“Hot singles are waiting to speak to you!”

Remember those party line commercials that used to air late at night in the 90s?  For just a few dollars a minute, you could call and talk to someone claiming to be a hot woman in your area of town.  (The commercials always featured women because everyone understood that only men would be dumb enough to call the number.)  Even when I was a teenager, I knew that there was no way that a young, hot woman was sitting at home alone and waiting for a stranger to call her.  But obviously, some people thought they were true because those party lines commercials aired for a long time and really only went away once everything moved online.

In Party Line, Greta Blackburn and Leif Garrett plays homicidal siblings who have money to burn so they spend all of their time on the party line, enticing men to sneak away from their wives and come to their mansion so that they can be murdered.  Detectives Richard Hatch and Shawn Weatherly are assigned to find out why so many married men are turning up dead.  The chief of police is played by Richard Roundtree, who is so smooth that his main purpose in the movie is to remind us that not everyone has to use a party line to pick up women.  It’s a standard 80s thriller that has some moments of unexpected humor, largely due to the contrast between the beautiful and rich killers and the people that they target.  Richard Hatch is wooden in the role of the detective but Shawn Weatherly is attractive and likable as his partner,  Greta Blackburn makes for an excellent femme fatale while Leif Garrett is twitchy but convincing as a killer who likes to wear a bridal gown.

Party Line was made when the idea of adult phone lines was still a new one.  Apparently, when those lines first started to advertise, the part about it costing money wasn’t actually mentioned and could only be discovered by reading the small print at the bottom of a television screen.  Since the small print was not only very small but also usually accompanied by a picture of a blonde in lingerie, no one ever bothered to read it.  I was not one of them but I do know more than a few 90s kids who came home from school to discover a parent waiting to talk to them about the phone bill.  The world was a different place back then.  Today, everyone should know that most hot singles have something better to do than to talk to you and if they don’t, they’re probably killers like people in Party Line.  It’s not worth a dollar for each additional minute.