Set in Virginia Beach, 9-year-old Joey Collins (Joshua Morrell) and his mother Laura (Eva Kryll) are morning the loss of Joey's father. One night unexplained phenomena start happening when many of Joey's toys start moving and turning on by themselves including a toy telephone that Joey comes to believe allows him to speak to his deceased father. Other kids at school including bully Bernie (Matthias Kraus) mock Joey for this, and both Laura and Joey's Teacher Martin (Jan Zierold) show concern which is only exacerbated by Joey displaying telekinetic abilities. As time goes on, a malevolent entity in the form of a ventriloquist Dummy (Jack Angel) begins confronting Joey and threatens Joey's mother if he keeps using the toy phone which the Dummy claims isn't his father on the other end.
Joey (retitled Making Contact for the Roger Corman release) is the second film from director Roland Emmerich. After having seen and been impressed with Steven Spielberg's E. T. in 1982, Emmerich decided his next film would be a horror film that incorporated many of the techniques seen in 80s American blockbusters of the Spielbergian mold. Despite being a German production, the film was shot in English as Emmerich wanted to target an international audience after his first film The Noah's Ark Principle hadn't been a big success at the German box office. Emmerich recruited most of the actors from U. S. military bases in Germany, and used his contacts to friends in the United States, who helped him with suggestions and props, to create the American look of the film. The effects work in Joey was done by Hubert Bartholomae, with whom Emmerich had collaborated on The Noah's Ark Principle, who had to build up a new studio to experiment with different ways of creating the effects needed for the film. For a low budget production of 3.5 million Deutsch Marks, Roland Emmerich certainly captures the look and feel of 80s Spielberg productions except for the script which is a confusing hodgepodge of ideas that aren't fully formed.
In terms of the effects work and look of the film, Emmerich certainly has created a film that encompasses everything you remember about that whimsical 80s Spielbergian style of filmmaking seen in Close Encounters, E. T. and its various contemporaries. The cast not being made of professional actors (and you can certainly tell from some of them) does make it difficult to be sucked into this film storywise, but even good actors would have a hard time selling the material here. According to Roland Emmerich's Biography by Jo Muller, Emmerich wasn't all that concerned with the actual story in the film so much as the look and effects work (and you can tell). While on a purely visual level there's a lot to appreciate in the film, the movie doesn't have any real substance to it and is just a loose assortment of ideas crudely daisy chained into a narrative. Despite Emmerich allegedly being inspired by E. T., Joey plays more like a weird mixture of Poltergeist, Carrie, and the Anthony Hopkins horror film Magic. The actual "why" as to what's happening is never established and despite the Dummy routinely saying the thing on the other side of the phone isn't Joey's father we're never given any idea as to what it is on the other side of the phone and the Dummy keeps acting stereotypically evil and cackling so there's no clear motivation for what's going on. The adult characters also take what's going on a little too well to the point that this feels like someone made a Zucker Abrahams Zucker type parody of Spielbergian blockbusters in the vein of Airplane! Or Top Secret but for some reason cut out all the jokes and played it straight.
I guess in terms of weird 80s timecapsules of these kinds of filmmaking tropes, there is a certain novelty to seeing them portrayed in a funhouse mirror image of themselves by way of Emmerich's complete lack of subtlety (complete with some stuff that would be a copyright nightmare with all the Star Wars, Disney, and other licensed merch that adorns the sets). But the story's such an unfocused mess portrayed by inexperienced actors that it does become a bit of a slog to sit through.
