Disconnected, written by Gorman Bechard and Virginia Gilroy while directed by the former is a very low-budget slasher that begins a little slow at first before it finds its groove to make for a decent shocker.

Frances Raines stars as Alicia, the lead of the film and the woman whom all roads lead to or at the very least, the one the serial killer she meets means to take until she is no more. He even manages to kill her twin sister among others and is looking to have one final date with her, though she puts him off for a while before finally relenting. As it is, the killer is not the one that does her in, but something or someone mystical in nature, a force that haunts her throughout the movie and it does so through the telephone, thus the title. At the start of it all, Alicia helps an old man who needs to use her phone and from one moment to the next he is gone. Throughout the movie, she starts receiving an inordinate amount of phone calls, most of them with no speaker on the other end, just abominable sounds that start to drive her crazy. For a little while, the audience is made to wonder if the serial killer will take her life or if she will do it herself, driven insane by those unearthly calls.

Despite being made on the cheap, the movie looks decent and Bechard does a fair job of directing it. It is not very exciting and it does tend to bog down in places but there is enough here to make it interesting and to keep the viewers watching, wondering what is going to happen to Alicia. The great thing and perhaps the worst thing about horror movies are the logic holes that one has to overlook in order to enjoy them. Why did Alicia not simply unplug her phone or throw it away? Why not move out of her apartment and leave the phone there? Sure, there was a mystical or magical reason why but it was never really dealt with nor did Bechard even touch upon it. Alicia simply started getting the calls, started going crazy and then, when all was said and done, left the audience wondering just what actually happened, leaving it up to them to decide the ending in their own mind.

For the most part, with a fair amount of blood, some nudity and a bit of schlock, Disconnected is not the worst picture that one will see. The interviews with the policeman were a waste of time and the makers of this film should have cut those out and added a little more punch into it, to give that extra bit of zing – to make it flow a little better than it did but for what it was, it ended up being all right.

2.5 out of 5