Now out on DVD is the uncensored director’s cut of Don’t Answer the Phone!, the rather vile and derivative 1980 cheapie slasher. Here, Nicholas Worth wanders around making nasty phone calls to various women, then slicing and dicing them. After knocking them off, he leers at their naked bodies and lets out a preposterous giggle. Or is he crying? It’s unclear, but we know that he’s a Vietnam vet—cinematic shorthand for crazed, psychotic and prone to homicide.

What’s always funny about movies like this is seeing how they rip off other movies of the period. Worth periodically leers into the mirror in careful introspection, à la De Niro as Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver (1976). After kicking the ass of one black pimp, he asks the looking glass, “Are you proud of me now? Do I measure up?” It’s all pretty ludicrous stuff, and perhaps not surprisingly, Robert Hammer only wrote, directed and produced one film, and this is it. The other bit of weirdness is that this DVD is being touted as something special, but it really looks as though they just took the best quality VHS they could find and then transferred that to a DVD on their home burner. One sad thing was lost: for years, I spotted the dreadful cover art on the VHS at Boîte Noire—it featured a stupefyingly rotten drawing of a woman screaming as she stared at a phone. That graphic, sadly, has not made its way onto the new DVD.

by MATTHEW HAYS