La llamada del asesino

As a lonely, single guy in 1990's, I watched WAY too many "erotic thrillers" on late-night cable. The "erotic" part was always pretty debatable, but very few of these movies were at all "thrilling", especially as time went on and they became increasingly lousy with slumming porn actors, interminably long softcore sex scenes, and horrid music (that all seemed to be composed by a guy name "Herman Beeftink"). This movie, even though it was a half-assed vehicle for then-star of TV's "Melrose Place" Brooke Langton, is actually a lot more entertaining than most.

Langton places a sexy young thing who has just moved into her boyfriend's apartment, but she has a jealous lesbian girlfriend (Sara Buxton) who won't let go. Through a crossed wire or something, she starts listening in on the phone sex conversations of someone in the building, and she realizes that this person's phone sex partners keep turning up dead. But is it the handsome but creepy upstairs neighbor, the landlady's disturbed brother, or is it perhaps someone closer to home?

OK, in real-life there are probably half a dozen ridiculously sexy women anywhere in the world who were actually into phone sex in the 90's(if they weren't getting paid for it that is) and five of the sex get murdered in THIS movie. So, obviously the plot is less than believable. Still, this does keep you guessing to the end. It has some elements of superior thrillers of the era like "Single White Female", but while it's not as good as that one, it actually does have a much better ending. The erotic content is kind of brief as these films go, but that also makes this more entertaining than most as an actual MOVIE. Being the seething cauldrons of acting talent that they were, Langton and Buxton could not be called on to actually express their lesbian passion by stripping off for some hot girl-on-girl action, but that is not nearly as big of liability as it would be in a lesser movie. I would actually, tentatively recommend this. It's not much of a compliment perhaps, but there are only two direct-to-cable 90's "erotic thrillers" I actually think are better than this, "Sensation" with former MTV "VJ" Kari Wuhrer and Eric Roberts and "The Fourth Floor" with Juliette Lewis and William Hurt.

"Listen" is pretty good, especially since I like actress Sarah Buxton.

The movie is exciting, and rather complicated; it's all cleared up in the end, though.

This film makes for a very confusing ninety minutes - so confusing, in fact, that the perpetrator has to explain the denouement by means of a voiceover right at the very end.

The plot itself is very simple. Someone is apparently titillating women via a telephone chatline, meeting them face to face and then brutally murdering them. Overhearing these conversations by way of a faulty telephone handset, a young woman (Brooke Langton) comes to the conclusion that the murderer is someone living in her own apartment block. So to help the story simmer away nicely we are given a few ingredients to play with - a reclusive boyfriend, a lesbian lover, an aggressive co-resident and a weird caretaker, along with a couple of dark and languid sex scenes. It's true that the plot has a few twists but amidst the bemusement, they neither help nor hinder.

One of the problems of this film is that the two lead characters are so physically alike that it's difficult to tell which is which - only the shape of their mouths offers a clue. Both are nevertheless competent and credible actresses. However, it's the feeble storyline and not the acting that lets this film down. Ultimately, it's an erotic thriller without the eroticism and the thrills.

This movie has a lot of problems. Set in San Francisco, but obviously filmed elsewhere (Vancouver, I think) it overuses way too many of the erotic thriller clichés. It wasn't very erotic, with only one scene being an exception. It casts suspicion on too many characters. There is some really poor acting by the police characters, and the supposed big-city police department was shockingly inept. But I suppose if they had done a better job, there would a lot less to make a movie about. Brooke Langton and Sarah Buxton, the two leads, are really the only ones in the film who could act at all. They carried the corpse of this movie through all of the gaping plot holes, and in the end, one of the characters had to explain the whole thing in a voice-over. Ugh. Don't bother, although it's unlikely anyone will see it these days. I had taped it from cable many years ago, and just watched it. Probably not available commercially any more.

Why should I feel a little guilty for liking 'Listen' so much? Because it has telephone voyeurism, lots of sex and an obsessive lesbian? Those things work to its advantage. This movie has all the stuff that a fan of the late-night cable channel thrillers goes for, including a complicated plot and a finger pointed at everybody.

Brooke Langton and Sarah G. Buxton are likable (and watchable) in this movie, at least in my book. Veteran Andy Romano adds some seasoning as one of the police detectives (there's always police detectives in these flicks, right?) and some of the younger actors like Gordon Currie, Joel Wyner and Evan Taylor do good jobs also.