The Killer is On the Phone

The Killer is On the Phone

"I just think that sometimes, losing one's memory can be extremely useful."

Seeing a familiar stranger (Telly Savalas) at the airport triggers a panic attack for stage actress Eleanor Loraine (Anne Heywood), leading to a case of amnesia. She is distressed to discover that not only is her boyfriend Peter dead, but there is a new man in her life named George (Georgio Piazza), who claims to be her husband. While she pieces her life back together and tries to remember the past five years, the man from the airport follows her every move, murdering the people around her. Who is this man and why does this man want Eleanor dead? Are Eleanor's memories real or is she confusing reality with a play she was in? And how did Peter die? The answers lead to devastating and surprising revelations.

The Killer is On the Phone is a well-acted, beautifully shot movie that suffers from pacing and logic problems. It puts us in Eleanor's shoes, so it's intended to be disorienting, but it's a little too confusing for its own good. Maybe it's that the twists aren't sufficiently twisty and the story is too predictable. The identity of the killer is never in question, but the real mystery is finding out who hired him and why. Overall, I'd say that the amnesia storyline is poorly realized here. If you're interested in similar story better told, I recommend seeking out Puzzle.

• The city of Bruges, Belgium looks a lot nicer in that 2008 Colin Ferrell movie.
• The title is a complete non-sequiter.  It implies that the killer makes repeated threatening phone calls to the victim, but nothing like that ever happens in the movie. The alternate title, Scenes From a Murder, is a little more accurate, as Eleanor pieces together fragments of memories.

What the Hell Am I Watching? 

Telly Savalas's hitman (who is named Ranko, by the way) is completely inscrutable. He is being pressured by a client to pull off the assassination of an oil baron, but instead insists on staying in Belgium to clean up an old job. He has every opportunity to take out his target and for some reason, never manages to do it.

Instead of doing the job he was hired for, Ranko buys a collection of tin soldiers, for some reason. This is never addressed or explained.

Under sedation, Eleanor has a gauzy, slow-motion dream sequence that looks like a K-Tel "Light Rock Hits of the 70's" infomercial. And then it takes a weird S&M turn.

Later, Eleanor is walking down the street and sees a group of children running away from a little person dressed as a Medieval court jester. There's a red flag right there. The jester waves his puppets at her (not a euphemism) and she hallucinates that the jester is Peter... and then Ranko... and then the jester again. She gets freaked out and runs away.

Fashion Moment

Off-white suits: Who wore it better?

Ranko:

 

or Margaret (Rosella Falk):

I think Ranko is the clear winner here. Telly Savalas can wear the hell out of a suit.

Sleepless

Sleepless

"He killed my mother. It's not the same for me as it is for you.

Not just a routine case. Or a hobby."

Seventeen years ago, in 1983, little-person serial killer Vincenzo Fabrizi murdered three people in Torino – including the mother of young Giacomo (Stefano Dionisi) – before his body was found, dead of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot. Now, in the year 2000, someone is killing the same way and leaving trademark paper animal cutouts at the crime scenes. Retired detective Ulysses Moretti (Max Von Sydow), who worked the original case, is drawn to the investigation once again, joined by a grown-up Giacomo. Is this just the work of a copycat killer? Was it really Fabrizi's body they found all those years ago? And how do the murders tie in to a violent nursery rhyme that the killer hums? 

By the dawn of the 21st century, the world had mostly forgotten about giallo, but its greatest auteur, Dario Argento, kept the fires burning with Sleepless. Here, he borrows not only from his own catalog (The Bird With the Crystal Plumage, Deep Red), but makes reference to the classics (Blood and Black Lace) and borrows from some of the lesser entries of the genre (a major third act plot point is lifted directly from The Pajama Girl Case).  But Argento's main inspiration for Sleepless seems to be David Fincher's 1997 thriller Seven, with its low-key lighting, grimy rain-soaked aesthetic, and a serial killer who commits ironically-themed murders based on a work of literature.

• The title ostensibly comes from Moretti's insomnia, but only a passing reference is made to the fact that he has trouble sleeping.  It has nothing whatsoever to do with the plot.
• The creepy nursery rhyme at the center of the story was written by Argento's daughter, Asia.
• Goblin is back, hooray! Argento movies just aren't the same without the eerie synth-rock sounds of Claudio Simonetti.
• It's weird to see giallo characters use cell phones. So many movies from the 1970's and 1980's hinge on the fact that the characters can't readily communicate from anywhere they want.
• Two of the murders listed in the body count occur before the prologue and another (Vincenzo's death) occurs between the prologue and the main action of the film.

What the Hell Am I Watching?

Seriously – what the hell am I watching? Because the "moody" lighting is so low most of the time that I can't make out what's going on.

If that blue file is so important, why do people keep forgetting it or leaving it alone or dropping it in the street? It's infuriating!

Police round up little people as suspects to the sound of wacky bassoon music. It's kind of insulting and off-putting.

Giacomo reunites with his childhood friends at a bar where his romantic rival, Fausto (Roberto Accornero) keeps bringing up the fact that Giacomo's mom was brutally murdered. Even when they change the subject, he keeps bringing it back and wonders why everyone is so sensitive. Also, they talk about the fun times as kids when they all murdered animals, as if it's just something every kid does growing up.

The gang meets up a few days later at a mime bar. As in a bar for mimes. Wearing striped shirts and white facepaint, pretending to be trapped in a box. I swear to God, this is a thing that happens in this movie. What's most bizarre is that it goes completely unremarked-upon. No one makes reference to the fact that they're in a bar full of mimes. This might be a visual reference to the movie "Blow-Up," one of Argento's early influences.

Fashion Moment

As a clever callback to the hitman in Argento's The Bird With the Crystal Plumage, the murder of a nightclub dancer is committed by someone in a yellow jacket -  literally a "giallo killer."