Disconnected - 1984

Disconnected.  Is this a documentary about how I feel these days?  Is it an hour and a half interview about how emotions, inner turmoil, and constant mixed messages make me feel incredibly disconnected with life?  Cause holy shit that would be prescient.  Brian Eno makes it all better.

Disconnected is in fact a 1984 movie that's a sort of slasher, sort of thriller, sort of talky who knows, definitely amateur flick which I watched on Amazon.  It's got a cool cover on Amazon, one that made me believe it was a When a Stranger Calls / Don't Answer the Phone rip off.

Posters like this lead me to believe I have a genuine 80's fun time slasher on my hand.  And this...  Well, it is 80's, it is part fun time, and I guess it does have one kill in it?  This is the work of a school student as director, an actress with a career of only a few years, and a barely existent budget.  So, you get what you expect from this one.

Alicia is a nice enough girl, working in a video store.  Her store brings in some questionable characters, one of them being Franklin, who is interested in getting to know her.  She's also been getting weird phone calls, sometimes with no one there, sometimes with intense robotic sounds that grind into her and make her feel pain.  Also as if this is not enough, there's been a string of murders going on locally.  Could all these be connected?  Yeah, probably.

This movie does have the things that make one generally like an 80's flick.  It's got deaths, nudity, weird music, eccentric actors, minimalism, and a surreal vision to it.  I am sure it is divisive in it's watchers, and in fact I even found one review where the guy loved it and put it in the same grouping as The Room when it came to cult films.

For me, this is not exactly how I felt.  The film for sure is an interesting experiment.  Randomness is it's primary attribute, and it is essentially good, but for sure it's got a tendency to wander around unfocused, and it gives the feel that it for sure is amateur.  All that aside, for amateur, it is certainly better than one might expect.  I give it 3 stars.