| Phantasm Released: 1979 MPAA Rating: R Genre: Supernatural Nuts and Bolts: Jody Pearson and his little brother Mike discover that strange things are afoot at Morningside Cemetery. A grim caretaker known only as the Tall Man uses the nearby mausoleum as the hub for his alien slave ring. Can the two brothers and their old pal Reggie expose the Tall Man’s operation without getting themselves killed? The chilling secret behind the Tall Man’s power will TERRIFY you! Summary: China Grove hillbilly musician Tommy Masterson decides to make love to a voluptuous lavender clad blonde behind the tombstones at Morningside Cemetery. Just as the good ole boy shoots his load, the lavender lady pulls out a long knife and stabs Tommy through the gut. The last thing he sees before he dies is a tall gray-haired man standing over top of him. The blonde is nowhere to be seen. Band mates Reggie and Jody Pearson learn about Tommy’s death. As far as they are aware, Tommy took his own life by wedging his hunting knife into the floorboards of his house and falling upon it. The two meet up with friend George Toby who has come in to town to attend Tommy’s funeral. Michael tells Toby that he plans on leaving town, leaving Mike in the care of their Aunt Belle. Mike overhears this and becomes increasingly upset at the idea. The following day, Jody and Reggie attend Tommy’s funeral. Jody is glad that his little brother Mike is not present. He fears the boy never fully recovered from their parents’ death two years prior. As Jody wanders the hall of the mausoleum he begins to hear strange raspy scratching sounds echoing from around darkened corners. As he investigates he is greeted by the caretaker who briskly informs him that the funeral is about to begin. (The caretaker is the same man who was seen standing over Tommy’s body.) Mike Pearson arrives regardless blasting his little Yamaha motorbike through the graveyard. He hides in the bushes during the burial and watches the entire procession through a pair of binoculars. After Reggie and Jody leave, Mike notices the Tall Man effortlessly lifting up Tommy’s coffin and placing it BACK in to the hearse. Freaked out, Mike seeks solace in the arms of a girl named Sarah and her fortune telling grandmother. He tells the grandmother that he is concerned about his brother leaving him. Mike is informed that if Jody does leave, then he will take Michael with him. Mike also tells the old woman about the strange tall man he saw at Morningside. The old woman mystically makes a black box appear before Michael’s eyes. The two instruct Mike to place his hand inside the box. As he does so he feels an intense pain shooting through his hand. It is explained that the pain he feels is only a reflection and that it is fear that is the killer. The pain he feels is all in his mind. Feeling less then satisfied with the experiment, Mike drops five bucks on the table and leaves. That night, Jody drives down to Dune’s cantina to drown out his sorrows. Mike follows him about like a puppy dog and watches his brother through the windows of the bar. Jody hooks up with a cute blonde and the two decide to head down to Morningside to bump uglies. (Watch out Jody! She’s wearing lavender!) The overly obsessed Michael of course follows them. As Mike watches his brother priming himself up to fuck this chick, he hears strange noises coming from the bushes. Before he can react, a midget wearing a brown robe attacks Mike. (Scary huh?) Mike races past the copulating couple screaming his damned head off. Jody executes an Olympic level dismount and chases after his brother. Jody calms Mike down and tells him that he’s just imagining things. He gives Mike the keys to his ’71 Cuda and tells him to go home. The lady in lavender is nowhere to be found, and Jody has no idea how close he nearly came to being killed. The next day Mike sees the Tall Man walking down the street. The Tall Man pauses in front of Reggie’s Ice Cream parlor and takes note of Mike’s presence. Mike quickly returns home. The Tall Man sends his dwarf servents after Mike and they try to kill him in the garage at the Pearson home. However, the little shrimps quickly beat feet when they discover that Jody has returned home. Mike explains to Jody how the little fucks tried to topple the Cuda on top of him while he was working on it. Jody of course doesn’t believe him. Mike decides to investigate on his own. Armed with a hunting knife he goes down to Morningside Mausoleum. He breaks into the mausoleum and comes upon a zombie-like worker milling about. Skirting past the worker without being seen, Mike inspects the empty marble halls of the rotunda. The Tall Man finds him and sends a small flying steel sphere after him. The sphere chases Mike around the corner, but Mike runs into the waiting arms of the worker drone. Wrestling with the thug, Mike bites him on the arm forcing the man to drop him. Using two sharp spikes, the sphere races by and imbeds itself into the face of worker drone. It projects a drill bit into the man’s forehead and extracts all of his blood which it then jettisons out through an expulsion port at the back of the device. Mike takes off as the Tall Man finds him again. Retreating into a small room, Mike crushes the Tall Man’s fingers inside of a door. He chops his fingers off with his knife and a strange yellow ooze drips out from the stumps. One of the discarded fingers continues to twitch upon the floor. Mike collects the dainty dismembered digit and returns home. Showing Jody the wiggling finger, he convinces his brother that the Tall Man is definitely something from another world. Mike goes to pack up the finger so he can show it to the police when it transforms into a strange alien insect. The creature attacks him and Mike barely succeeds in wrapping up inside of his jacket. The two brothers struggle valiantly and ultimately shove the greasy little fuck into the garbage disposal. Grrr. Bugs! Hate ‘em. Reggie stops by and Jody and Mike bring him up to speed. Now its Jody’s turn to check out the mausoleum. Re-treading his brother’s steps, he goes into the basement where he is attacked by one of the demented little gnomes. Jody manages to blast the little shrimp to Sheboygan with a well-placed shot from his gun. Jody then jumps into his car and gets the hell out of there. Mike picks him up later on the highway and the two race home. As they are driving, a white hearse pursues them. Taking pot shots at it with the shotgun, they manage to steer the hearse into a tree. They inspect the wrecked vehicle only to find that it was being driven by one of the dwarves. Jody pulls back the things hood. He is shocked to discover that the dwarf is actually the corpse of Tommy Masterson scrunched down to midget size. He is impaled on a tree branch with yellow shit spilling out of his lip. Jody decides that Mike would be safer at his friend Sally’s antique store. As Mike is wandering about the shop, he comes upon an old black and white photo of the tall man driving a 19th century horse-drawn carriage. The man in the photo turns his head and stares directly at Mike. Meanwhile, Tommy’s corpse is loaded into the back of Reggie’s Ice Cream truck. The corpse breaks free and overturns the truck. Don’t worry though, Reggie survives and will turn up again later. (Gee, did I spoil that little surprise for ya? My bad.) The Tall Man however, is a little bit miffed over having his fingers cut off and he goes to collect Michael (Even though they’ve all grown back on their own). He kidnaps Mike from his own house and locks him in the back of another hearse. But little Mikey is strapped this time and uses the automatic weapon to blast out the back windows. Leaping to freedom, Mike lands on the asphalt as the hearse careens out of control exploding into a nearby tree (These guys lose way too many hearses this way.) One would think that this would be the end of the Tall Man, but you and I both know that he ain’t going out like that. Mike hikes it over to Morningside where he finds Jody wandering around. The two are chased by one of the killer spheres, but Jody blows it out of the air with a well placed shot from his rifle. As they wander about they come upon Reggie alive and well. (See, I told ya!) The three enter a large white walled chamber lined with blue vats containing the bodies of dwarf workers. In the center of the room are two large tuning forks. Mike goes to inspect the device and learns that it is actually a doorway to an alien dimension. The Tall Man is an other worldly figure who operates on Earth in order to collect the bodies of the dead and transform them into his slave army. The zombies need to be crunched down to midget size because of the accelerated gravity and heat of the alien world. The Hardy boys go outside to try and find the Tall Man leaving Reggie to take care of the gateway. Reggie disrupts the tuning forks and the vibrational attunement collapses. A vacuum is created and everything begins hurling about the room. Reggie races outside to escape but is stabbed in the stomach by the Tall Man. (Tally is doing his lavender lass transvestite thing here.) But Reggie’s sacrifice is not in vain however as the entire mausoleum is lost to the swirling vacuum. Jody and Mike decide to spring a trap for the Tall Man. They plan on baiting him to follow them to Singer’s Creek where they intend on dumping him into a thousand foot deep mine shaft. The Tall Man comes after Mike once again and tries to capture him by way of strange mystical pitfalls that he creates. Mike avoids them though and lures the caretaker to Singer’s Creek. The Tall Man falls into the mine shaft and Jody appears using his shotgun to set off a rockslide sealing him in. The Hardy Boys have solved the case of the dwarf-raping octogenarian! At this point, Michael wakes up. Nearly the entire film has been a horrible nightmare. Reggie is there by his side and explains to him that his dreams were brought on by stress over losing his brother in a tragic car wreck the year before. There never was a Tall Man! (Or so we are led to believe) Reggie promises to take care of Mike. Mike goes up to his room where he sees the reflection of the Tall Man in the mirror. A dwarf appears and pulls Mike into an unknown dark world. Acting/Dialogue: The acting really isn’t too good in this, but A. Michael Baldwin and Bill Thornbury (Mike and Jody) put forth an interesting sort of Greg and Peter Brady feel to all of this. They really stumble through their dialogue but in a strange way, the actors almost seemed as if they were born to do these roles. Everything just fit right. The real talent in this comes from Angus Scrimm as the Tall Man. Angus doesn’t have too many speaking lines in this flick, but it’s the power of his presence that makes this film. The dialogue all around is fairly shitty. In fact, its SO shitty that it actually becomes quite comedic. Reggie Bannister really takes the cake with his over-zealous suggestions on how to do away with the Tall Man. (See Great Lines) Gore: We get to see a little flying spiky ball fly into some jerk’s forehead. Blood spurts out all over the place as a little drill pops out digging into his brain. And if that ain’t enough, it flushes all of the nice juicy red out the ass end of the thing. The scene where Mike chops off the caretaker’s fingers is pretty cool too. Especially since the guy apparently bleeds mustard instead of good old fashioned hemoglobin. Not much else beyond that though. Guilty Pleasures: Well, the Lady in Lavender (as she is credited) shows off her rack at two different points in the film. Nothing wrong with that. The Good: Watching Phantasm is like eating a bag of jellybeans. On the average, it’s a fairly mundane film, but every once in a while you come across one of the rare and highly coveted red jellybeans. This film is just deliciously dumb. It’s not really meant to be a comedy but you find yourself laughing at it anyway. Especially when the severed finger turns into a bug and begins crawling all throughout Mike’s hair. The character of Reggie is a complete goof and he definitely represents the Curly of this particular trio of Stooges. I guess what makes Reggie so amusing is that he is an over-aged guitar picking Ice Cream driver leftover from the flower power generation. (Hmmm. Come to think of it, maybe I should list that in ‘The Bad’ category.) The Tall Man is pretty fucking cool and he gives us just the right amount of creeps to keep our interest. He’s kind of the forgotten bastard brother of Freddy, Jason, Pinhead and all of the other A-list Boogeymen. His little spiky spheres are bad-ass. I just wished we got to see more of them. The overall motivation behind the plot was kind of interesting. The caretaker robs graves in order to use the corpses for slave labor on his home planet. Now I ask you, is that really such a bad thing? The way I see it, he’s performing a service to the community. Why clutter up all of the cemeteries when there are golf courses in need of building? Ship em ALL off-planet, I say! Hell, its not like the guy is using LIVING subjects for his workforce. Who gives a rat’s ass if he abuses our dead? For the first time in their un-lives, these morts now have a sense of self purpose. Bully for them! Typically I hate films that give you a questionable ending. But in the case of Phantasm, I don’t really mind. I like pondering whether or not Jody really died or whether Mike was actually taken by the Tall Man or was that just another dream? I guess since I don’t take this film seriously one iota, there’s not really a lot here to get upset about. The music is really awesome in this too. It’s slightly reminiscent of the stuff that John Carpenter usually does and I think that as far as film scores go, it ranks right up there with the tracks from Exorcist and Amityville Horror. There’s an interesting little side-bit that I found to be perversely amusing. As Reggie is driving his Ice Cream truck aimlessly trying to figure out what to do about the corpse locked inside, we can hear the internal recorder playing Three Blind Mice. Pretty fitting choice I think. One part that I found intriguing were the words of the fortune tellers. At first, they really mean nothing. But after watching the entire film, you kind of put the words into a whole new perspective. The ladies told Mike that if Jody were to ever leave, that he would take Michael with him. Is this to mean that Jody was actually killed by the Tall Man? Maybe he wasn’t killed in a car crash after all? I guess I’ll just have to watch the sequels in order to learn the truth. They also tell him that the pain Mike feels is all in his mind. A cute bit of foreshadowing that alludes to the fact that everything we’ve watched up until this point is total bullshit. Now even though this movie is dumber than a bag full of dog shit, I have to give credit where credit is due. The final scenes when Mike awakens from his nightmare were quite touching. Reggie Bannister actually comes across as a real character for the first time as he holds Mike in his arms. Nothing much to rave about with this one. Phantasm is just another one of those cheesy twenty-dollar budget popcorn flicks that goes good with a cold six-pack. Nothing intensely cerebral here, but a fairly fun flick if you’ve got nothing better to do. The Bad: As you scrounge through that overflowing bag of jellybeans you will invariably always come upon the greatly feared and despised black licorice bean. Oh and how I HATE the black licorice bean. There are a couple of aspects to Phantasm, which liberally borrow from other Sci-Fi films. The dwarves from the desert planet look so much like Jawas it’s not even funny. And then there’s the matter of the black box from the fortuneteller’s house. This is BLATENTLY ripped off from Frank Herbert’s Dune. In Dune the Bene Jesserit witch even tells Paul Atreides that “Fear is the mind killer.” The fortuneteller’s granddaughter repeats this practically verbatim. Hell, there’s even a bar in the film called DUNE’S Cantina. A respectful homage to Frank Herbert or an unforgivable rip-off? You be the judge. Getting back to the Jawas; these things were just stupid. I can’t see how Jody had so much trouble getting the little fucker off his back. The whole ‘scrunching of the corpse to make them adaptable to alien gravity’ thing is just dumb. If that were the case, then why doesn’t the Tall Man conserve resources and just steal the corpses of dead midgets? The story of the Tall Man was slightly intriguing, but I really wish they had done more with it. We only get a snapshot of the alien world he comes from and we really get no idea of exactly what he is or what he is capable of. We know that he has been on Earth doing this for at least a century, but you have to wonder how he was able to midgetize all of these people without generating a lot of attention to himself. The film is worth checking out. But don’t think that you’ll feel the need to lock your doors or draw your blankets up close to your chin. This flick is about as scary as a basket full of constipated wiener dogs. Great Lines: “It was little and brown and low to the ground!” “It was probably just a gopher in heat!” --Mike describing his attacker to Jody. “You think you go to Heaven? You go to us!” --The Tall Man speaking to Jody. Okay, I see it. I see it all now. What we gotta do is snag that tall dude and stomp the shit out of him! And we’ll find out what the hell is going on out there. Yeah! We lay that sucker out flat and drive a stake right through his God damned heart! --Reggie “The funeral is about to commence!” --The Tall Man to Jody right before Tommy’s funeral. “You play a good game boy. But the game is finished. Now you die! --The Tall Man as he is stalking Mike. “You don’t aim a gun at a man unless you intend to shoot him. And you don’t shoot a man unless you intend to kill him. No warning shots. You listening to me? No warning shots! Warning shots are bullshit.” --Jody instructing Michael on firearm safety as he hands him a shotgun. Overall Rating: 5 out of 10 severed heads. |
| Back to Movie List Back to Contents Back to Home Page |
 |
|
|
 |
 |
|
|
|
|