The Telephone Book

That is the only word to describe this totally off the wall comedy/art/porno. The story runs like this, a young and very cute girl (Sarah Kennedy) is sitting at home one day (probably looking at her pornographic wallpaper!). The phone rings, she picks up. Lo and behold it is, John Smith, the worlds greatest obscene phone caller! She instantly falls in love with his "amazing obscenities" and goes on a sexual adventure searching for him. This movie is NOT like your average porno, to be honest I did not even see anything close to hard sex. What I did see was a visual, auditory and sexual explosion of sheer oddity. If there was an 11 out of 10 this is the only movie I know that would get it!!!

A film that I think aims to get the audience into a state of sexual ecstasy. There's no point to the plot nor is there a message. It's all about sexual fantasies. Nobody in the picture actually has sex, they just talk dirty and that's how they get off. Even when the young Goldie Hawn look-a-like main character meets her obscene caller he never takes off his pig mask and all he does is TALK sex. At many points when the sexual tension is at its height the movie cuts away to people talking into the camera about their habit of doing obscene phone calls or putting bananas into their vagina and so on, so I think it wants to play with the audience. The last 10 minutes it is piling it up, though. It gets louder and faster by the minute, and more animated. The movie certainly had an orgasm.

It's a very smudgy comedy, but barely funny. Kinda like a Russ Meyer picture but more experimental. There was an interesting moment at the theater. A guy on screen talks about his previous obsession of making dirty phone calls and it becomes more and more absurd but not particularly funny. Then the guy right next to me starts laughing out loud, and I mean really loud. He can't stop himself and goes "HA!" every few seconds. Gradually more and more people throughout the whole theater start laughing more or less because of what was on screen but they most certainly wouldn't have laughed if this guy hadn't started. When the next scene began it was all quiet again. There was close to no laughter throughout the rest of the picture.

This underground NYC film does seem intent on stimulating its characters and audience into a frenzied state, even though nobody ever gets around to actually *having* sex. This "story", if you can call it that, deals with various sorts of extremely kinky and twisted fetishes and how one particular person can only ever do his best work over the phone. Certainly the actors give it their all, and writer / director Nelson Lyon makes this a very odd duck of a film. It's often quite surreal, with some priceless dialogue and one monologue near the end that goes on for quite some time. The film is very well shot in black & white by Leon Perera, and is episodic in nature, as our main character meets a couple of quirky people and the basic story is frequently interrupted by "obscene callers" speaking into the camera and telling us what they do (or have done) to get off.

Adorable Sarah Kennedy stars as Alice, a sex-obsessed and air headed hippie chick who receives the obscene phone call of a lifetime. Impressed by the mans' talent, she embarks on a search for the guy throughout NYC. Among the characters we meet on this journey are an avant garde adult filmmaker (Barry Morse), an excitable analyst (Roger C. Carmel) who pays her in coins for details about her sex life, and a lesbian housewife. Finally, she meets the awe- inspiring "Mr. Smith" (Norman Rose), who prefers to keep some sense of mystery about himself and never takes off his pig face mask.

What's amusing is seeing a couple of very familiar faces turn up in this thing: Jill Clayburgh as "Eyemask", Ultra Violet as a woman with a whip, William Hickey as the guy in the bed, Lucy Lee Flippin and Dolph Sweet as two of our obscene phone callers, and "Captain" Arthur Haggerty as the district attorney. Kennedy is a reasonably good anchor in this tale, while Rose invests the nutty Mr. Smith with quite a lot of gravitas.

As you can see from what I've described here, this may not appeal to all devotees of adult entertainment, but the colour animated sequence late in the film sure is a marvel of cartoonish dirty imagery. However, people may still come away from this feeling dissatisfied. Judge for yourself.

Seven out of 10.

Very entertaining. Girl in Manhattan receives the obscene call of her life, attempts to find him (identified as "John Smith") in the telephone book. Funny scenes as she finds the wrong John Smiths. Surprise ending when she finds the right one. Some nudity and extremely explicit but funny cartoon sequences.

I didn't know of this obscure movie until I went on YouTube and discovered its trailer on it. It depicted a voice of a man who claims if he chooses to, he could seduce the president of the United States and his family! So I just watched the whole thing and it's quite weird what with some confessions of former obscene phone callers put in between the story of a young woman wanting to meet her obscene phone caller. It takes place in New York City during the early '70s in mostly black and white, only turning to color when an animated sequence comes on during a live-action sequence taking place in two phone booths. Oh, and there are early appearances of future stars like Jill Clayburgh. So on that note, The Telephone Book is one weird movie that's quite amusing if not completely hilarious.