Let us turn to another classic erotic thriller, 1988's Party Line starring Leif Garrett and Richard Hatch and released in the wake of other classics such as Jagged Edge and Fatal Attraction.
Some of your universe's critics are unmoved by the quality of Party Line. For example, reviewer anxietyresister writes, “Frankly, this film bored me to tears.” Reviewer mark.waltz writes, "it fails on every level, even as camp." And reviewer Leofwine_draca calls the film "unconvincingly acted by the principal cast members, and directed in the most mundane way imaginable."
Read on for the truth about Party Line...
Appropriately, the film begins with a woman dialing a touchtone phone with a newspaper clipping advertising “The Classiest Adult Party Lines” on the table. As the titles roll, we hear the woman interact with the person on the other end of the 976 number. “When do you want to meet? That’d be great. Tonight. Mmm-hmm. I’ll see you there.”
The film cuts to a man and woman having sex in a bedroom, but they are interrupted by a man who implies he is the woman’s husband (the interloper is played by Leif Garrett). He threatens to call the man’s wife and tell them he is sleeping with another woman. Then Mr. Garrett knocks the man out with a tchotchke. The woman says, helpfully, “Good work, baby brother.” She adds, “Now get Daddy’s razor.”
Later, Mr. Garrett and his sister Angelina drive their red sports car to a dance club.
Meanwhile, we follow a lawyer named Stacy who is having an affair with her boss, local district attorney Henry. She gets a phone call and drives to a murder crime scene overseen by Captain Richard Roundtree. Back at the police station, we are introduced to Detective Richard Hatch, a vice cop, as Captain Roundtree tells him one of the men he put away is back on the streets.
Elsewhere, the 976 party line is in full swing, and we see a snapshot of this erotic phenomenon from recent history. Mr. Garrett is on the line with a boastful man named Lenny and two giggling teenage girls (Jennifer and Alice) who present they are sexually experienced. Mr. Garrett tells one of the teenagers he wants to meet her, but the girls hang up quickly when the parents for whom they are babysitting arrive home early. The father drives the girls home, and when he gets Jennifer alone in the car he tries to kiss her, but she slaps him and gets away.
At the same time, Angelina is on another party line, this time with only one man, and she arranges to meet him at the siblings’ favorite nightclub. Mr. Garrett helps her get ready for the date and they head to the nightclub, where Detective Hatch is coincidentally tailing his prior offender. Angelina finds her phone date and they leave the club immediately to sit in his car, where Mr. Garrett appears and threatens their victim with a straight razor. Forgoing pleasantries, Mr. Garrett slashes his throat.
In the club, Detective Hatch goes into the clean, brightly lit bathroom to break up two customers doing cocaine; he arrests his offender as well as the drug dealer, but they escape and Detective Hatch is forced to chase them out of the club. The drug addict escapes on a motorcycle and, cleverly on the part of the filmmakers, Detective Hatch jumps into a car to commandeer the vehicle — but it is the car with Mr. Garrett’s dead victim sitting behind the wheel!
Of course, homocide trumps vice, so Detective Hatch cannot chase his perp. To make matters more complicated, Captain Roundtree assigns Detective Hatch and Assistant DA Stacy to be partners in the murder case (it is not explained how a police captain can assign a district attorney to be a vice detective’s partner), even though the DA’s office is investigating the mild, unassuming Detective Hatch for police brutality, of which he is purportedly proud. When Stacy attempts unsuccessfully to take statements from the crowd of witnesses, Detective Hatch even nonchalantly fires his weapon into the sky to get their attention (though he says he loaded it with a blank round, which detectives always carry in case of emergency crowd control).
In a mix of comedy and sleaziness, the father who tried to kiss Jennifer calls the party line because he found it on his phone bill — and he starts to get into it. “You haven’t met Big Jack yet,” he brags.
Back at Mr. Garrett’s house, Angelina confronts Mr. Garrett, who is wearing his mother’s wedding dress, because he killed another person at the nightclub.
Of course, the filmmakers know that the audience is less interested in the behavior of the psychopathic killers and more interested in the police investigation, so they cut to the DA’s office, where Stacy’s boss holds an impromptu press conference that blames Detective Hatch for failure to prosecute yet another prior case. Detective Hatch punches the district attorney in front of the reporters, so he must turn in his badge. Captain Roundtree admonishes him, “Man, you’ve really got to do something about your temper. Why don’t you take a seminar or something?”
“The downside is I was beginning to get interested in this case,” replies Detective Hatch. He meets Stacy in the parking lot, and she tells him she still wants him on the case.
Regardless of her endorsement, Stacy goes alone to interview Mr. Garrett at the mansion he shares with his sister because he, perhaps foolishly, gave her his address as a “witness” at the nightclub. She speaks to him for a few minutes, then leaves, prompting Angelina to slap Mr. Garrett because law enforcement is getting too close. Then Angelina rips apart their mother’s wedding dress to punish her brother.
In the next scene, Detective Hatch’s girlfriend, a motorcycle cop playfully named “Butch”, pulls over Mr. Garrett in his sports car. When she sees a red wig sitting innocuously on the passenger seat, Mr. Garrett immediately slashes her with his switchblade razor, killing her. In a poetic shot, we see her dark red blood stream down the red door of the Ferrari.
Back on the party line, Jennifer and Alice flirt with Mr. Garrett, arranging to meet him at Cafe Pacifica that very night. However, unbeknownst to those involved, their conversation is being heard by others on the party line: the sleazy dad (Big Jack) and a woman wearing underwear.
At the cafe, everyone on the party line arrives. Jennifer and Alice watch as Mr. Garrett, the eavesdropping woman, and Big Jack quickly leave to go to Mr. Garrett’s house for an implied foursome with Angelina. Alice is done with the nonsense: “Can’t we just go home? This is getting way too weird for me.”
At Mr. Garrett’s mansion, the eavesdropping woman admits she is not Jennifer — Big Jack, in a sleazy admission of his own, says he thought the voice was his babysitter. Angelina leaves Big Jack in the kitchen as she joins Mr. Garrett and his date on the balcony. Angelina holds up a tray covered with a napkin. “Let’s have a little snack first,” Angelina quips. “Cold cuts?” She lifts the napkin to reveal Mr. Garrett’s switchblade razor, which he grabs.
The film cuts, judiciously, to the police investigation, as Detective Hatch and Stacy conclude that all the clues lead to the fact that there are two killers, a man and a woman. Then they have the brilliant idea of going through the victims’ printed phone bills, and they find that everyone called the 976 number.
In the next horrific scene, a little boy finds the bloody, nude bodies of the eavesdropping woman and Big Jack lying in a field.
The case finally comes together when Jennifer visits Stacy and Detective Hatch with the information that she has seen the killer. She also says she would recognize Mr. Garrett’s voice. “I think it’s time we call this party line. When’s the best time to call these party lines, Jennifer?”
“Anytime, but nighttime’s the best.”
At Stacy’s house, they set up a speakerphone so Jennifer can participate in the 976 party line, but Stacy tells Detective Hatch she is having some ethical objections. “First we get this 16-year-old girl to lie to her parents and now we have her making obscene phone calls to complete strangers.”
Detective Hatch waves off her objections: “Something she’s done a hundred times before.”
At that moment, they hear Mr. Garrett’s voice. Jennifer seduces him and they arrange to meet at the Fantasia nightclub that night.
At Mr. Garrett’s mansion, Angelina plans to run away to Rome but Mr. Garrett starts to kiss her, and then he starts to strangle her, killing his sister.
At Fantasia, Stacy wears a sleazy red dress and waits for Mr. Garrett while Detective Hatch walks around, finally running into Jennifer, who is sitting at the bar with a glass of alcohol (perhaps implausibly, as she looks even younger than her 16 years).
Meanwhile, in the brightly lit nightclub bathroom, Mr. Garrett, dressed as a woman in what might be a nod to Dressed to Kill (1980), surprises Stacy. “We can go home now, Angelina,” he tells her, confusing her for his dead sister.
Mr. Garrett drives Stacy to his mansion, but he is undone by his Ferrari’s vanity license plate: TEMT ME. Detective Hatch calls in a favor with a friend at the police department so he races to the mansion, where Mr. Garrett holes Stacy at gunpoint. He tells her his family has “all gone bye-bye. Because I killed them. See, my analyst says I’ve got this Oedipus Complex, and that I was in love with my…” He begins to dance with Stacy, moving onto the balcony, but Stacy is able to push him over the balcony, where he falls to the patio below just before Detective Hatch arrives.
Shockingly, however, Mr. Garrett is not dead! He has disappeared from the patio. Detective Hatch and Stacy both pull out their guns and search for the killer. In the thrilling climax, both good guys shoot him and he falls into the indoor pool.
“Let’s get out of here,” Detective Hatch says.
The End
Party Line is an ambitious thriller, masking its sleazy content (incest, swinging, stalking teenagers on 976 lines) with the deceptively (and I can only assume intentionally) bland style of a television police drama. At its heart is a tour de force performance from child actor Leif Garrett (perhaps best known for 1974's Devil Times Five) in one of his later roles as an adult.
Some have said this film is miscast, but I would beg them to reconsider. I will admit that Richard Hatch's laid-back, almost zen performance seems at odds with his character's rebellious, police-brutality-endorsing nature, but even the staunchest critic will admit that Mr. Hatch is quite good looking, so of course that criticism is moot. Additionally, some might argue that the 16-year-old girl Jennifer is miscast because she looks like she is 14 at the oldest, but these critics are also wrong, as she delivers her lines coherently and walks through an adult nightclub wearing a bulky sweater, so again the criticism is moot. To conclude, Party Line is perfectly cast, highly erotic, and one of the finest police thrillers of the late 1980s.