MOVIE REVIEW : An Old Police Plot With Very Few New Twists in ‘Party Line’

“Party Line” (citywide) tells of an extravagantly decayed Bel Air brother (Leif Garrett) and sister (Greta Blackburn) who plug into the racy 976 phone call phenomenon to lure men seeking sex to brutal deaths. Sis Angelina seduces the guys and then the totally crazed brother Seth slits their throats with his father’s straight-edge razor. It seems they are working out lots of anger toward their late, rotten parent, a Hollywood producer.

Blackburn and Garrett throw themselves into playing this pair of all-out monsters, but “Party Line” is a trite and lackluster police procedural movie. Poor Richard Hatch, a capable actor, is stuck playing your standard Dirty Harry carbon-copy who’s quick to take the law into his hands. Similarly, Shawn Weatherly, as a special investigator from the district attorney’s office assigned to work with Hatch on the serial murders, has to fight off the advances of her boss, another overly familiar predicament. In any event, director William Webb and writer Richard Brandes allow the film to lapse quickly into a grisly and extended series of cliches.

Like everything else in “Party Line” the acting is uneven. Garrett, the former teen idol, continues to tackle character roles with zest, and Hatch and Richard Roundtree (as Hatch’s police captain boss) are, as always, reliable pros. The bright spot in this otherwise glum and gory trash is, however, Patricia Patts as an irrepressible, imaginative 16-year-old baby-sitter who loves to play the sultry vamp on the 976 lines but later on proves her maturity in a crisis. “Party Line” (MPAA-rated R for some sex and much violence) may be lousy, but Patts is a delightful discovery.