Netflix'd :: Clearing Out the Instant Que :: The Yellow Pages Effect :: Matthew Parkhill's The Caller (2011)

When an abused wife finally makes the right call and pulls the plug on her marriage, the only mistake she makes is where she chooses to live after finally walking out on the puerile creep. For while the new apartment has lots of space, and is near the restaurant owned by the parents of her new beau, things take a sinister turn when a distraught woman keeps calling her number, looking for her own deadbeat husband. At first thinking she's found a kindred spirit, the two women engage and swap their tales of woe. But when a misunderstanding leads to a Hitchcockian, Strangers on a Train twist, resulting in the caller murdering her husband, our heroine tries to pull the plug. But the phone keeps ringing, the caller gets more frustrated, then angry, then threatening, until finally dropping a bombshell: the caller thinks it's 1978, and she's calling from the exact same apartment. And judging by all the evidence we've seen and heard, the caller is telling the truth...

Having (I believe, at least,) finally dethroned the slasher/serial killer movie, as flesh-eating zombies and homicidal ghosts, through big screen releases to whatever the hell Asylum is currently knocking-off directly to your DVD player, wage war to be crowned the new King of Horror, cinematically speaking, I found myself tipping the scales a bit while playing Netflix roulette the other night. Well, at least I thought I was. Judging by the descripto-blurb provided for Matthew Parkhill's The Caller, when combined with the set-up and opening act, I thought I was dealing with another angry spirit, who was ready to make life miserable for the latest occupant of the deceased's former abode, who, in turn, was just too damned dumb to leave. Turns out I was wrong.

More akin to Gregory Hoblit's Frequency, where solar flares allow a son to communicate with his dead father some twenty years in the past via an old ham radio, solve a string of murders, and changes history, The Caller mines this same sci-fi mash-up of Quantum Leap and A Sound of Thunder (-- where author Ray Bradbury effectively introduced the world to the cataclysmic repercussions of time-travel by stomping on a butterfly, which is then combined with Dr. Sam Beckett's attempts to stitch it all back together). But while there are a few dire time-stream hiccups in Hoblit's film, Parkhill's protagonist, Mary (Lefevre), has no agent in the past to rely on to put right what goes wrong and is therefore completely at the mercy of one of the nastiest and vilest psycho-biddies to come down the pike since Margaret White.

Except for a brief glimpse, we only hear Rose, played beautifully by Lorna Raver -- last seen similarly tormenting Alison Lohman in Sam Raimi's Drag Me to Hell. And with each taunting call comes a new burp in the time-stream. Secret messages scratched into the drywall that weren't there before. A finger buried in the yard. A new wall in the pantry, where, as the movie progresses, more and more mummified bodies keep piling up as Rose's reign of terror grows back in 1978. Meanwhile, in 2011, more and more people around Mary keep disappearing -- people only she remembers. You see, that's why Mary cannot stop answering the phone. For if she does, more people she knows and love will "die" retroactively.

On her end of the phone, Mary submits but tries to find out more about Rose, who, originally, hung herself in the apartment back in 1978 when her philandering husband ran out on her. But now, with the past in such a state of flux, Mary's research goes nowhere as history keeps changing, executed best with Mary's ever self-adjusting photo-albums. And after an ingenious plan to beat Rose at her own game backfires, the audience realizes how thoroughly screwed Mary is when Rose calls again and puts someone else on the phone, and Parkill punctuates that point rather grisly with some scaldingly hot chicken grease that had me squirming in the recliner. But with this despicable act comes Mary's final salvation when the past and present finally collide for quite the denouement.

So, yeah, The Caller is more sci-fi than supernatural, but that in no way or shape ruins things. Expanded from a half-hour BBC drama, though some may find the pace a bit glacial, I found the resulting feature film to be totally engrossing, the good guys -- Lefevre, Moyer (the boyfriend), and Guzmán (the landlord) -- charmingly endearing, giving the disappearances a hefty punch that's sorely lacking in a lot of these jump-scare-o-ramas, and found the whole thing to be dreadfully spooky, just in a completely different way because Mary is screwed and Parkill doesn't cheat as he detonates one most probable expectation after another as we barrel toward the climax, with no cop-out retroactive happy ending either. However, I will warn that the final coda involving Mary's ex almost derails everything that came before, and reeks of a tacked on twist just to have a twist, but I refuse to let this misjudgement ruin the overall experience because The Caller is just that damned good.

The Caller (2011) Alcove Entertainment :: Head Gear Films :: Pimienta :: The Salt Company International :: Samuel Goldwyn Films / EP: Robert Bevan, Phil Hunt, Cyril Megret, Compton Ross / P: Amina Dasmal, Robin C. Fox, Luillo Ruiz, Piers Tempest / AP: Belly Torres, Carlos Anibal Vázquez / D: Matthew Parkhill / W: Sergio Casci / C: Alexander Melman / E: Gabriel Coss / M: Aidan Lavelle, Unkle / S: Rachelle Lefevre, Stephen Moyer, Luis Guzmán, Ed Quinn, Lorna Raver

For the Love of Hitchcock :: Trailer Park :: Tying it Up into One Final Knot...

While a sadistic sexual predator runs around loose in London, leaving a trail of strangled women in his wake, all adorning his signature necktie, a surly and perpetually down-on-his-luck bartender (Finch) picks the wrong time to have a very public dust-up with his ex-wife, especially when the strangler tags her as the next victim! And as the false-witness and circumstantial evidence mounts against him, including the murder of his current girlfriend, our protagonist turns to his best friend (Foster) as his last chance of escape. Unfortunately, the best friend in question is the real killer (-- no, that's not really a spoiler, trust me), who is doing his damnedest to frame our hapless hero and lead the cops right to his doorstep. Knock. Knock...

Video courtesy of OldHollywoodTrailers channel.

In the annals of movie history, has there been a less sympathetic wronged man than John Finch's Blaney? What a pompous, passive/agressive ass. So is it any wonder, then, when the master-manipulator has us in the back of the potato truck, we're sweating it out with Barry Foster's Rusk as he tries to get the incriminating tie-pin back, hoping the killer will succeed -- and thus get away with murder? Wait. What?!? *snap*crackle*pop* goes the rigor'd fingers ... Yeah. Once again, we're all confused as to who we should be rooting for, which is one of the many reasons why I love this nasty and twisted little film so much.


Now, one of the biggest knocks against Hitchcock is How can he be considered such a cinematic genius when all he ever did was keep making the same movie over an over again. It's a legitimate beef, too, though perhaps skewed a bit by target fixation. Here, we've got another wronged man at the mercy of the authorities (The Wrong Man), we've got another hero on the run (North by Northwest, Saboteur), we've got a homicidal sexual pervert (Psycho), we've got several scenes where we're rooting for the more charismatic killer (Strangers on a Train), we've got a killer trying to hide a body in a steamer trunk (Rope), and it even falls apart in the clumsy third act (Dial M for Murder), only to end on one of the greatest "Oh shit!" moments in cinema history. So, yeah, Frenzy could be considered nothing more than patchwork quilt of Hitchcock's greatest hits. But what, may I ask, is exactly wrong with that?


Remember, this is after a couple of box-office swings and misses that were outside his wheel-house (Torn Curtain, Topaz). So, can you blame the guy for returning to London and a genre he knew inside and out? And in so doing connected right on the sweet-spot? And the only thing, I think, keeping Frenzy out of the same breath as the likes of Vertigo, Notorious and North by Northwest as one of the greatest Hitchcock movies ever is the odious comedy relief provided by the chief inspector and his culinary-impaired wife, where every meal felt like an inside joke that I wasn't privy to. Look, I like these characters, but while we should be laughing at these intrusions I got the distinct feeling they were laughing at me instead, and, thus and so, wore out their welcome rather quickly.


Still, there's a lot to like. And what I like the most is the juxtaposition between the murders of Brenda, the ex-wife (Leigh-Hunt), and Babs, the current girlfriend (Massey). By 1972, being pushed aside by the artistic brutality of Argento, Romero, and Polanski, Hitch was on the verge of ... not obsolescence, but, quaintness. But with Brenda, where we see the assault and murder from the beginning to its gruesome end, the old master ditched his usual tricks of implication and showed these young film turks that what they do isn't all that hard. Now compare that to the later murder, where Rusk escorts the unsuspecting Babs to his flat, where the camera follows them up the stairs, but once the door closes, sealing Babs' grisly fate, the camera silently retreats back down the way it came, back into the noisy streets, knowing full well we'll never see Babs alive again, and then ask yourself which has more of an impact? That's right. And this sequence, I think, is the absolute zenith of Hitchcock's fluid, voyeuristic camera tricks and a fine capper on his career. Because, between you and me, I like to pretend Family Plot never happened.


And since this will be my last post for this Hitchcock hootenanny, it's time I fessed up to something. When this Blogathon was announced I figured I'd best get to re-watching some of these movies. Only then did I realize how light my home video library was on the tributee in question. Aside from an old clam-shell VHS copy of Psycho bought at a library liquidation -- which, upon closer inspection, hadn't even been removed from the plastic-wrap -- there was nary a Hitchcock movie to be found, DVD, DVD-R, VHS, Betamax, Laser Disc, taped, recorded, downloaded or otherwise. Nada. Zilch. Somewhere between shit and squat. And as such a self-proclaimed huge fan, I just found it strange that I was never so enamored by any one film in particular to actually purchase it to watch at a moments notice. Sure. There are plenty that could be. But maybe that's not such a bad thing. Keeping some things at arms length may actually make you appreciate them even more when you stumble upon them on cable, or it randomly gets suggested up in your Netflix que, or forces you to go out of your way to see. E'yup. Maybe not such a bad thing at'all.

Other Points of Interest:

The newspaper ads for Frenzy at the Morgue.

This, alas, is my last post for the For the Love of Film Blogathon, a new age telethon to raise funds for The National Film Preservation Foundation to help bring The White Shadow (a/k/a White Shadows), an early silent film that a certain master of suspense did just about everything for except direct — assistant director, screenwriter, film editor, production designer, art director, and set decorator, to the streaming masses and help defray the costs of adding a new musical soundtrack.

There’s no donation too small, folks. So please, click on the link above, wherever you see it this week and give what you can. Thanks. For more information, check out the group’s Facebook page. Big thanks, as always, to Ferdy on Film, The Self-Styled Siren and This Island Rod for throwing such a wide net for contributors. Until next time, then, I bid you all a good ev-ah-ning.

Frenzy (1972) Universal Pictures / P: Alfred Hitchcock / AP: William Hill / D: Alfred Hitchcock / W: Anthony Shaffer, Arthur La Bern (novel) / C: Gilbert Taylor / E: John Jympson / M: Ron Goodwin / S: Jon Finch, Barry Foster, Anna Massey, Barbara Leigh-Hunt, Alec McCowen, Michael Bates, Billie Whitelaw