Phantasm II & III (1988-1994)

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Phantasm II (1988)

Director: Don Coscarelli

Screenplay: Don Coscarelli

Cast: Angus Scrimm as The Tall Man; James LeGros as Mike Pearson; Reggie Bannister as Reggie; Paula Irvine as Liz Reynolds; Samantha Phillips as Alchemy; Kenneth Tigar as Father Meyers; Rubin Kushner as Grandpa Alex Murphy; Ruth C. Engel as Grandma Murphy; Stacey Travis as Jeri Reynolds

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #143

Phantasm (1979) is a horror film as its meant to be, a campfire tale of human emotion that also happens to be an oddball crowd pleaser. With its exceptional success because of this, Universal Pictures acquired the rights to the sequel in the height of the eighties horror film boom for their own use. It's the big budget sequel but between part II and III is where the most contentious aspects of the series for me will stand out. The first, upon reflection, is an immensely rewarding rediscovery. One whose ending manages to take a cliché and deliberately turn it into both a metaphorical emotional impact for the viewer and emphasising how odd the first Phantasm was, neither in reality or dreams and entirely in a confounding nether realm. Obviously for Phantasm II to exist you need to re-do this ending, beginning a series of film serial-like cliff-hangers, where the end footage is played again but with new scenes interwoven. The problem with this is that, with no true ending to these sequels, they need either to contribute something of interest or become time killing and ultimately worthless, the goal originally to close out on Phantasm IV: Oblivion (1998) and now Phantasm: Ravager (2016). To get to the ending, it would help to have sequels that bring something of worth to them.

I will also remark, just from Phantasm II having the biggest budget, how really marked in the theme of death this series is even over other horror franchises. It's a film which plays on the fear of death even when being more entertaining and bombastic. These films more than any other franchise meant to be as entertaining tackle this subject with a lot more inante power to them due to their tone, more affecting than any other whether you are spiritually inclined, agnostic or atheist. It's a theme Don Coscarelli has gone over in his career, his obsession, which he does tackle even just in the tone and look of his films. I admit, going through a depression because of unemployment, one which has become existential, has made viewing these films regardless of my critical opinion of them all immensely affecting, a tone I have been unable to shake off. Probably the worse films to have watched in this low mood but at the same time a testament to the material's qualities This fear paints the entire aesthetic, from the Tall Man (Angus Scrimm) having suited morgue attendants as minions to the production design. The sequel also presents an interesting new arch for the series, where the scale of the first film's portrait of the Tall Man as an adolescent's fears now grows to be a menace that inflicts entire towns. Scenes of Mike (now played by James LeGros) and Reggie (played by Reggie Bannister) entering a town entirely desolate is effective and creepy. A scale for a film which yet is set around only a few characters and an existential fear disguised as sci-fi weird horror.

It's the most violent certainly of this series, paradoxically to the modern day the Universal Pictures backed sequel film increasing the gore to make it a more populist sequel. An emphasis on comedy where Reggie is now Bruce Campbell, his character lovable but by way of a wannabe middle aged lothario, doing his damndest to be a hero, but also flawed, out of his depth and really obsessed with lusting after women. The later could come off as creepy considering he's considerably older than any of the women he's with throughout parts II to IV, only succeeding because Reggie Bannister is a charming, charismatic actor whose able to make dialogue that would sound so wrong from other actors work.

However with this there's also the cost of mainstreaming the original film, an independent movie whose awkward, rough edges were its charm, a prom queen or king with acne who were prettier than the ones with too much makeup and gel in their hair. Why recasting A. Michael Baldwin with James LeGros as Mike doesn't work. Considering how good he was as a child, replacing Baldwin was absurd in the first place, for a tangent with an actor in LeGros who is okay but ultimately a bland figure now here. The less said about Liz (Paula Irvine) and an un-used telekinesis subplot the better, a psychic link to Mike and a potential romance which never goes anywhere and is ultimately made worthless with what happens to her in Phantasm III. The issue of films having write out plot points from previous sequels is the biggest flaw of the middle of Phantasm's franchise, this sense these films are in a cycle of the protagonists continually chasing the Tall Man and neither being a symbolic repetition or leading to an actual end of interest. I admit to liking Phantasm II as a spectacle - the morbid aesthetic, the chainsaw battle etc., a killer title theme by Fred Myrow and Christopher Stone the series wisely returned to - but I also admit that it's pretty empty compared to the first film. That sense of losing the quieter, more creepy personality of the first film which spent an entire scene of Mike doing a MacGyver to escape his locked bedroom. Which dealt with the bond between brothers and friends for large passages of its length. Idiosyncratic personality being scrubbed off here.

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Phantasm III: Lord of the Dead (1994)

Director: Don Coscarelli

Screenplay: Don Coscarelli

Cast: Angus Scrimm as The Tall Man; A. Michael Baldwin as Mike Pearson; Reggie Bannister as Reggie; Bill Thornbury as Jody Pearson; Kevin Connors as Tim; Gloria Lynne Henry as Rocky; Cindy Ambuehl as Edna; Brooks Gardner as Rufus; John Davis Chandler as Henry

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #144

Idiosyncratic personality fully scrubbed off here. Sadly here it feels like there's little to appreciate for me only until you get to the final scenes, the most rewarding aspect of the entirety of Phantasm III as it allows Phantasm IV: Oblivion to exist, a far more rewarding sequel. For most of Phantasm III however it feels like a rehash of Phantasm II with less to offer. It repeats almost the exact same plot as before. Thankfully A. Michael Baldwin is playing Mike again, and his entire plot line for this film is the most rewarding aspect of the film, leading to a progression where the Tall Man has greater intentions for him than to be turned into a hooded dwarf. That Bill Thornbury returns as his older brother Jody, dead and now a sphere with its sense of consciousness still there, should bring an entire new weight to the film's main plotline.

Baldwin though is not in a lot of the movie at all.  Instead most of the film has Reggie (Reggie Bannister) with Tim (Kevin Connors), effectively Macaulay Culkin from the Home Alone films if the traps killed people, and Roxy (Gloria Lynne Henry), an African-American woman who attempts to use nunchaku on the silver spheres and is tough. They present an interesting duo to have but unfortunately they don't possess any really interesting aspects about them. Their dialogue between them is very clichéd. Tim is just depicted as a precocious kid in spite of the back-story of losing his family having the potential to bring a greater emphasis on familial bonding, with Reggie and Tim easily developing a symbolic father-son/uncle-nephew interaction if the script developed it more. Roxy is more disappointing, a strong black female character who completely goes against stereotypes of female characters in a lot of horror regardless of race, more androgynous and tough, someone with short hair and wears combats like Sarah Connor, the perfect foil to contrast the danger of Reggie's obsession with women becoming creepy by making her someone who finds it ridiculous. Unfortunately she never gets any real drama of interest and disappears at the end of the film with no conclusion to her story. Thankfully Phantasm: Ravager has Gloria Lynne Henry return to the role, but I wish that her initial introduction meant more than it did.

Where Phantasm III is of interest is just the ending. When Mike is "infected" by an operation by the Tall Man, leading to the plot of Phantasm IV which becomes more introspective, an odder film like the original. Phantasm II and III for me don't really interest as much as they should, which do possess a lot to admire between them in terms of style and mood, but sadly in the case of Phantasm III feels pointless.

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Phantasm (1979)

Director: Don Coscarelli

Screenplay: Don Coscarelli

Cast: Angus Scrimm as The Tall Man; A. Michael Baldwin as Mike Pearson; Bill Thornbury as Jody Pearson; Reggie Bannister as Reggie; Kathy Lester as the Lady in Lavender; Bill Cone as Tommy; Mary Ellen Shaw as the Fortune Teller; Terrie Kalbus as the Fortune Teller's Granddaughter

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #139

Synopsis: Having lost his parents not that long before, Mike (A. Michael Baldwin) is worried his older brother Jody (Bill Thornbury) will leave him. This concern is amplified when he witnesses, after the funeral of one of Jody's friend, the undertaker (Angus Scrimm) lift the coffin from the open grave by himself and place it in a hearse. This "Tall Man" is a maleficent being, part of a sinister series of sights including hooded dwarfs, a mysterious woman in lavender (Kathy Lester) who seduces young men and kills them, and silver spheres that float in the air and produce harmful weapons from their forms. With his older brother Jody and Reggie (Reggie Bannister), the hippy iceman cream and friend of the brothers dragged into this by pure accident, Mike attempts to confront this horrible conspiracy at the funeral home in their home town.

And thus begins Phantasm, that rare franchise where even when a bigger budgeted sequel come to be, has been always in the hands of its original creator Don Coscarelli. Even when he passed directing what may be the final entry, Phantasm: Ravenger (2016), in favour for David Hartman to take the chair he has had direct involvement in all of the five films. Looking ahead, it's a question whether this franchise and his decision to make them a connected, large scale mythology is actually successful for me personally, as much of a risky gamble as would a studio milking the success of the first film their own way. What's interesting though is that, returning in 2016, this is the only franchise (excluding remakes and staying in one single world in chronological order) to have spanned from when most of these iconic horror films of the seventies and eighties first came from, American independent genre films or creations from very small studios and figures like New Line Cinema (A Nightmare On Elm Street) or Moustapha Akkad (Halloween). It has witnessed the boom of gory genre cinema in the eighties (Phantasm II), the decline in the early nineties (Phantasm III), the straight to video era (Phantasm IV), and now the retrospectives of these films, streaming culture, cult film viewings and a selective screen theatrical tour (Phantasm V). Whether the series works altogether depends on the viewer, but I appreciate the wide scale of time within American horror cinema it has passed through regardless of my final opinion on the collective franchise trajectory.

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The first can thankfully stand by itself, and what's fascinating is that, after its director first began by making a drama and a comedy for his two features, Coscarelli decided to make a horror movie that sincerely tackles death and the grieving process. Phantasm is a film which pushes at its obvious restrictions, that it story mainly has to take place around the funeral home but with the advantage that its tone is rich nonetheless. It's a unique film, obsessed with a premise that cuts into people with a real fear and predating Coscarelli's later film Bubba Ho-Tep (2002) that was about old men dealing with their own aging mortalities. With Phantasm however it's from the perspective of a young boy, Mike's journey through the film played out as much as a dream representing his fears of separation from his brother as it is real and morbid.

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With the advantage of how good the cast is - Angus Scrimm as the Tall Man, Baldwin and Thornbury, and Reggie Bannister who would become to Phantasm what Bruce Campbell would to the Evil Dead films - it plays like a nightmare from a young boy's perspective entirely. Where the source of evil is just a very tall undertaken who wears a black suit, a figure who merely walks calmly out of the shadows to snatch people away. Something that evokes primordial fears of childhood that grow more serious as one becomes a teenager. That shouldn't discount how fun the film is as well, as capable for humour and moments of character interaction which feel sincere and affable, but is a film whose atmospheric music by Fred Myrow and Malcolm Seagrave fits the already ethereal tone. That the film is openly more stranger than this, when the hooded dwarves and dimensional portals are involved, isn't a detriment to this but is a build up for a film that eventually starts to slide in and out of reality. So drastic at points it's difficult to tell what is merely Mike's anxieties and what's actually chasing him and the people close to him.

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Weird is apt as Phantasm in structure is a haze, shifting between dream sequences and narrative with unpredictability. As such a film unintentionally straying off narrative as its also done on purpose to represent the emotional concerns laying at its heart. That the film openly blurs genre is as much a factor. Part old gothic horror, the funeral horror like an Italian genre film setting but real architecture, to the older Fortune Teller who makes a brief appearance and places Mike through an actual supernatural encounter warning him of the future (and franchise long narrative) he would find himself in). Crashing into suburban American and then the sci-fi starts to abruptly appear as well adding to the bizarreness. I'd argue the later films pared this material a little bit too much down as there are details more rewarding here because of this unconventional potpourri of influences, details which show Phantasm's origins from the strange melting pot of seventies independent horror cinema but still rewarding, particularly the inclusion of the Lady of Lavender, a figure who could've been borrowed from an old turn of the century horror tale as a tempter of people to their doom, placed within a seventies modern small town and managing to be able to still seduce guys at the bar.

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With the late Angus Scrimm the centre of it, an older character actor who could've appeared in an old fifties western, this feels like a film fed from the old American b-movies from the forties onwards, taking its cues from a still untapped psychotronic well. One deep enough that it works effectively as much for psychological effect as well as being creepy in its oddness. Considering the importance of Mike's perspective as a character, ultimately the one whose viewpoint is in the middle of all this film's events, its appropriate in terms of a film dealing with fears of the mortal threads of life against the adolescent fever imagery that the material is barely touched upon in great detail, even the iconic silver spheres only seen twice or so, but has so much potency it lead to an iconic reputation.

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Personal Opinion:

A film that upon reflection for this review is growing qualities as I contemplate it, in hindsight to having gotten through most of the sequels which have their varying qualities, realising the virtues that mean more with the original feature that they came from. This is especially as I've not watched any of these films since my early twenties or even younger, over ten years, when once there was only four entries not five. To revisit Phantasm which virtually no memories in the slightest of any of them barring the ending of Phantasm III (1993) is like seeing the film from virgin eyes, and it appeals to me both for its home-grown qualities and that ultimately, it's a horror film as its meant to be, a campfire tale of human emotion that also happens to be an oddball crowd pleaser.

Abstract Spectrum: Fantastique/Psychotronic/Weird

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Low

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