When Michael Calls

ABC Movie of the Week involves Elizabeth Ashley as a divorced single parent who mysteriously begins receiving a series of spooky phone calls from a child who says he's her nephew, a boy who allegedly died in a snowstorm years prior; ex-husband Ben Gazzara and brother Michael Douglas (who heads up a home for emotionally disturbed youngsters) investigate on their own after a bee-keeper and a sheriff both turn up dead. Spotty teleplay from James Bridges, adapting a novel by John Farris, inexplicably drops a thread about a young burglar caught red-handed, and also a farmhouse which the killer sets on fire. However, the phone calls here are certainly creepy (even better than the ones from Doris Day's "Midnight Lace") and the performances by Ashley and Gazzara are solid. Bridges and Michael Douglas later reunited on "The China Syndrome".