At Senseless Cinema, we have not yet looked at the works of Connecticut filmmaker Gorman Bechard, so we need to remedy that as soon as possible (i.e., right now) by discussing his first feature, 1984's Disconnected.
Reviewer arfdog-1 writes, “It's truly difficult to know what's going on because the entire movie is one big disjointed mess.” Reviewer leofwine_draca writes, “Sadly, none of this makes much sense at all and it certainly isn't entertaining; sleep inducing, more like.” And reviewer petervenkman57 writes, “This is a train wreck of movie. It just doesn't get worse than this.”
Read on for an accurate evaluation of Gorman Bechard's Disconnected (1984)...
The film begins with a slow pan across a small city, from a giant cross on a hill past industrial brick buildings to a rooftop parking lot, where a bearded man listens to music on headphones and eats a sandwich. Comically, another man approaches him from behind, startling him and forcing him to drop the sandwich over the side of the building. As the cinematic fates would have it, the two men are detectives, and they’ve just gotten word that a body has been found.
After the title sequence, we follow Alicia, a young woman who brings a helpless elderly man into her apartment, which is tastefully decorated with one-sheets of Hitchcock films taped to the walls. The film cuts abruptly to a bar later that night, where Alicia is explaining to her sister Barbara Anne and their boyfriends that the elderly man simply disappeared from her apartment while she was preparing tea. Their conversation is soon drowned out by a band called The Excerpts performing a catchy New Wave tune called “You Don’t Love Me.”
Later, Alicia and her boyfriend Mike are in his car having a difficult conversation where she accuses him of sleeping with her sister. (They are revealed to be twins, though they have different hairstyles and it would be difficult to mistake them for each other, even though they are played by the same actress.) The dramatic scene is intensified by director Gorman Bechard moving the camera to the right, then the left, then the right, then the left again as the couple argues back and forth. (The dramatic tension created by this camerawork is of course worth the dizziness and mild nausea experienced by the viewer.) Alicia gets out of the car, rejecting Mike’s desire to join her in her apartment.
The next day, Alicia is working at her job in a video rental store when a loquacious customer enters and expounds about the store’s lack of classic and foreign films. “You like movies, don’t you?” he asks.
“Very much so,” Alicia replies.
“I knew you would.” The man, Franklin, admits he doesn’t have a VCR so he won’t be renting any movies, and he also admits he saw Alicia at the bar last night and decided to stalk her. Thinking nothing of his behavior (and paying no attention to the ominous and obviously non-diegetic soundtrack), Alicia tells him her name as well as her boyfriend’s name.
Later, Franklin returns to the store to flirt with Alicia, but they are interrupted by a man who blurts out, “Hey, what do you got new in porn?”
After sending the man on his way, Franklin asks Alicia out. She says she is seeing Mike so she can’t go out with him, but he offers to go get her a Coke. Walking out, he says, inexplicably, “See you bye.”
At home, Alicia gets several phone calls where nobody speaks, but then she picks up the ringing phone to hear a private conversation between her boyfriend Mike and her sister Barbara Anne that reveals they are still having an affair. Alicia goes to bed but dreams that Mike is strangling her. (It is clear to the discerning viewer that this is a dream because the scene is lit by a small purple light.)
The next day, presumably based on her dream, Alicia decides to take Franklin up on his offer. She phones him from the video store to set up a date.
In a shocking twist, the film cuts to Franklin’s bedroom to reveal that he is the serial killer, and he has a woman’s bloody corpse in bed with him! (Almost as shockingly, Franklin’s sheets are nearly transparent!)
In a moment of social comment, the filmmakers pan up the wall above Franklin’s blood-soaked bed to reveal a crucifix hanging near the ceiling. The scene then dissolves to the detectives, Mike and Tremaglio, discussing the serial killer case next to the big cross on the local hill from the opening establishing shots.
Franklin takes Alicia to a movie at night, where they run into Barbara Ann and her date. When Franklin and Alicia are alone, he says, “I get the impression you and your sister don’t exactly get along that well.” After they go their separate ways, Franklin says, “See you bye” again.
After they part, Franklin picks up another woman in a bar, takes her to his home, and stabs her with a switchblade, which proves a very effective murder weapon despite the short blade as the woman dies immediately.
Meanwhile, Alicia continues to receive phone calls with nobody on the other end of the line. Occasionally, there is also a loud buzzing sound on the other end. Despite multiple calls to the phone company, Alicia can’t resolve her unusual telephonic problem.
At night, Alicia goes to Franklin’s apartment for a dinner date. He asks her, “Do you want the ten-cent tour?” and ushers her into another room. Unfortunately, we viewers are not privy to the tour (likely because we did not pay a dime for the privilege) as the scene dissolves to dinner. Franklin charms Alicia by calling whatever they are eating Shrimp Newburg. Then Alicia brings up Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt, ironically unaware that its story about trusting a serial killer parallels her current relationship with Franklin.
After dinner, they move to the bedroom to have sex. In a chilling scene, Franklin wakes up, pulls out a different switchblade, and rolls over to stab Alicia, only to find that she is not in his bed — and, to make matters worse, he has stabbed one of his pillows. There is a note on the bed from Alicia telling him she had to leave because she’s busy in the morning.
Alicia receives another phone call with a loud screeching on the other end, artistically shot with the sun pouring directly through the apartment window in order to, no doubt, induce a headache in the viewer.
There follows a classic stakeout scene in which the detectives chasing the serial killer, Mike and Tremaglio, wait in their car for something to happen. The brilliant dialogue seems to be a mix of witty scripted bon mots and some improvisation, and must be transcribed here for posterity as an example of state-of-the-art screenwriting.
“You know, I’m really tired. I need a vacation.”
“This is work?”
“This is work.”
“All you do is sit in cars and eat grinders.” (Grinders, of course, being a regionalism for submarine/hoagie/hero sandwiches.)
“You should taste these grinders.” (One must note the detective is currently eating only one grinder despite his use of the plural.)
“It’s a pity those poor girls can’t eat grinders anymore.”
“These grinders taste like they’ve been eaten before.”
“All we’ve got is that they came from this neighborhood.”
“Yeah. So?”
“That’s all we’ve got.”
“It’s not much.”
“Sure isn’t.”
“It’s come to the point that we might have to go door-to-door and just, uh, you know, question everybody.”
“That’s not a bad idea. Even the mayor’s been on our backs.”
“Why don’t we start with that guy over there?”
“Might as well. At least he looks the part.”
“Slasher suspect number one.”
They climb out of the car.
“Can’t you at least leave that damn sandwich in the car?”
“Huh. It’ll get cold.”
The detectives speak to a man walking down the sidewalk, unaware that Franklin, the real serial killer, is across the street.
Later, Barbara Ann visits Franklin in an attempt to seduce him, as her major character flaw is that she needs to sleep with her twin sister’s boyfriends. The two have sex as, amusingly, various small statues and tchotchkes (and, less amusingly, two photographs) look on. Shockingly, Barbara Ann’s bloody hand reaches for a framed photograph, the only indication Franklin has killed her.
The next morning provides more shocks, as Alicia enters Franklin’s apartment and discovers a bloody mess just as Franklin enters with a switchblade. He stammers, “I didn’t kill all those girls.” Alicia screams.
Fortunately, the detectives are still canvassing the neighborhood, so they run to the apartment.
The film cuts to the next night. The detectives escort a still-alive Alicia to her apartment, where she finds Mike waiting for her. She kicks him out of her apartment, telling him she doesn’t need him.
Through a documentary-style interview with Detective Tremaglio, we learn that he shot Franklin dead. All seems complete — except the film has not even reached the hour mark, indicating to the sophisticated viewer that he or she is in for some twists and turns. They begin with a reminder that Alicia’s phone is not working; she receives another phone call that is only startlingly loud buzzing.
The film continues as a mood piece as Alicia gets drunk, has trouble sleeping, and sits on her furniture in the nude. After 15 minutes of this mood, she relents about Mike and asks him for a date. They go to a nightclub, then spend time together in a musical montage that is mixed with flashbacks to Alicia’s previous relationships with Mike and Franklin. After a date, Alicia returns to her apartment and is scared by another buzzing phone call. This time, she screams, “Leave me alone!” into the receiver and the sound stops. This is followed by an artful montage of still photos of Alicia smoking and drinking in her apartment.
Finally, as the film rockets toward its climax, Alicia tears the phone apart. But in a shocking twist, the buzzing sound occurs again, coming not from the phone but from somewhere in the apartment.
In the film’s final chilling shot, the helpless elderly man not seen or mentioned since the beginning of the film walks out of Alicia’s apartment and glances at the camera.
The End
As we have discussed many times, the mark of a great film is its ability to raise questions that it never intends to answer. Gorman Bechard is, perhaps, a master of this aspect of great films, and Disconnected raises perhaps more unanswered questions than any other film in the phone-based slasher subgenre. For example, what actually happened in the film? Why were noises coming from Alicia's phone after she destroyed it? Who was the elderly man in the beginning and end, a man who was apparently responsible for most or all of the film's sinister goings-on? Why were crucifixes prominent in the film? What narrative purpose did Alicia having a twin sister serve? Did Franklin really kill all the victims or was his deathbed statement of innocence partially correct? And why did Franklin always say "seeyoubye" upon parting with the other characters?
When a film suggests this many (and more) unanswered questions, the discerning viewer knows he or she is in for a treat. But Disconnected has another treat in store for movie audiences: unlike in most films, the characters in Disconnected actually say goodbye to each other when they're finished on the phone. This fact is enough to cement Gorman Bechard's position as the phone-based slasher film's foremost realist. What more, I ask you, could a film director want?