Don’t Answer the Phone | 1980 | USA | Robert Hammer

Rather a grim and scuzzy endeavour, Robert Hammer’s Don’t Answer the Phone rests comfortably in the category of mad war veteran killer movies with a heavy dose of misogyny. Kirk Smith is a Vietnam veteran who’s settled in the big city by bodybuilding, taking up photography, and slaying women by night, abusing their bodies post-death. As his crimes begin to escalate, he decides to taunt a radio personality, Dr. Lindsay Gale, with details of his killings under an assumed Hispanic identity. As two brusque and brutish cops seem to close in on his true identity, Smith decides that Gale is going to be his next victim, forcing the cops to race against time to save her. For a video nasty, the film doesn’t offer buckets of blood but more than makes up for it with a sleazy emphasis on the killer’s sexual motivations as he strangles women to death and abuses their corpse afterwards. The UK VHS was actually a US R-rated print which omitted most of the intensity of the death sequences, but enough grimness remained to get this one banned, especially with Don’t in the title.