Don’t Answer the Phone! (1980)
Inspired by the L.A. hillside strangler, Nicholas Worth gives an excellent turn as a disturbed Vietnam veteran who pretending to be a photographer, picks up women off Subset Strip before choking them to death with a stocking.
The phone of the title is because Worth regularly calls a local lady doctor on a radio phone in, mocking her tirelessly before she becomes the 'final girl'.
This is one hell of a grimy film. The violence is gratuitous and highly exploitative with each victim forcibly groped in the seconds prior to death.
Don’t Answer the Phone! isn't a likable film, in fact i'd class it alongside Fulci's The New York Ripper when it comes to exploitative, sleazy, violence towards women and yet Worth's deranged performance makes the thing highly watchable due to it's matter of fact grimness elevating the film to a scuzzier existence far above typical slasher fayre.
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