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| Images courtesy of Vinegar Syndrome |
After making a rather infamous silver screen debut in
directing Arnold Schwarzenegger in his first film Hercules in New York, American
television, film and theater director Arthur Allan Seidelman went on to direct Children
of Rage which was the first Hollywood film to address the Arab-Israeli
conflict before directing the reincarnation thriller Echoes in 1982. A few years later, the filmmaker wound up working
at Empire Pictures, the same company behind such titles as Re-Animator, From
Beyond and Rawhead Rex.
With The Equalizer screenwriter Michael Sloan who
also coproduced the picture and Empire Pictures founder Charles Band serving as
executive producer, Seidelman and Sloan cooked up The Caller: a genre-shifting
amorphous sci-fi infused freakout so weird that the film bypassed a theatrical
release and went straight to video. A
shame because its two nameless leads played by 2010 actress Madolyn
Smith and A Clockwork Orange legend Malcolm McDowell give ferocious
performances in a film that frankly feels like Oleanna by way of the
sheer absurdist insanity of Halloween III: Season of the Witch.
Sometime in the winter, a nameless woman played by Madolyn
Smith resides in her secluded forest home when one night a strange trench coated
middle-aged man played by Malcolm McDowell arrives unexpectedly on her
doorstep. Claiming to have car trouble,
he asks to use her phone but soon after letting the man in, she grows
suspicious of him and soon after the two start cross-examining each other in a
series of steadily intensifying, bizarre mind games that start becoming
violent. All the while, for days on end,
every night there seems to be thunder and lightning but no rain, pointing to
something far stranger than the film’s characters or the audience can possibly
expect.
Probably the strangest yet also maybe the classiest entry in
the short-lived Empire Pictures film company, The Caller as a movie
seems determined to sidestep genre expectations, shifting tones and styles with
elements of fantasy and reality playing out so we’re at a loss as to how to
classify it. A mystery film, a
science-fiction thriller, a chamber piece comprised of only two actors engaged
in a fierce battle of the sexes, there really is no simple way to describe this
movie to the uninitiated other than to say it’s sort of like if David Mamet did
a Cannon horror film. Also a showcase
for some wild special effects by Re-Animator wizard John Carl Beuchler,
the film starts out seemingly normal before gradually climbing the chandeliers
of insanity as it marches unblinkingly towards a most confounding conclusion.
Visually this might be one of the best looking
straight-to-video films ever made, lensed by Santa Sangre director of
photography Dannielle Nannuzzi, giving the film an artificiality that makes you
question your own eyes. Then there’s
Stuart Gordon’s longtime composer Richard Band’s electronic score which veers
between orchestral strings that sound very, very like Charles Bernstein’s
terrifying soundtrack for The Entity.
Of course the film wouldn’t work at all without the brave and wonderful
performances of its two leads McDowell and Smith. Smith comes across as paranoid and neurotic
while the invasive McDowell exudes danger but also possesses a sex appeal the
Smith character finds almost impossible to resist.
Initially dumped on VHS tape by TransWorld in 1987, The
Caller flew under the radar for years before reappearing on a made-on-demand
DVD-R disc from MGM in 2011 on a dated master.
Thankfully, around 2020, the good folks at Vinegar Syndrome did a 2K
scan of the 35mm interpositive and released the disc in limited
quantities. While not the usual fare
fans of the Empire Pictures output tended to expect, The Caller is truly
a one-of-a-kind dose of chamber piece paranoia that would or would not forecast
William Friedkin’s Bug which also saw two eccentric codependent
characters drive each other insane. As
it stands, with Arrow Video’s Enter the Video Store smattering of Empire’s
most celebrated catalog titles around the corner, The Caller is a welcome
addition to Vinegar Syndrome’s ongoing catalog of strange and unusual genre-defying
works too oddball and off kilter to be true.
--Andrew Kotwicki
