Don't Hang Up (1974)
4/10
generally pretty poor whispering-dirty phone-calling transvestite killer flick
23 December 2004
Warning: Spoilers
The title doesn't make much sense to me. I'm not sure what door in the movie shouldn't have been opened.

The movie starts uneventfully, with a conversation between a man and a woman in a room that looks like a richly furnished train car, complete with the sound of the train traveling. In fact, the man's house is a train car, and he has a cassette of train sounds. The woman leaves, and calls a young woman. The young woman tells her boyfriend, a doctor, that she's been told her grandmother is ill, and she needs to return to her home town. She hasn't been there in thirteen years.

Flash back to thirteen years ago. A shadowy figure enters a house. He caresses a sleeping young girl, then goes into another room and stabs the girl's mother. The girl wakes up and enters her mother's room and finds her dead with a knife in her. She screams, and an arm comes out of nowhere and claps a hand over her mouth. She looks up in fear. That early scene in the movie of the killer muffling her scream, and the girl's look is one of the few effective shots in the movie.

It doesn't have much going for it in the visuals department. Occasionally there's some strange use of sound, and there's some weird lighting in an attic scene where many of the panes of glass are red and blue.

Back to the present day. The young woman arrives in her grandmother's house. An old doctor is there, who she doesn't trust, along with the man from the opening scene "Judge" and Kearn, the town's museum operator. She doesn't trust any of them, and it's true they don't inspire any trust. She's rather crabby throughout the whole movie. She wants to check her grandmother into a hospital. The men in the town want her house, and the museum operator wants the things in it (his museum is already filled with many of the grandmother's things). Inexplicably, the woman wants to keep the house.

The young woman starts getting phone calls from a man speaking in a sinister whisper. He makes various threats, and wants her to do things to arouse him. Such scenes recur often. Unfortunately, there are so few characters in the movie, that the possibilities of who it could be are limited. Worse still, we see right from the beginning who is making the phone calls. So, while the young woman doesn't know (even though the caller occasionally drops into his normal voice), the audience always knows: no suspense. Each call rattles her more and more.

The ending was unexpected for me, so maybe gets points for not going with the obvious, but I'm not sure I cared for it.
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