| Phantasm 2 Released: 1988 MPAA Rating: R Genre: Supernatural Nuts and Bolts: It is seven years after the first Phantasm. Mike is now an adult and still having visions of the Tall Man. His old pal Reggie and he jump in their muscle car and track the Tall Man to Perigore Oregon. The dwarves are back, and this time their balls are bigger than ever! Summary: We find a girl named Liz Murphy reading through her diary. Liz apparently has acute visions that most other people can’t seem to perceive. She dreams of a Tall Man who robs graves for their dead. She knows that her grandfather will pass away soon and that he will become a victim of the tall mortician. She also dreams of a man named Mike Pearson. Now we cut to a flashback scene showing the last part of the first movie plus five minutes. Mike is thirteen years old and has just discovered that everything he had experienced with the Tall Man had just been a delusional dream. He goes up to his room only to be attacked by the Tall Man’s midget slaves. His guardian Reggie hears a noise and goes to investigate. A robed dwarf leaps from a cupboard and attacks the older man. Reggie beats him down with the butt of a shotgun and runs upstairs to rescue Mike. After grabbing Mike he opens up all the gas valves in the house and the home explodes soon after. Burnt Jawas are found everywhere. But apparently THIS never really happens either, as we soon learn that Reggie has no knowledge of this event. Now we flash forward seven years to the Morningside Psychiatric Clinic, Mike Pearson is about to be released after having been a patient for all that time. Mike’s still a little wacky but he bullshits the doctor into believing that he is cured of his delusions. No sooner does he get out of the Looney-bin then he is found at a cemetery digging up a grave. His old pal Reggie happens upon him and inquires as to what in the name of fuck Mike is doing. Mike explains that the Tall Man is at it again and shows Reggie how all the graves at the cemetery are empty. Reggie still has no knowledge of the Tall Man or his dwarves. Reggie takes him in his car and they go to Reggie’s house. Mike has a flash vision of Reggie’s house exploding and he tries to warn him. As soon as they pull into the driveway, Mike’s vision comes to pass and Reggie’s entire family dies in the exploding house. They attend a quick memorial service the following day and Reggie now believes Mike’s story. Easily getting over the loss of his family, Reggie agrees to join Mike in his crusade to hunt down the Tall Man. They break into a hardware store and steal a shitload of supplies. They steal chainsaws, bal peen hammers, shotguns, shovels, pistols and flamethrowers. Reggie borrows a page from an old A-Team script and fashions himself a four-barrel shotgun. They take off cross-country following the Tall Man’s trail. They end up in a small ghost town completely devoid of life. (Okay, I’ll warn ya now that this segment is actually one of Mike’s visions and doesn’t really happen.) The two investigate Marius Cemetery and find an old mortuary. Mike investigates the lower levels and finds an attractive young corpse lying on an embalming table. (The only significance to this scene is that she’s naked.) They also find a terrified young blonde girl cowering in the corner with a sheet draped around her. This is Liz. I suppose we are to assume that Liz is having the same vision as Mike is at the same time. (Thus far, the two have never met, even though they know of each other through their visions. Confused yet?) Anyway, a little midget critter begins ripping out of Liz’s back and it’s sporting the face of the Tall Man. The Tall Man tells Mike to “Go east!” if he wants to find him. Reggie roasts the shit out of the little fucker including Liz. This is where Mike’s vision ends. Meanwhile in Perigord Oregon, Liz Murphy attends the funeral of her grandfather. After the funeral, the attending priest (who has the same talents as Liz and Mike) stabs the corpse with a large pin. The corpse however still rises from the dead and returns to his old home to kidnap his wife. Mike and Reggie pick up a hitchhiker named Alchemy (Yes, that’s really her name). Mike recalls seeing a corpse resembling Alchemy at the Marius Mortuary in his dream/vision. He thinks that she may spell trouble. Reggie doesn’t give a shit however since he’s exceptionally randy this evening. Apparently watching your entire family blow up into fiery chunks of flesh does nothing to sway one’s libido. Alchemy takes them into Perigord where they stay at an old bed & breakfast owned by her uncle. They set up booby traps all over the place in case the Tall Man sends any of his slaves after them. Meanwhile, Liz discovers that her grandmother has been kidnapped the Tall Man. She races down to Perigord Mortuary to see what she can find out. She finds the priest Father Meyers who warns her that they must stop the Tall Man before he can steal anybody else’s corpse. The Tall Man finds Meyers and begins to strangle him with his own rosary beads. The priest escapes and runs down the corridor. Now its time for the spheres! The Tall Man releases one of the silver spheres and it races after Meyers slicing off one of his ears. Right about this time you’re probably wondering just what the hell is going through this guy’s head right? Well, that question is quickly answered as the sphere races back to bury itself into his nugget. While the Tall Man is busy with Meyers, Liz turns the corner and finds that her grandmother has been transformed into one of the robed dwarves. She brains Grandma across the face with an urn and then leaves the mortuary. Mike and Reg then go down to the cemetery to try and find traces of the Tall Man. Mike finally meets Liz and they take her back to the Perigord Bed & Breakfast. Later that night, Reggie takes Alchemy up into the bedroom for some farm raised hanky panky. A few yee-haws and a ride-em-cowboy later, Reggie hears an explosion. The Tall Man has tripped the booby traps and succeeded in kidnapping Liz. Liz is taken back to the mortuary where an embalmer straps her down to a table that feeds into the crematorium. She escapes and manages to shove the bastard into the flames himself. Mike and Reg finally trace her back to the mortuary. Reggie replaces the morticians’ embalming fluid tanks with hydrochloric acid. Mike and Liz race down a corridor where they encounter another mortician as well as one of the flying spheres. They dodge the racing orb and it pins the mortician’s hand to the wall. Another sphere appears. This one is a gold ball with whirring circular blades. Not being a weapon of great discrimination it hunts down the easiest target. Namely the sallow faced prick that is nailed to the wall. The mortician is forced to hack his own hand off with a hatchet in order to escape. But the gold ball is pretty obstinate and eventually burrows into the guy’s stomach and up through his face. (Shweet!) Meanwhile, Reggie is in a downstairs basement where he faces off with a gravedigger wearing a gasmask. The two get into a chainsaw duel with one another and Reg ultimately comes out on top when he brings his saw blade up through the guy’s crotch. (I guess this clown’s going to have to borrow a pair of the Tall Man’s balls to replace the ones that just got chopped off!) Before heading upstairs he is cornered by four of the dwarf slaves. Firing just a single shot from his four-barrel shotgun, Reggie takes down every dwarf. (This guy is cooler than Shaft isn’t he?) Reg eventually meets up again with Liz and Mike who have discovered the secret chamber that leads into the Tall Man’s home dimension. The Tall Man attacks them and smacks Reggie across the floor. Mike grabs one of the silver spheres and sends it into the Tall Man’s forehead. A gout of yellow snot erupts from the back of the device at it slurps out all of the Tall Man’s brain matter. But our boy is a tough cookie and removes the sphere from his noggin crushing it in his hand. A strange insect pincer comes out from the head wound and tries to lunge at Mike. (I’ve heard of someone being called a dickhead, but a tickhead?) While the Tall Man concentrates his attention on Mike, Liz attacks him from behind. She plants one of the embalming tubes into his neck and feeds him the hydrochloric acid that Reg had dumped in there earlier. The Tall Man screams in agony as the acid burns through him turning him into a big bubbling pile of mucous. The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew leave the mortuary, confident that they have ended the Tall Man’s menace for good. Alchemy is waiting outside with a hearse that she hot-wired earlier in the film. As they drive away, Alchemy reveals herself to be an agent of the Tall Man and seemingly kills Reggie. Mike and Liz are pulled out the back window of the hearse by a bunch of horny Keebler elves. Did all of this really happen? Or is it all just another dreamlike phantasm? Acting/Dialogue: The acting isn’t great, but it’s a helluva lot better than what we were subjected to in the first movie. Reggie Bannister seems to really fall in love with his character in this one. He’s a bit over the top but at the same time he succeeds in coming off as a cool fucking ass-kicking dude. I like to refer to him as Bruce Campbell-Light. I swear at some points you almost expect him to say “Groovy” every time he squeezes off a shot with his four-barrel. James LeGros does a decent enough job as Mike Pearson I suppose. But at some points he comes off sounding really cheesy. Angus Scrimm does what he does best. Spook the hell out of us with his raspy voice, his eerie penetrating eyes and his menacing balls. Gore: There’s some really great stuff in here. Almost immediately we are treated to a scene with Reggie whooping the shit out of a bunch of dwarves with the butt of his rifle. We see a greasy little dwarf thing growing from the exposed spine of Liz during one of Mike’s visions. We also see a guy forced to chop his own hand off. This same fuck later has the big gold sphere pierce his body and travel all throughout his insides ripping him up. It finally gets bogged down in his jaw, its blades still whirring. And then of course, there’s the apparent death of the Tall Man. He gets a tube full of hydrochloric acid pumped into his skull and proceeds to melt into a yellow bubbling mass of flesh. Some really cool shit. Guilty Pleasures: The character of Alchemy shows off her chest a few times in this movie. She’s a nice looking woman, but there’s nothing really to rave about here. It’s quite amusing when we see her slurping on Reggie’s bald head and riding his dick like she were at a rodeo. Yaaa-Hoo! (Uhhh…just to clarify. When I say she was slurping on his bald head, I’m talking about his ACTUAL head, not his pecker.) The Good: Phantasm 2 is basically an expensive version of Phantasm 1. The dwarves are nastier, the body count is higher and the balls are bigger. This is still very much Don Coscarelli’s movie though. It has the exact same mood and tenor as the first flick and he’s even maintained the same kick-ass film score from the original. Another similarity that can be drawn here is that the movie does little to take itself seriously (Or at least I hope it doesn’t.) And as such we shouldn’t take it too seriously either. There’s a humorous scene in the very beginning that kind of sets the tone for the tongue-in-cheek humor that is to follow. When we first meet Reggie he is standing over Mike who is digging through a grave. The casket turns out to be empty however. The name on the tombstone just happens to be Grant. I guess we never WILL find out just WHO exactly is buried in Grant’s tomb now will we? Fucking Tall Man. Almost immediately afterwards we see Mike and Reg shopping through a hardware store stocking up on all manner of firearms. I swear to God, I could almost HEAR the theme song to the A-team playing in the background as Reg was soldering up his custom made four-barrel shotgun. Reg then locks-n-load and says, “Lets kick his ass.” There is so much bullshit male posturing in this flick that it will leave you rolling on the floor in stitches. This is what B-grade Horror is all about folks! The humor reaches its all time (literal) climax during the Reggie sex scene. Alchemy declares that she loves his head and kisses his hairline. (Like I guess we’re NOT suppose to get the double entendre there huh?) She begins rocking on him and waving her arms screaming like she was at a rodeo. This scene fails to be provocative but God damn it sure succeeds in being funny. From what I gather, we are led to believe that the Tall Man has the ability to alter reality and only people with certain highly perceptive abilities (Like Liz and Mike) are aware of his presence. This goes a long way towards helping to explain off the first film. Now we can understand how someone like the Tall Man can midgetize an entire community without a single person ever saying, “Well gee, that’s odd.” I like the idea that only certain people can perceive his efforts. It helps to flesh out the motive as to why he has such a boner for Mike in these past two films. Just like its predecessor, this movie offers a lot of little references to other Sci-Fi/Horror films. Whereas in the first movie, the references just came across as blatant rip offs, now they seem as if they are amusing little nods to other creators. Of course we have the little Jawa critters running around again. I’ve already talked about them in the other review. There’s a scene where the gold sphere emits a long red heat seeking laser. As we see the laser we hear the very recognizable snap-hiss sound traditionally made by Darth Vader’s lightsaber. This franchise is a Lucasfilm lawsuit waiting to happen. There’s another scene where Mike is stalking the corridors of Marius Cemetery with his flamethrower. This scene is VERY reminiscent of the Sigourney Weaver shots from the climax of Alien and Aliens. Director Don Coscarelli also pays homage to Horror luminaries Tobe Hooper and Sam Raimi. Reggie gets into a chainsaw duel with one of the Tall Man’s servants and he even manages to cleave him through the crotch. This was also done by Dennis Hopper’s character in Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2. And finally we see another mortician pouring ashes from the crematorium into a bag labeled with the name Sam Raimi. Sam Raimi is the cinematic genius that gave us Evil Dead, Evil Dead 2, Army of Darkness, The Hudsucker Proxy, Darkman, Hercules & Xena, and Spiderman. And lastly, we get the intro of the bigger and badder Golden sphere! This one has round sectional rings, which whirl about like a garden weasel. It also has a heat seeker, which it uses to hunt down its prey. The Bad: Okay, I KNOW this movie is called Phantasm and that we are meant to take things with at least a partially digested grain of salt. But this film achieves in being even more ambiguous than the first one. At least with the Nightmare on Elm Street movies, it’s very easy to discern what is a dream and what is real. But in these flicks, EVERYTHING ends with a question mark! Now I’m not a moron, but even I had a tough time trying to figure out what the hell is going on here. There are a lot of scenes that just seem to be really pointless. Take the beginning for example. Why bother showing Reggie clubbing the shit out of the little robed homunculi if it ends up doing nothing to serve the plot? And what point did Alchemy serve other than showing off her tits? Her intro involved an extremely labored scene, which appeared to achieve little more than the Tall Man telling Mike to “Go East”. Now while I realize that this movie occurs during the pre-Email dark ages of communication, I would think a suave dude like the Tall Man could have come up with a more efficient means of getting a message to Mike. I think a postcard would have sufficed. Once again, Coscarelli fails to give us any real insight into what the Tall Man is really all about. We get another clip of the alien dimension but it is really no different than what we were shown in the first film. We still don’t know who he is or how long he’s been doing this. Hell, he doesn’t even have a name! I don’t mind a little mystery in a picture, but after the first film, I would think its time to give us a little background on this guy. And speaking of a lack of background, I have to bring up the issue of the dwarves again. I have yet to figure out just what the hell he uses these little things for. He doesn’t use them for grave robbing as he employs other goons for that. So what does he DO with all these grimacing little midgets? I shudder to think of the possibilities. No wonder the little fucks are so angry looking all the time. They’re probably still sore from getting ass-hammered by this weirdo. Is it any wonder that the Tall Man employs the use of big round spheres that run through continuous cycles of penetration and ejaculation? (At about this time, you’re probably wondering how many Big Balls jokes I can squeeze into this review right?) Just like the first film, we get another ending that leaves us scratching our head. Was Alchemy ALWAYS a tool of the Tall Man, or did she only get like that after she car-jacked him? Is Reg really dead or is it just another one of Mike’s dreams? Phantasm 2 is an energetic fun-filled gorefest that will strengthen your masculine resolve and diminish your intellect all at the same time! Great Lines: “Small towns are like people. Some get old and die a natural death. Some are murdered.” --Mike describing a ghost town they pull in to. “You think that when you die you go to heaven? You come to US!” --The Tall Man to Father Meyers. “God Reg. I love your head!” --Alchemy rubbing up on Reggie’s plate. “Sorry Grandma.” --Liz after knocking her grandmother-turned-dwarf out with an urn. Overall Rating: 6 out of 10 severed heads. |
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