| Dialing for Dingbats | |
| Director: | Peter Slodczyk |
| Producer: | Michael Solton Lloyd Kaufman |
| Starring: | John Caponera Marta Dargham Michael Jeffries Johnny Mask Lyn Segerblom Roger Rodd |
| Distributor: | Troma Entertainment |
| Runtime: | 81 minutes |
| Language: | English |
Dialing for Dingbats is a 1989 romantic comedy directed by Peter Slodczyk and distributed by Troma Entertainment. The distribution company describes the film as "light hearted".[1]
Randy, a lonely and shy man, meets a woman through a party line but communication problems complicate their date.
The film was considered "the first serious examination of the world of dingbats on the phone" by the Orlando Sentinel.[2] A retrospective very negative review states that "This film couldn’t have been made in any other time than the late 80s, and not just for the snapshot of the bygone pre-internet dating scene mechanisms. It has a colorful VHS-era kitsch and an ungodly amount of earnest but bad jokes to the point it becomes surrealistic. The film takes too many detours to fill up the slight seventy-eight minute running time, with both commercial parodies and actual footage from other Troma films shoehorned in."[3]
All I Need to Know about Filmmaking I Learned from the Toxic Avenger (co-written by Kaufman and James Gunn) states that : "Troma tackles yet another socially important issue with the addiction of 1-900 party lines. This is the first film about phone sex."[4]