Burp! (1986)

Directed by:

Will Wissink

In a dark, seedy area of a big city by some loading docks, a hooker (Tamar Baruch) gets thrown out of a john's car, misses her bus and is forced to wait at the bus stop. Meanwhile, a well-dressed yuppie (Edward Montie) in a nice car gets distracted fiddling with his radio and wrecks by a nearby "telefoon" booth. Unharmed but with his car now out of commission, he attempts to call for help and finds a woman's purse inside; helping himself to the change. Meanwhile, the hooker gets hassled by a trio of punks led by a one-eyed guy with a Mohawk and Coffin Joe fingernails. She punches one, kicks another in the shins multiple times and then uses an aerosol can and lighter to torch the leader while the female punk cheers and takes photos. The stranded motorist kind of stands back and watches the whole thing play out, then jumps back on the phone. It sends out an electric charge, weird noises and scrambled voices start coming out of the receiver, the phone splits apart, sprouts teeth and then shoots out a long tongue that wraps around the guy's neck and pulls him inside and eats him. It then burps. The end.

While this 12-minute Dutch short is well-shot and isn't horribly made or anything, it's not scary, not funny and I never could quite figure out what the whole point was... granted there was a point aside from someone thinking the idea of a killer telephone was enough all by itself. Really just kind of forgettable on the whole.

This was released on VHS in 1996 as part of a short film compilation titled "The Nether Horror Collection" from Haxan Films / Cult Classics out of France. The set also comes with a number of other genre shorts, all from Dutch directors, including Picknick (1977) from Dick Maas (who'd go on to make the surprise hit The Lift and serial killer film Amsterdamned), De Vlieg / "The Fly" (1985) from Hans Heijnen, The Great Rock and Roll Massacre 1 + 2 (1988) from Jan Doense and Phil Van Tongeren, Tjebbo Penning's The Bitch Is Back (1995), about a man being terrorized by a one-liner spouting blow-up sex doll, and five others.

★★