BELLS
Ding-a-ling...you're dead!
A great premise is well-executed in a crackling little Canadian thriller that also goes by the title Murder By Phone. The cast is great, the direction taut and the story almost always involving. Why I'd never heard of it before, I don't know.
Some unhappy camper out there has found a way to kill you over the phone - first, by making your brain hemorrhage, then, by blasting you twenty feet in the air with a massive electrical discharge. Never mind how implausible this might be - what a great setup for a movie! And people wonder why I always let the answering machine get every call that comes into my home.
This guy's cranky, too - even doing this against a bank teller who tells him the bank's closed! (and she's pretty hot, too, until she gets tele-annihilated) Richard Chamberlain (who, half the time, sounds like George Takei's been overdubbing his voice) stars as an ecology prof who looks into this when a former student of his is killed in this matter. John Housman is very funny as his colleague, who claims to be working "from inside the fence" but in reality may well have just sold out. He even gets to say "I earrrrrrrrrrrnedit!" like he did in all those TV commercials ("We make money the old-fashioned way...").
Somebody in this movie says that by the year 2000, there will be 1.4TRILLION phones in the world. That's, what, 250 phones per person? That's an awful lot of phones. He goes on to say that the cost of these phones - when you factor in all the crap that comes with 'em - is about a thousand dollars a phone. 1.4 QUADRILLION dollars. Does that much money even exist?
The best moment comes in the form of the cop's hilariously cruel ploy to see the president of the phone company. This one's a lot of fun, and recommended to anybody intrigued by the premise.