The Caller (Arthur Allan Seidelman, 1987)

Well now here's a little gem - a late '80s genre film that I, for some reason, had never heard of.  Big thanks to Daniel from Youtube's The Cobwebs Channel for flagging this one up on his list of ten underrated retro horror movies (link here), without which I may well have continued bimbling through existence completely unaware of this movie's existence.  Man, though, it makes me feel old that a flick that came out when I was eight years old - old enough to watch and remember this kind of thing - can be described as "vintage".  Wowsers.  I am an antique.

Perhaps inauspiciously directed by the man behind Arnie Schwarzenegger's 1970 debut (as 'Arnold Strong') Hercules in New York, 1987's The Caller is a two-hander that had me double check the credits to see if it was based on a stage play.  It wasn't, as it it turns out, be it so easily could have been such is the almost Pinteresque feel and mise-en-scene.  Opening with a rare expedition outside the main confined setting, we see Madolyn Smith's character - credited merely as 'The Girl' - stopping by a seemingly deserted rural  gas station to fill her car, calling to the 'off stage' (for we shall see no other characters other than she and the he who shall soon reveal himself) employees that she is leaving the payment for the petroleum upon the pump.  As she drives off, we see that she is being observed by a raincoat-clad fair-haired figure.  Is it John Constantine?  (No)

Whatever happened to Madolyn Smith, anyway?  Not Madeline Smith, of waifish Hammer Horror fame - the American one, with her name spelled in more of a Goblyn Queen kind of way (side note: for quite a long while I toyed with the idea of writing a Spenser-esque epic poem entitled The Goblyn Queene, an ode not to Elizabeth I but to everyone's favourite fetish wear-clad Jean Grey lookalike.  Well, my favourite, I can't speak for you.  Who are you, anyway?  What are you doing in my house?).  She seemed to be in lots of things in the '80s like 2010, Deadly Intentions and Funny Farm, hanging around just long enough for this impressionable child to form a monstrous crush on her before vanishing from our screens.  It's cruelty is what it is.  I hope she's happy, wherever she is.

So The Girl drives home through the forest - encountering a broken-down and abandoned vehicle upon the way, a car which worryingly has a dismembered child's doll stuffed in its glove compartment (and I don't think one needs to have seen Carlos Aured's 1973 Blue Eyes of the Broken Doll [though frankly any self-respecting genre fan probably should] for that to give off serious maniac vibes) - before arriving at her seemingly idyllic cabin in the woods.  Seriously, who buys or rents a cabin in the woods and doesn't expect to wind up in a horror movie?  Anyway, she goes about her routine including carrying a suspiciously-sized box which is leaking a red substance from the car to the kitchen before taking a shower - all the while watched by the mysterious observer who circles the property spying in at the windows.

This personage makes his presence known when he knocks at the cabin door; it is Mick Travis himself - a.k.a. Caius Caligula, a.k.a. Alex DeLarge - Malcolm McDowell, credited as the eponymous 'The Caller'.  The mystery man claims that his car has broken down and that he's had to walk for miles from another part of the forest, and could he possibly use the phone to call for help.  Reluctantly, she lets him in and the pair begin the dance - warily assessing each other through a smokescreen of polite smalltalk, all the while prodding verbally at one another for any sign of weakness, McDowell's Caller coming out with a catchphrase of  "point to you" whenever the Girl pokes a hole in his story.  He, likewise, begins to break down her own narrative of expecting the imminent arrival of a prospective suitor and her inconsistency in the mentions of her daughter and late husband: is the object in the box her dead former beau's severed head?  Did, perhaps, the daughter kill her father and was committed to a mental institution?  Is she, the mother, just as unstable, and is she the danger rather than the urbane stranger?

Spoilers ahead, obviously.  Normally I wouldn't give a spoiler warning for a decades-old movie, but it is one hell of a twist.

Still here?  Good, good.

The outcome is that this cosy little demesne is surrounded by a force field, and the Girl is - perhaps - one of the only surviving humans after an alien invasion.  The Caller is an android Terminator-style watchdog tasked with keeping an eye on her (and, like the aforesaid James Cameron joint, he does get some of his surface human flesh disguise removed revealing the robotics within).  I swear I'm not making this up.  A movie that's 98% Harold Pinter's No Man's Land meets something by David Mamet suddenly spins on its axis and becomes Claudio Fragasso's Shocking Dark.  Like the Spanish Inquisition, no-one sees that coming.  Honestly, it has to be seen to be believed.  Highly recommended.