Party Line

source: Party Line

Where to really start with this movie? The story is a bit all over the place, and the way things come together, you could easily see how this could be spoofed. To start, Lief Garrett, and his sister in the movie, are killing men they meet on the party line. Why? Because the men are married and they want to punish the men! Why? Because their father cheated on their mother. This is their motivation. Also, they parents are dead. They can not accept what their father has done to them or their mother, but they are certainly living well with the inheritance that was left to them. Their relationship is all over the place. They love each other, they hate each other, they fight like little kids, he dresses up in mommy's wedding dress. All over the place. Next, Richard Hatch is a vice cop that gets to investigate the murders Lief and Sis are committing. He is the cliche troubled cop that gets into trouble but gets to keep his job. He has to work with the Assistant to DA to investigate the case. I know you are wondering why a DA is investigating a case. We were wondering the same thing. Eventually, he gets suspended and has to team up with the DA while he is suspended. The typical movie cop, with movie cop problems. If you like bad movies like I do, it is definitely worth the watch. Nothing exciting really happens in the movie. You start to figure out how things play out, but it is the seriousness of the mood of the movie that lends it to being spoofed. That is really what makes it worth the watch. To give you an idea of what I mean, the first time you see Richard Hatch's house, he has a pieces of sports equipment in his house, from just about every thing that is considered a sport: tennis racket, hockey sticks, basketball jersey, a football, a baseball bat, a samurai sword, a hunting bow, and a safari hunting hat. All to prove how much of a man he is? Stuff like that. Oh yeah, I can not forget about the baby sitter, which seems to be in high school, talking to guys on the party line and leading them on. She loves talking to guys on the party line, and Lief's character is very interested in her. The only reason I gave it a 3, is due the little things that you think of that make it more enjoyable, while you are watching it. Nothing too exciting happens. It does have a few moments you think it is going to get better, but it fails. Still worth a watch. Especially if you are watching with friends. Enjoy.

What a very good cast for this slasher. The picture wasnt that great of quality but overall I enjoyed this movie. Definitely worth a look.

Leif Garrett was great as the murderer. However Richard Hatch was not believable as the detective and he was an unconvincing ladies' man.

Thats what this movie really takes. A big piece of cheeze. This movie is about a sister and brother Bonnie and Clyde type of duo that creates their own party line in order to lure their victims in and trap them and kill them. But for what reason? Just for the fun of getting away with it? In comes Richard Hatch who comes across as a wishy washy ladies man. A real BAD version of a ladies man. And he gets involved with finding who's behind all the killings across LA. He finally meets a teenager who helps him find the killer and rest is for your fun and amusement. But there are parts in this film that really get me going like the scene with Lief Garret dressed in his mothers wedding gown acting like a sissy in front of his sister telling her that he needs her and can't live without her and watching as she slaps him across the face dominateing him. I can't believe that was Lief!!! Well, I guess I could. But it's worth watching but only to see one of Garrets worst films that he ever did.

I watched this movie this past week. I picked it out of a line up of "old horror/ thriller movies." I wanted a good laugh, so I picked this up, along with "Fade to Black" and "The Slumber Party Massacre Number 2." Boy was I in for a surprise. The plot was too extreme to even be believable. (Why would a brother even want to take part in sexual escapades with his biological sister?) I have to admit that some of the scenes were pretty funny in slow motion, i.e. when the babysitter's employer dropped the babysitter off, and the babysitter slapped the employer in the face- the face he made, was too funny for words. A must see. Leif Garrett must have been desperate for work. However, the film makers were even more desperate to have this film released. And I mean, "film makers." If you want to call them that. Rating by TaxiDr: 2 1/2 for laughter, and 1 for taking a chance in the movie industry.

A strange case, this movie. It's at its best when it explores the perverse (past and present) family ties that bind Leif Garrett and Greta Blackburn (and she's has a powerful, sexy presence). But the script keeps intercutting their story with that of a misfit cop (a real Dirty Harry wannabe) and an ambitious female assistant DA who are searching for the killer that is slashing his/her victims' throats with a razor. As you have probably already guessed, the film has too much plot, too many supporting characters (what's Richard Roundtree doing here?) and too many plot coincidences. You could do a lot worse, though. (**)

This is the most 1988 movie that I have ever seen, one that is equal parts Cinemax After Dark semi-sleaze mixed with last gasp of celebrity, a late model slasher and even giallo-esque elements all with the gimmick of party lines, which before the interest used to dominate the late night airwaves, promising live sex chat for anyone. Oh man, if you could scrape this movie onto a mirror and do lines of it, I totally would. Seth (Leif Garrett, who we can pretend is the kid from Devil Times Five grown up because, well, that's totally the truth and that kid was a transvestite and this character is too, so let's just pretend, OK?) and Angelina (Greta Blackburn, who played Lorraine, one of the aliens on V) are a brother and sister duo who hide out in their family's Hollywood Hills mansion and use the party lines to lure people into having threeways with them and then slashing their throats with razor blades. Yes, incest and sex is violence and L.A. scum all in one glorious package. But what if there was a bad boy cop? Oh, there is and his name is Detective Dan (Richard Hatch, who battled Cylons once upon a time). He's under investigation for all his bad cop antics, but when his CHiP woman gets killed by Seth, he teams up with a psychologist (Shawn Weatherly, who knows a thing or two about cops, seeing as how she was in Police Academy 3: Back in Training) to take on the case. This is the kind of movie where Detective Dan handcuffs a cokehead to a toilet before shoving his face into the urinal cake while two siblings sex murder a dude in the alley. Also, because this is a late 1980's cop movie, the boss cop has to be a gruff older black guy and hey, Richard Roundtree is perfect for that role. The guy who played Simmons in this, Terry McGovern, has a pretty interesting claim to fame. Sure, he was the voice of Launchpad McDuck. But he was also the guy who invented the word wookie. While making THX-1138 for George Lucas, they were riding in a car together and he shouted, "'I think I ran over a Wookiee back there," which made the future Star Wars director laugh so hard that the word - which McGovern invented - stuck in his head. Director William Webb uses Garrett and Roundtree in a lot of his films, which include Delta Fever (which has Martin Landau and Wendi Jo Sperber in it) and The Banker (along with Teri Weigel and Robert Forester). This is the kind of movie that I'd be watching at 1:37 AM on a Friday when I was 16 years old, so in case you thought that I ever did anything productive with my life, you are sadly wrong. At least now I document my movie watching, I guess. Oh man, I almost forgot that this teenage girl is coercing her friend into calling the party line too and then she goes to the cops and they make her call the party line while they listen to her basically have phone sex. So this movie riffs on I Saw What You Did, but there's no Joan Crawford to make it better. That nightclub also looks like it totally came out of a Rinse Dream movie.

There are films that you can tell within 5 minutes are going to be genuinely awful. The setup is hideously written and the acting is even worse, with photography that is barely watchable and the intelligence of adults who have been partying for a 3-day weekend and still having sobered up yet. Leif Garrett and his sister Greta Blackburn are on a crime spree of murdering men who go home with Blackburn, with absolutely no motivation given for their insanity. It's up to District Attorney Richard Hatch and police detective Richard Roundtree to solve this string of violent crimes, but the real crime here is the script inflicted on unsuspecting audiences that may have them in a trance because it's so bad that they feel they have to stick with it either for their own titillation because of the sex scenes leading up to the murders or just to see how bad it continues to get. With the number of big screen sexual thrillers dominating movie theaters in the late 1980's, there were plenty of ripoffs, very few even watchable, and this is probably one of the worst that I've seen of that genre in any era. Garrett has definitely passed his prime by taking on a role like this, with dialogue so trite and ridiculous that is fooling himself into thinking that it will hide his non-existent performance. Blackburn is even worse, her bad 80's perm out doing Glenn Close's big hair in "Fatal Attraction" for tacky garishness. When good actors like Hatch and Roundtree go slumming in films like this, obviously for just the paycheck, it becomes truly sad. I give this two stars simply for its audacity and the metaphor for what the number two indicates in street terms. Had this actually been a parody of this genre directed by John Waters with his usual cast of campy actors, I would definitely have enjoyed it, but as presented here, it fails on every level, even as camp.

This 1988 thriller tells about 2 disturbed siblings playing games with strangers on a phone sex line to kill them. Soon, a rogue cop and an assistant D. A. pair up to solve the murders. This isn't that bad except for some of the acting, there's erotic, disturbing and humorous moments. If you like 80's crime or slasher flicks, give this a try.