This movie scared the be-jabbers out of me, and that is saying something.
The plot is simple: girls in a sorority house are menaced by a psycho killer who, for reasons known only to himself, has set up shop in their attic. It's the Christmas season and most of the girls have gone home for the holidays, but three of the sisters -- Jess (Olivia Hussey), Barb (a fabulously foulmouthed and over-the-top Margot Kidder) and Phyl (Andrea Martin) remain behind with their house mother, Mrs. Mac (Marion Waldman).
It seems that the house has been plagued with bizarre phone calls. Not exactly obscene, the calls tend toward ranting gibberish, insane laughter, horrible screams, and some kind of unholy crooning. The calls are one of the truly frightening things in the film; they pour out of the phone like the soundtrack to a nightmare, and you find yourself wondering why the girls don't just hang up. Sensibly, they call in the police, who come to put a tap on the phone.
The first girl to disappear is Clare Harrison (Lynn Griffin), whose father sounds the alarm when she fails to meet him to be taken home for Christmas. The father, played to jittery perfection by James Edmond, spends most of the movie nervously asking cops, sorority sisters, boyfriends, and anyone else he can find, if they know what has happened to his daughter. Unbeknownst to the rest of the sisters, Clare has taken up residence in the attic, where the killer has posed her in a rocking chair with a plastic bag over her head and a baby doll in her lap.
Clare is shortly joined in oblivion by Mrs. Mac, who makes the mistake of clambering up into the attic to look for her cat and ends up staying for eternity, suspended from the ceiling by a chain -- attached to a hook embedded in her throat. The psycho picks the girls off in a leisurely way, eventually leaving only the luminously beautiful Olivia Hussey -- who, according to the Horror Film Rules of Conduct, should be a victim of the killer because of a subplot involving the fact that she is pregnant and wants to have an abortion. She argues with her boyfriend, Peter (in one memorable exchange, he calls her a selfish bitch and accuses her of aborting the baby "...like you were having a wart removed!"); Jess eventually comes to suspect that Peter may be the killer because the killer begins incorporating bits of her arguments in his calls.
Margot Kidder plays Barb a little too broadly for sympathy; at the beginning of the film, we discover that her mother prefers to spend Christmas with a new boyfriend ("You're a gold-plated whore, mother," Margot snarls into the phone, scotch in one hand and cigarette in the other); this serves to explain why Barb spends the movie drinking, smoking, dropping double-entendres, swearing like a pirate -- and having anxiety-induced asthma attacks. By the time the killer gets to her, you feel sorry for them both.
There are several memorably frightening moments in the film, but one in particular will make you squirm. In a classic early-slasher-genre trick, the phone tap reveals that the obscene calls are coming from inside the house -- specifically from the housemother's bedroom -- and a terrified Jess discovers the bloodied bodies of Phyl and Barb. In the bedroom with the bodies, an eye stares at Jess from a crack in the closet door, and the voice of the killer taunts her from the darkness. Jess slams the door on the killer -- who immediately begins to shriek in a way that suggests damnation and rage unfit for human consumption. The shrieking continues as he chases Jess around the house; eventually I had to mute the TV because I seriously could not listen to the shriek. It was that horrible.
The end of the movie is as bleak as the contents: Jess kills Peter with a fireplace poker because she thinks he's the killer; the police break in and find Jess and the dead Peter in the basement. A doctor sedates Jess and puts her to bed, then insists on getting poor hapless Mr. Harrison to a hospital ("This man is suffering from shock!" -- which made me want to say "Dude, what do you think that GIRL is suffering from?") leaving Jess alone and sleeping in a darkened room.
As the police cars leave, posting only a single cop as a guard, the killer climbs, chuckling, back down out of the attic and the phone begins to ring.
The movie is atmospherically creepy, and the voice of the psycho is enough to give a person nightmares forever; there are a few spots where the director took the easy way out ("The calls are coming from inside the house!" prominent among them) but on the whole this is a hell of an effective horror movie.
The plot is simple: girls in a sorority house are menaced by a psycho killer who, for reasons known only to himself, has set up shop in their attic. It's the Christmas season and most of the girls have gone home for the holidays, but three of the sisters -- Jess (Olivia Hussey), Barb (a fabulously foulmouthed and over-the-top Margot Kidder) and Phyl (Andrea Martin) remain behind with their house mother, Mrs. Mac (Marion Waldman).
It seems that the house has been plagued with bizarre phone calls. Not exactly obscene, the calls tend toward ranting gibberish, insane laughter, horrible screams, and some kind of unholy crooning. The calls are one of the truly frightening things in the film; they pour out of the phone like the soundtrack to a nightmare, and you find yourself wondering why the girls don't just hang up. Sensibly, they call in the police, who come to put a tap on the phone.
The first girl to disappear is Clare Harrison (Lynn Griffin), whose father sounds the alarm when she fails to meet him to be taken home for Christmas. The father, played to jittery perfection by James Edmond, spends most of the movie nervously asking cops, sorority sisters, boyfriends, and anyone else he can find, if they know what has happened to his daughter. Unbeknownst to the rest of the sisters, Clare has taken up residence in the attic, where the killer has posed her in a rocking chair with a plastic bag over her head and a baby doll in her lap.
Clare is shortly joined in oblivion by Mrs. Mac, who makes the mistake of clambering up into the attic to look for her cat and ends up staying for eternity, suspended from the ceiling by a chain -- attached to a hook embedded in her throat. The psycho picks the girls off in a leisurely way, eventually leaving only the luminously beautiful Olivia Hussey -- who, according to the Horror Film Rules of Conduct, should be a victim of the killer because of a subplot involving the fact that she is pregnant and wants to have an abortion. She argues with her boyfriend, Peter (in one memorable exchange, he calls her a selfish bitch and accuses her of aborting the baby "...like you were having a wart removed!"); Jess eventually comes to suspect that Peter may be the killer because the killer begins incorporating bits of her arguments in his calls.
Margot Kidder plays Barb a little too broadly for sympathy; at the beginning of the film, we discover that her mother prefers to spend Christmas with a new boyfriend ("You're a gold-plated whore, mother," Margot snarls into the phone, scotch in one hand and cigarette in the other); this serves to explain why Barb spends the movie drinking, smoking, dropping double-entendres, swearing like a pirate -- and having anxiety-induced asthma attacks. By the time the killer gets to her, you feel sorry for them both.
There are several memorably frightening moments in the film, but one in particular will make you squirm. In a classic early-slasher-genre trick, the phone tap reveals that the obscene calls are coming from inside the house -- specifically from the housemother's bedroom -- and a terrified Jess discovers the bloodied bodies of Phyl and Barb. In the bedroom with the bodies, an eye stares at Jess from a crack in the closet door, and the voice of the killer taunts her from the darkness. Jess slams the door on the killer -- who immediately begins to shriek in a way that suggests damnation and rage unfit for human consumption. The shrieking continues as he chases Jess around the house; eventually I had to mute the TV because I seriously could not listen to the shriek. It was that horrible.
The end of the movie is as bleak as the contents: Jess kills Peter with a fireplace poker because she thinks he's the killer; the police break in and find Jess and the dead Peter in the basement. A doctor sedates Jess and puts her to bed, then insists on getting poor hapless Mr. Harrison to a hospital ("This man is suffering from shock!" -- which made me want to say "Dude, what do you think that GIRL is suffering from?") leaving Jess alone and sleeping in a darkened room.
As the police cars leave, posting only a single cop as a guard, the killer climbs, chuckling, back down out of the attic and the phone begins to ring.
The movie is atmospherically creepy, and the voice of the psycho is enough to give a person nightmares forever; there are a few spots where the director took the easy way out ("The calls are coming from inside the house!" prominent among them) but on the whole this is a hell of an effective horror movie.
