Review of Hotline

Hotline (1982 TV Movie)
4/10
Out of Service
1 June 2023
Warning: Spoilers
Hotline: hotline call me on the hotline. Call me up. Call me up.

The movie starts out with a body dump scene.

So much for that "please be thoughtful and dispose of your trash in the can business." The unknown assailant rolls her down an embankment.

I like that movie where Jackie Brown has the metallic talons and is murdered and rolled up in a carpet, then dumped like trash in a junkyard at the end.

A creep in a bar keeps repeating, "Hey, sweet meat," and turns out to be a real gentleman who tips the lady twenty bucks and feels entitled to a night of ooh la la in return. Hey, big spender.

His advances are rebuffed, and his sour mash turns to sour grapes and revenge.

The movie establishes three or four potential suspects, and some of them are decoys.

It's a whodunnit movie.

The problem with these movies, like "Murder on the Orient Express," is that once you've seen them, you know who the killer is, and any suspense or surprise is then void with any future viewing.

Stalking long, tall Sally home, two different strangers help themselves in her house, and one offers her a job as a phone sex worker.

With no name actors and a plot yet to explain itself, I can't compare anyone to someone else. I guess I could call the Jennifer Connelly lookalike "the one who drives a white car with a coffin-red interior." I don't know what the hell car it is she's driving. It's not a Bentley, an Aston Martin, or a GT.

People ring up this hotline crisis center and order pizza, Subway, or what have you, and if it's delivered three minutes late, they threaten self-harm or, worse, suicide.

Nothing happens in the movie until a creepy weirdo starts ringing the phone-a-thon money raiser and starts with the threatening messages.

He's got that whole, "What's your favorite scary movie?" voice going on and speaks riddles with a tinge of a British accent.

I bet this nutcase even rang into the Melvin Belli show and claimed to be Zodiac.

Building a repertoire with the one who drives a white car with a coffin-red interior, the calls come fast, even personal, and I got half a penny says that he eventually calls her at her home. (Check.)

Clarence Boddicker sells her a listening device to wiretap the landline, and the cryptic messages flood in.

The one who drives a white sports car with a coffin-red interior flies all the way to Vegas just to take a phone call from Ghostface.

Here she meets some Lecter wannabe, and the scene is really pointless.

Just like the creep who follows her back from Reno and proceeds to stalk her in the parking lot. It's a dead-end lead that goes nowhere.

There are no murders, just psychological torment.

At least the Scorpion Killer acted on his impulses and didn't just hide behind phone calls with empty rhetoric.

As predicted, he calls the one who drives a white sports car with a coffin-red interior at her home on her unlisted number.

The movie never explains why the one who drives the white sports car with the coffin-red interior was targeted.

Am I supposed to be surprised when it's revealed who the tormentor is near the end?

I don't even know who it is.

He reminds me of the VHS cover of "Dead End Drive-In," or remember that idiot from "Headless Eyes" who locks himself in the meat locker and freezes to death?

Whoever it is, they're wearing blue eye shadow and heavy mascara and resemble something out of "Class of Nuke 'Em High." They die ridiculously as a deep-sea diver shoots him with a spear gun.
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