By Erin Free
In this regular column, we drag forgotten made-for-TV movies out of the vault and into the light. This week: the 1982 woman-in-peril thriller Hotline starring Lynda Carter, Steve Forrest, Granville Van Dusen and Monte Markham.
The telemovie of the 1970s and 1980s was a happy hunting ground for actresses who had hit it big on popular TV series, and then experienced something of a career stall. These made-for-the-small-screen films allowed established actresses to work on familiar territory while still treading new creative ground. This saw actresses like Farrah Fawcett, Cheryl Ladd, Valerie Bertinelli, Donna Mills and many others breaking out with bold performances while maintaining their connection with the established television audiences built up by their initial TV series success.
Also on this list is the singularly delightful Lynda Carter, who became a pop cultural icon and feminist figurehead thanks to her title role on the popular superhero TV show Wonder Woman, which ran from 1976 through to 1979. When the show (which now has a dedicated cult following) folded, Lynda Carter soon became a “telemovie queen”, toplining rock-solid small screen efforts like The Last Song (1980), Born To Be Sold (1981), Stillwatch (1987), A Prayer In The Dark (1997), Someone To Love Me (1998), and several more. One of Lynda Carter’s most entertaining telemovies is, without question, 1982’s slick and involving psychological thriller Hotline.
Directed by hard-working TV vet Jerry Jameson (who also helmed major features, such as 1980’s Raise The Titanic and 1977’s Airport ’77) and written by David E. Peckinpah (the nephew of legendary filmmaker Sam Peckinpah), Hotline is a terrific showcase for the stunningly beautiful Lynda Carter, who gets to flex her dramatic muscles without having to go down the tried-and-true, gritty, no-makeup path. The striking brunette plays the excellently named Brianne (pronounced, curiously, “Brian”, which she has to explain several times during the course of the film’s brisk 96 minutes) O’Neill, a burgeoning artist who is studying at college while also tending bar and house-sitting for a friend. After getting hit on by a drunk in the bar and savvily diffusing the situation, Brianne is offered a job by psychiatrist and barstool-warmer Justin Price (Granville Van Dusen), who runs a crisis call centre and instantly recognises her potential to help people.
Brianne accepts Justin’s job offer (and also his advances), but almost immediately runs into trouble when she begins receiving taunting, creepy, threatening phone calls at the crisis centre from a whispering madman who claims to have murdered several women. As the calls continue, the man soon becomes known as “The Barber” – due to his kink of cutting off the hair of the women he kills – and begins dropping riddles about future crimes and past transgressions. As the tension builds, various suspects emerge, including the initial drunken harasser; the slightly shady and enigmatic Justin Price; his perhaps-too-friendly employee Rick (Harry Waters Jr.); Brianne’s limping former stuntman boss at the bar, Kyle Durham (Monte Markham), and his best friend, Tom Hunter (Steve Forrest), a former cowboy actor with whom he has worked over a period of decades.
And yes, we can hear your gears grinding right there…so we’ll just digress for a moment. For anybody who watches Hotline, this Hollywood-cowboy-actor-and-stuntman-best-friend duo will instantly evoke thoughts of Quentin Tarantino’s 2019 cinematic jewel Once Upon A Time…In Hollywood, in which Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt of course play a strikingly similar cowboy-actor-and-stuntman-best-friend duo. There’s even a scene in Hotline set on a boat and involving a speargun! When these obvious similarities were put to Mr. Tarantino during a podcast, the film-obsessive claimed that he had indeed seen Hotline, but only after he’d actually made Once Upon A Time…In Hollywood.
So, why the watch? Tarantino was apparently planning his still-unpublished book about the imagined films made by DiCaprio’s Rick Dalton after the events of Once Upon A Time…In Hollywood, and was looking for various telemovies to slot has-been Rick into. So yes, apparently Quentin Tarantino (a noted aficionado of telemovies) watched Hotline for research purposes. We’ll give the great Mr. Tarantino the benefit of the doubt here, but it comes a little close to being just too perfect a story, doesn’t it? Some canny online sleuths have also pointed out that Hotline writer David E. Peckinpah also co-penned the 1983 disappointment Stroker Ace, which was helmed by stuntman turned director Hal Needham and starred his buddy Burt Reynolds, who Tarantino has cited as partial inspirations for the DiCaprio and Pitt characters in Once Upon A Time…In Hollywood. Anyway, back to Hotline proper…
To put it bluntly, this is a really, really fun film. Lynda Carter makes for an engaging, likeable heroine (even tooling around the suburbs in a classy convertible oldster as if she was, well, the star of her own mystery TV series), going to great lengths, and putting herself in great danger, to find out not only who is harassing her on the phone, but also if he is indeed the serial killer he claims to be, or just a creep with a phone fetish. The tension is ratcheted up further by the fact that the audience knows Brianne O’Neill is indeed in grave danger…and in grave danger of getting a haircut courtesy of “The Barber.”
Fast-paced, lurid, strongly performed (Granville Van Dusen is unctuous but slightly unsettling; old-hand character actors Steve Forrest and Monte Markham bring bundles of colour and personality; Downton Abbey creator Julian Fellowes appears in a funny bit as a campy electronics store owner; and Lynda Carter holds it all together with her abundant charm and class), and thrilling, Hotline boasts a wonderfully ripe sense of creepy, stylish hysteria (but none of the extreme violence) of the Italian giallo films of the 1970s. Its whispering telephone creep – and possible serial killer – is a particularly perverse antagonist. Though the final reveal of the killer won’t come as a shock to many, Hotline’s wholly satisfying denouement is played out with such ghoulish, inventive relish that it’s near-impossible not to delight in this small screen chiller’s sense of kinky theatricality.
Availability: Never officially released on DVD, Hotline is fairly easy to track down online, but it’s in pretty rough shape…though it’s certainly watchable.
If you enjoyed this review, check out our other vintage telemovies Killdozer, The Jericho Mile, Death Car On The Freeway, Mongo’s Back In Town, Tribes and And The Band Played On.
