Dialing for Dingbats

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".

Plot

Randy, a lonely and shy man, meets a woman through a party line but communication problems complicate their date.

Reception

The film was considered "the first serious examination of the world of dingbats on the phone" by the Orlando Sentinel. 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."
All [I Need to Know About Filmmaking I Learned from The Toxic Avenger|All I Need to Know about Filmmaking I Learned from the Toxic Avenger] stated that "Troma tackles yet another socially important issue with the addiction of 1-900 party lines. This is the first film about phone sex."