BlazeLime Strong and Moving!

Odelecol Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

Bea Swanson This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

Portia Hilton Blistering performances.

Coventry There were five main reasons why "The Killer is on the Phone" stood on top of my watch list, and they all add up to each other! Number one: it's an Italian giallo! This perverted and violent type of whodunit-thriller is my favorite sub genre of horror and it's my personal mission to track down every single and most obscure installment ever made! Number two: it's an Italian giallo from the magical year 1972! They heyday of my favorite sub genre was relatively short, give or take from the mid-sixties to the mid- seventies, but the early seventies were the best years and 1972 in particular with too many brilliant gialli to list ("What have you done to Solange?", "Don't Torture a Duckling", "Who Saw Her Die?", "The Red Queen Kills Seven Times" and about fifteen more). Number three: it's an Italian giallo from the magical year 1972 and directed by Alberto De Martino! Mr. De Martino perhaps wasn't the greatest cult director from Italy, but he did courageously attempt to cash in on every trend and his movies are always massively entertaining ("The Antichrist", "Blazing Magnum", "Holocaust 2000", "The Puma Man"…). Number four: it's an Italian giallo from the magical year 1972, directed by Alberto De Martino and starring Telly Savalas! That's right, the one and only Kojak and former Ernst Stavro Blofeld makes a rare giallo appearance here! Savalas was and forever remains a monument of 70s cult cinema and here in this movie he gets to do what he does best: stand around silently and look ultimately menacing! Number five: it's an Italian giallo from the magical year 1972, directed by Alberto De Martino and starring Telly Savalas, AND entirely shot on location in my native country Belgium! Admittedly that last little detail meant the cherry on the cake for me. For some unknown reason, they shot the film in Belgium instead of Italy and it's fantastic to see familiar places pop up in a giallo, like the Ostend ferry port or this beautiful park in Bruges. Hence there also was the opportunity for Willeke Van Ammelrooy, an actress only famous in Belgium and The Netherlands thus far, to receive a bit more international recognition. Of course, considering all the above points, you'd think that I'm extremely biased and couldn't possibly write a properly objective review about "The Killer is on the Phone". Not true, in fact, because even though I'm incredibly happy that I was finally able to watch this movie, I do reckon that it's merely just a mediocre effort that probably won't even make my giallo top 50. The main shortcomings here are definitely the slow pacing, the unnecessarily complex and illogical plot and – most of all – the lack of violence and perversity. Theater actress Eleanor Lorraine spots a bald and uncanny man at a drinking fountain and faints. This was the same man who murdered her beloved husband five years ago, but because of the shock she suffers from amnesia and doesn't remember anything that happened in the past five years, including the killer's identity. The killer – Ranko Drasovic – doesn't know Eleanor's memory is gone, so he starts stalking her and plans to get rid of the witness. Meanwhile, Eleanor's surrounding also face many issues. She doesn't recognize both her new husband and her lover, and she has forgotten all her lines of the stage play that premieres the next Saturday. The script surely has a lot of potential and features a handful of great ideas, but the elaboration is poor and implausible. Eleanor suffers from a severe case of amnesia, yet everybody allows her to wander around town on her own and hold private investigations without offering her help or support. The killer has numerous of opportunities to eliminate her quickly but prefers to observe her endlessly, instead… probably just to stretch the running time. Oh, and by the way, so much for the film's title, as the killer only calls her house once and that sequence is rather irrelevant because there isn't an actual telephone conversation going on… The last 10- 15 minutes feature a few suspenseful moments and typically absurd giallo-twists, including the chase behind the theater scenes and the truth regarding her husband's death, but it's not enough to save the film. Stelvio Cipriani provides a marvelous musical score, as usual, and furthermore this film only proves that Bruges is a beautiful city; 36 years before the blockbuster hit "In Bruges" did the same.

lazarillo A theater actress (Anne Heywood) recognizes a thuggish hired killer (Telly Savalas) on the street and faints. When she comes to, she is suffering amnesia, having forgotten that has happened for the last five years since right before she witnessed her wealthy former boyfriend being murdered. This is a problem both for her husband of the past three years and for her theater company since she has the lead in their latest play ("Lady Godiva", quite convenient, of course, for a cheesecake-happy giallo film). The amnesia plot has obviously been done to death both within the giallo genre (i.e. "Eye in the Labyrinth", "Puzzle")and certainly outside it. Still this manages to add some new twists. At one point, the heroine has vague memories of being in bed with one of her male co-stars. Thinking they were lovers, she agrees to go to bed with him again in order to jog her memory, only to realize at the last moment (and to the poor guy's chagrin) that the memory is actually that of a scene in play they did together earlier! Meanwhile, the killer has also recognized her. He accidentally kills her sister, and he then comes after her. Anne Heywood was kind of like a British version of Carroll Baker in that she started out in fairly respectable roles when she was younger (like "Black Narcissus"), but by middle age found herself appearing (usually sans clothing)in a lot of sleazy Italian exploitation flicks. This movie is not nearly as sleazy as some of her other Italian films like "Ring of Darkness" (where she has a naked catfight with the actress playing her teenage daughter). And her sleaziest film was actually a American production "The Shaming" (where she plays an interracial rape victim who falls in love with her rapist). Telly Savalas is great here as always, even if he doesn't have much more to do than look menacing. The director Alberto DeMartino is definitely not one of the great Italian directors, but his movies are always entertaining.I really like the giallo genre so I may be a little kind to films like this. But even among the nearly two hundred gialli I've seen now, I'd rank this one solidly in the middle of the pack.

bensonmum2 Scenes from a Murder is a fairly rare giallo that I felt fortunate to have found in a used video store. The movie stars the uber-cool Telly Savalas as a stalker. The woman he's after has amnesia and has trouble remembering simple things like where she lives or that her lover died five years previous. For whatever reason, her family and friends allow her to wander aimlessly around the city. For the first 2/3 of the movie, that's pretty much all we get – a woman with amnesia stumbling around the city with the every present Savalas close behind. It's not very exciting and not very entertaining. It's not until the final third that anything really happens. The scenes of Savalas close on the woman's heels through an abandoned sound stage are effective but account for far too little of the movie. These scenes and the final revelation keep this from being a completely wasted experience.

rundbauchdodo This Giallo by Alberto De Martino, who made a very watchable and entertaining "The Exorcist" rip-off in 1974 ("L'Anticristo" aka "The Tempter"), boosts Anne Heywood in the female lead role as a woman that suffers amnesia after she sees the killer of her husband again five years after the murder, and Telly Savalas as the cold-blooded assassin who tries to kill her before she regains her memory.The idea is nice, but De Martino's direction is a little bit too slow and, especially in the first half of the film, the flow of the scenes sometimes looks hacked up in a way, so it's difficult not to use the fast forward button on one's VCR. The second half is better and the film becomes a passable thriller, while the climax itself with the uncovering of the person who contracted the killer five years ago remains the best moment of the whole picture.All in all a mediocre, rather anemic Giallo. Savalas also acted in De Martino's mafia actioner "I Familiari delle Vittime non Saranno Avvertiti" aka "Crime Boss" aka "New Mafia Boss" of the same year, which also doesn't belong to the best films of its genre.