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When Jenny (Charlotte Lewis), English model in Rome, wants to call a
lover - who already dumped her - & misdials, she accidently sets
some evil forces free that turn telephones into evil entities. & the
first thing the telephone on the other end of the line Jenny is calling
mistakingly is to strangle a cleaning lady (Jole Silvani). But
apparently, the phones can not only cause physical violence but also
work on a high frequency (they kill the fish in Jenny's watertank this
way) or mental level (they almost cause Jenny's neighbour & friend
Riccardo [Marcello Modugno] to commit suicide).
When Jenny's friend
Molo (Mattia Sbragia), maintenance worker for the telephone company, is
killed while investigating these strange occurences, she begins to
realize this is a personal matter between her & the phones,
especially when she, soon after finding dead Molo, is saved from a
brutal rape by some payphones shooting coins at the assailant (really).
The phones soon start to behave like a lover - she even has some sort of
weird phonesex - but a jealous one, as Jenny has to realize when her
manager & photographer Carmen (Carola Stagnaro) is hanged by her own
phone.
Riccardo meanwhile finds a professor (William Berger turning in a
welcome cameo) who actually explains these phenomena, but the phones are
killing him by exploding his pacemaker before he can actually do much.
But as the phones get angrier & angrier, they soon attack Jenny too,
first one of them jumps into her bathdtub to electrocute her (really) -
fortunately she has just left the tub -, then they burn down her
appartment, which she can only escape in a very sexy & revealing
outfit, only to be attacked again whereever she goes.
Finally Jenny decides to strike back with the help of Riccardo: via the place from
where she first dialled the wrong number that started it all, they find
a long abandoned lonely hearts-phone service office, where the
phones (with the help of magnetic tape & a ceiling-fan) start their
last all-out attack on Jenny, but she is saved again by Riccardo, &
comes to the conclusion to stop all the horror she has to call the wrong
number once again tro release some spirit. In the process of doing that,
she almost gets sucked up by a public phonebox but succeeds in the end.
The setup for this story is so stupid that one might think only
Stephen King would be careless enough to use. But while that man would
have turned the story into a conservative celebration of small-town-
& family-values, Deodato makes this one into a fast-moving, bizarre
(if silly) little horror ride - not devoid of unintentional humour
though. & though it is a far cry from Deodato's best movies (e.g. Cannibal
Holocaust), the movie never fails to entertain. Also, Charlotte
Lewis makes a better than usual, even sexy
late-Eighties-female-lead-in-Italian-horror-movie.
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