like many of the people commenting here, i'm one of the people who saw this film once in that very same screening late-night during the bbc2 sci-fi / horror season in the 80s as a last minute replacement in the schedule because something else overran.
i was extremely fortunate to see it again last night, after managing to finally track it down with bit torrent / isohunt ! what i find fascinating now reading all these reviews is the level of detail people have remembered it in on one viewing, posting 20 years later on to IMDb (& indeed, it having made such an impact on us all that 20 years on we even bothered to look it up) - not just the broad storyline of 'man trapped in phone box', but the details of how inviting the door was open at the beginning (the perfect angle, almost seductive), the clowns, the order in which different people tried to rescue him, & the passing of another trappee during the journey. i can barely remember star wars in that detail, never mind an (effectively) silent short ! the one thing which has changed for me between the memory i've carried for 20 years & what i saw last night is the speculation of what was actually going on - all this time what i've remembered is a story in which all the towns phone boxes mysteriously took on a murderous life of their own, but what struck me last night was the complicity of the phone company in the affair. were they the victims of the phone boxes too, or was something more sinister going on - had the phone company deliberately engineered the problem to cull the population for some reason ?
i was extremely fortunate to see it again last night, after managing to finally track it down with bit torrent / isohunt ! what i find fascinating now reading all these reviews is the level of detail people have remembered it in on one viewing, posting 20 years later on to IMDb (& indeed, it having made such an impact on us all that 20 years on we even bothered to look it up) - not just the broad storyline of 'man trapped in phone box', but the details of how inviting the door was open at the beginning (the perfect angle, almost seductive), the clowns, the order in which different people tried to rescue him, & the passing of another trappee during the journey. i can barely remember star wars in that detail, never mind an (effectively) silent short ! the one thing which has changed for me between the memory i've carried for 20 years & what i saw last night is the speculation of what was actually going on - all this time what i've remembered is a story in which all the towns phone boxes mysteriously took on a murderous life of their own, but what struck me last night was the complicity of the phone company in the affair. were they the victims of the phone boxes too, or was something more sinister going on - had the phone company deliberately engineered the problem to cull the population for some reason ?