2 Guys And A Chainsaw - A Horror Movie Review Podcast · Todd Kuhns & Craig Higgins

Murder By Phone

June 19, 2025·56 min·4 clips

This was one of those movies I caught as a kid and wondered about forever.

Todd picks a film as a tribute to Richard Chamberlain. He runs through Chamberlain's path from Dr. Kildare to King Solomon's Mines, using that detour to show why the actor mattered so much to him. Craig is skeptical from the start. The movie they dig into centers on a college professor who also seems to be an electrical engineer, and the hosts spend real time trying to make those pieces fit, because the film never quite does a clean job of it. Mostly, it doesn't. The professor comes off like an early-80s liberal academic whose environmental worries, blunt opinions, and general irritatingness are part of the joke, whether the movie knows it or not. He is headed to a conference. That conference is an ecological one in a big city, and one of his former students goes there ahead of him, which puts her in the path of the phone-call death that drives the whole mystery. The death is bizarre. She gets blasted during a call on the subway, and the only witness is the so-called bag lady, a detail the hosts clock as one of the movie's most charmingly dated choices. Her father wants answers. He asks the professor to pick up her things and look into what happened, because the official heart-attack story makes no sense to anyone with a pulse. That is the hook. From there the professor is pulled deeper into the mystery and into the orbit of his old mentor, a much older man played by John Houseman. They know Houseman. The hosts talk about him as a familiar face from plenty of other movies and TV, including Scrooged and The Fog, but they also think he feels like he's phoning it in here. The plot gets muddy. As the recap goes on, Todd keeps trying to hold the line while Craig gets hung up on who is doing what, why the movie is moving so slowly, and whether it is almost over. That tension is the fun. The result is a conversation that keeps toggling between affectionate memory, old-movie trivia, and the sort of blunt frustration that makes a messy genre title easier to sit with.

As heard by us

A groggy old horror mystery with enough odd details to stay interesting.

This Two Guys in a Chainsaw episode treats Murder By Phone like a shaggy late-night horror detour, with the hosts framing it as a tribute to Richard Chamberlain and tracing the plot from a college professor with environmental politics and electrical-engineer credentials into a…

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Why you'd press play

You want a dated early-80s mystery and hosts who keep narrating the wreckage.

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