Synopsis
Making Contact (1985), originally titled Joey, is a German-American sci-fi horror film you can watch online on iFILM. It was directed by Roland Emmerich — years before Independence Day — and follows nine-year-old Joey, a boy who loses his father and shortly after discovers he can move objects with his mind and pick up a voice on a toy telephone he believes is his dad calling from the other side.
The grief angle gives way to something harder to shake. Joey finds a ventriloquist's dummy in an abandoned house, and the dummy turns out to be no ordinary prop. It shares Joey's abilities and has its own intentions, putting everyone around the boy in steadily escalating danger. The film toggles between the supernatural contact Joey craves and the genuinely threatening force he has accidentally awakened.
Emmerich made this as his graduation project at the HFF Munich film school, and it ended up with an international theatrical release — which almost never happens to student films. Fans curious about the director's early instincts will recognize the mechanics; the scale is just much smaller. Stream Making Contact (1985) online on iFILM.
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