31 days of Horror: Day Twenty Three - Minaccia d'amore (Dial: Help)

Minaccia d'amore (Dial: Help) (1988)

Jenny Cooper is a British fashion model living in Italy. She's trying to get in contact with the dick head she's going out with, but he's not returning her phone calls. When she dials the wrong number and gets the office of an old dating agency, the magic/psychic phone at the agency falls in love, and begins stalking her. It phone's her up at home, or where ever else she is and plays strange noises and old recordings. At first Jenny thinks these are ordinary prank phone calls, but when the phone kills all her fish, and makes her neighbour take his shirt off and try to jump off her balcony, she knows it's serious. She gets her rock music playing, sports car driving friend who is also a telephone repairman, to look into things. He tells her "I've got a report that there's an energy that can't be explained in any way". She goes down to the subway looking for him, and finds him burned alive, then she's attacked by a maniac, but a payphone shoots coins at her attacker turning him into a bloody mess.

You get the picture. This is a nonsensical Italian horror movie that manages to be as constantly entertaining as it is confusing. Charlotte Lewis who plays Jenny, looks good, and does her best with the material. As is often the case with Italian genre films the cinematography is better than it has any right to be, and fans of hot 80's fashion phones will be delighted with what's on display. Director Ruggero Deodato is most famous for starting a cycle of hyper gory Cannibal films (he had to bring actors into court to prove he hadn't murdered them on camera) but he shows here, he can turn out an entertaining movie even if the blood is kept to a minimum, and nobody gets impaled.