone Co.l
In one of many preposterous script cogs, Bridger befriends artist Ridley Taylor (Sara Botsford), painting a huge technology mural in the phone company's lobby, who conveniently has access to all the lans and files in the supposedly high-security installation. Aided by local police detective Meara (Gary Reineke) they trace and trap the killer.
British director (now a Canadian resident Michael Anderson fails to pump any excitement or suspense into the picture, preferring to immerse the viewer in telephone lore and load every scene with a different type of phone receiver. Cumulative effect is campy rather than scary, not surprising given the imprersona, definitely unhorrific reliance on "murer at a distance". Each killing consists of victim shaking, bleeding profusely and then, with hokey special effects, flying across the room in slow motion.
With silly, cliched dialog (and time out for pompous militant speeches by Chamberlain concerning controlling our destiny and protecting the environment), cast plays by the numbers. Redhead Sara Botword is introduced here as an attractive heroine, subsequently having made wo moe horror films "Still of the Night" and "Night Eyes", while Barry Morse is quite predictably up to no good as the president of IWT. Tech credits are subpar, particularly the murky photography. For an effective and intentionally funny paranoia film about the phone company, one still has to turn to "The President's Analyst".
