PeterMitchell-506-564364 Alternatively known as Bells, here's an entertaining chiller with two gooder actors for a film that's still a good solid drama/thriller. Certainly something different here, we have a disgruntled nut who used to work for the phone company, taking people out at random, some he personally knows, by upping the voltage so high, their body melts, their ears explode, and are sent flying backwards whether on subways, or from high rise buildings. Richard Chamberlain, of all people, is a professor, who investigates the killings, when one of his best students, is a victim (the first one on the subway). While bedding architect (Sara Botsford- Rats) he teams up with a cop who he first bangs heads with, on the account of his no caring attitude, they try to flush out the killer, who's doing his business from a small electricity house, which is also his abode. John Houseman, an old lecturer and close friend of Chamberlain, has something to hide here, too, which I thought was a good shock point (pardon the expression). I did like the cop in this film, a Frederick Forest type guy, I found a hoot, if the whole film. The death scenes are classics, and we do question if we could really kill someone by upping the amps so high. How they set the killer up, is classic, as is the last call Richard Chamberlain takes, that he shouldn't of. On the whole, Bells is fun viewing for the horror/thriller viewer, though I don't think it will turn you off answering your next call.

Coventry "Bells" looks like an average and routine 80's slasher but you should know to expect a little bit extra from the talented director of "Logan's Run"; Michael Anderson. And indeed, only a couple of minutes into the film and already it turned out that my impressions and expectations towards this film were entirely wrong and I was in for a pleasant surprise. "Bells" isn't a teen slasher movie at all (despite the VHS cover art and the cheesy sounding alternate title "Murder by Phone") but a fairly well plotted thriller that even shows the ambition to question the reliability of gigantic enterprises and refer to government conspiracies. How many "Friday the 13th" rip-offs can righteously claim to have done that? Richard Chamberlain stars as university professor and environmentalist Nat Bridger who privately investigates the bizarre death of one of his former students. The poor girl turns out to be the first victim of a maniac who developed a method to kill people over the phone (!) by sending an extremely high level of voltage through the speaker. Don't ask me to explain the technical aspects, but the victims start to shake and bleed from eyes & ears before getting catapulted in the air by an explosion! Not exactly tasteful but original and very entertaining to look at! This killing modus operandi as well as the further development of the "whodunit" storyline is often very implausible and silly, but you easily look past these flaws simply because the pace is exciting and the suspense-sequences are extremely intense. The film's only real disadvantage is that the scenery has severely dated by now and that some of the observations in the script turned out very exaggerated (for example, the phone company tour guide's estimation that there will be 1.4 trillion phones by the year 2000). Perhaps, this even is a rare example of a horror film that would actually profit from a remake! I'm convinced that some of the nowadays scriptwriters can come up with nifty ideas when re-working this premise into a story that revolves on mobile phones, teleconference attributes or web cams. Class actor Chamberlain is adequate in the lead, but the best performances are delivered by Sara Botsford as his love-interest and Gary Reineke as the obnoxious police detective.

FieCrier Much more of a gap between the invention of the telephone and this movie, and the invention of the television and the movie Murder By Television, for some reason.....I saw the cut version of this, which was still rated R surprisingly, despite there being no nudity, just a couple of not-too-bad cuss words, and some deaths that weren't too terribly horrific. This could hardly get anything worse than a PG-13 rating today. I'd be curious what was cut from the movie.Anyway, a young woman answers a phone ringing in a subway station. Strange sounds come from the phone, and she begins having a seizure of sorts, blood drips from her eyes, and then she is forcefully blown away from the phone, while the receiver ignites in flames.The young woman was a former student of Richard Chamberlain's character, anenvironmental science professor, I think. Her father asks him to investigate her death, which he was told was a heart attack. Chamberlain learns about the phone from a bag lady, and gets some help from a woman painting a mural at the phone company's headquarters. Meanwhile, other people keep dying the same way.One of the most amusing moments for me was when John Houseman's character drawled "I've earned it." Houseman had done some famous commercials for Smith-Barney saying "They earned money the old-fashioned way: they earned it" - with that same pronunciation. I don't know which came first, the commercials or this movie (I'd guess the former).

gridoon Well, it's an interesting premise, but the director misses most of the opportunities it offers, managing only a handful of suspenseful moments. The film plays more like a whodunit than a horror film, but the "mystery" part is dreary, and the death scenes are silly and overwrought. What a cast as good as this one (including Sara Botsford, a real revelation) is doing in an unimportant little time-waster like this is anybody's guess. (*1/2)