Long Distance starts shakily enough. Monica Keena (who it took me a while to remember as Rachel from "Undeclared") plays Nicole Freeman, a recently-jilted post-grad Psych major working on her thesis in a run-down former middle-school-now-apartment-building in Boston (great quirky/creepy locale, by the way). One night she accidentally misdials a number and gets a call back from the guy she reached, who happens to be a serial killer on a cross-country rampage headed for...well, you know.
Nicole goes through a series of phone exercises at the beginning of the film that are now very familiar to all those who've seen Scream and its many predecessors and progenitors. These calls are much of the usual mental torment/mind f*** crap, and they don't really hold the menace they need to relay. This trope is getting so old, it's really hard to make this scenario seem anything but a parody. Keena's acting, which is middling at best --- she seems, if anything, a bit too young for the part --- doesn't help.
Still, Long Distance isn't badly written. There's something vaguely enticing about a woman who's sucked into playing live "bait" for a wacko on a nationwide trek. It's worked by the screenwriters with an almost playwright's inventiveness. It keeps you watching and if you analyze the script in retrospect, it's actually pretty clever in the placement of clues that set up the plausibility-stretching denouement.
But that's really the crux of the problem with this overall earnest, well-intentioned shoestring indie: you shouldn't *have* to go back and put the pieces together...they should make more of an impact the first time you experience them.
I'm giving this one high marks more for what it could have been than what it is, but I'd caution you...it's not for the unobservant or those who need a big-picture sheen on their thrills.
