From Dial M for Murder to Phone Booth, ringing telephones have played central roles in the plots of thrillers. In Long Distance, a misdialed phone call puts an innocent young woman, a bubbly Boston blonde named Nicole (Monica Keena), in the path of a vicious serial killer. Nicole is busy living the single, TV-dinner life, fending off nagging calls from her mother, when she accidentally and innocently dials a number across the country. She gets a strange female voice on an answering machine and hangs up. But soon an ominous, insinuating male voice has rung her back. "Believe me, I'm not your mother," says the voice, who's dialed her back courtesy of caller I.D. But Nicole's flirtatious interest quickly turns to annoyance and she hangs up on the stranger, who calls her right back. "I'm intrigued," the voice says. "Your voice, your name." He calls himself Joe, "just average Joe," and his creepy persistence scares her, so she hangs up again. The next day a handsome young cop (Ivan Martin) tells her the voice belonged to a killer, who dialed her from the scene of a murder in Nevada. Soon the killer has embarked on a murderous rampage, killing women and calling our protagonist from each murder scene, and as he moves eastward he gets closer and closer to a now terrified Nicole.