"The Call" & "Prisoners"

a) Seeing "The Call"

1.  I can recall seeing yesterday The Call. It was almost a great thrill ride but failed to deliver any real intelligent surprise at the end. Besides that it seemed like a better than average thriller with a fairly decent ending reached by way of an idiot plot point or two. I am not interested in any of the explanations and perhaps it was to be nothing but a dream like thing to float around in the mind and fade. There is very little that one can specifically say about The Call without possibly ruining the plot for those who haven't seen it. However The Call might be good to watch again if they show it on TV in a few years time, there is nothing else to watch and one might feel as if one has used well the time
2. The sight of the girl in the back of the car punching the back light out and her hand is sticking out in the trailers, it was quite a haunting image, it was as if the back of the car was now a womb, I expected that corner hole to open up wide and show a foetus floating in amniotic fludi. When the girl comes through the gap in the back seat, it might have been the moment when she is supposed to being birthed.

b)  Seeing "Prisoners"
However today I remember that today I saw Prisoners and felt that The Call and Prisoners were almost the antithesis of one another. I realised that this would be the case before I saw the Prisoners and maybe even before I saw The Call. It was totally wonderful to see people walking out before the end of Prisoners, perhaps they were afraid of how far the story seemed to lead into depths of nowhere at points. If only more people were walking out before the end of Prisoners, it might have been an even greater film experience. Three people in my row along left early and this forced me sitting at the end of the row to get out of my seat twice for these people to stand in the aisle as they left and I wondered "what the hell is going on here?" but I appreciated the extremeness of the situation. Prisoners was the film with the most satisfying thriller storyline this year and a good one to rewatch because of some of its visually abstract revelations. I also very much appreciated the pouring rain  and it's minimalistic ending as well. It also brought me to think about Blade Runner in an inspired way.

c) People and situations from "The Call" transform into those in "Prisoners"

c. i) Halle Berry transforms into Jake Gyllenhaal

1. Initial Transformations. The actors to take note of here are Halle Berry who plays emergency telephone operator Jordan Turner in The Call and Jake Gyllenhaal who plays Detective Loki in Prisoners.
2. Distant sounds. Jordan Turner hears the sound of something metal making a chiming sound in the background of a telephone call and this become the idiot plot point that takes her to discover the metal cover concealing the entrance of a cellar complex beneath the ground where an old house once stood and there was the layer of the serial killer Michael Foster. 
3. Another step forwards by dropping something and retrieving it. In The Call, Halle Berry enters the cellar complex only because she suddenly drops her mobile phone down through the cellar entrance and down below there is not mobile phone signal. In Prisoners. once Detective Loki has decided to smash everything and throw on the floor everything on the desk in his work cubicle, after he has let a suspect who was drawing a map in the form maze shoot himself, the act of dropping something leads to another point in the story as he plays with the toy bus on the floor, moves it around and then discovers in the photo of the corpse from the cellar on the floor the medallion has the pattern of a maze
4. Idiot police didn't make a basic search of the area. The police in The Call had located the abandoned car on the plot of land where the cellar was to be found and the chiming sound was to be heard in the distance which turned out to be a metal object that might have been a padlock hanging by a string, hanging down the side of a flagpole, tied to a flag pole that kept hitting the pole, they didn't bother to notice the sound in the telephone call. They didn't bother to carry out a proper search across the area of ground which might have led to the discovery of a cellar.In Prisoners, there are the police digging up the yard outside the house but find nothing, and they fail to do something such as a proper search around the area and look to see if the parked car is concealing something obvious, but here Jordan has been transformed into Jake Gyllenhaal as Detective Loki who right at the end of the film hears the distant sound of a toy whistle being blown by Keller Dover who is trapped in a pit with a man hole sized entrance hidden beneath a metal cover,

c. ii) Mike Foster transforms into Keller Dover and then Holly Jones' husband

1. More Transformations. The actors to point out here are Michael Eklund plays the abductor/serial killer Michael Foster in The Call and also  Hugh Jackman who plays Keller Dover in Prisoners.  
2. Cellar transforms into abandoned former home. Once the enraged Keller Dover had abducted the imbecile Alex Jones believing him to be guilty of abducting his daughter, although the person turned out to be someone who was an imbecile who knew the actual abductor and was a victim himself, he held him prisoner in his former now abandoned home and grievously tortured him. He was almost no better than the Michael Foster character who had kidnapped blonde woman, taking them to his hideaway to kill them for his own perverse needs. Michael Foster's almost maze like cellar had become Keller Dover's abandoned how with its many upstairs twists and turns that led to the bathroom. 
3. Forced down the hole While Michael Foster had been shoved back down back into the cellar by Jordan Turner and her the girl abductee, Keller Dover had been forced down into the pit by the elderly woman killer who has shot him in the knee cap and so he is stuck down there. However Michael Foster is knocked unconscious by his fall into the cellar and Jordan Turner takes the opportunity to bind the man to a chair in his chamber and to leave him there to die. 
4. Serial Killers left to die bound to chairs in cellars. Michael Foster is left bound to his chair in the cellar in The Call and  then transforms into n dead body of a man bound to his seat in the cellar beneath the priest's house in Prisoners. That dead man was also a serial killer who had died some years ago, had killed many children and was the husband of the elderly woman Holly Jones, the villain of the film and aunt of the imbecile Alex Jones.

d) Alex Jones in Prisoners as an echo of Alex Jones of Prison Planet?
Meanwhile is there a connection between Alex Jones in Prisoners and radio presenter Alex Jones who runs the Prison Planet conspiracy website? Possibly not.