BOOOYYY, is this movie a step down
A silver sphere streaks through the air, sprouts blades and plunges them into the skull of an unlucky woman. With a whirring drill pops out, it digs into her head, sucking out her brains and blood and ejecting them into a big puddle on the floor until she collapses, dead.
Been there, done that, I thought to myself. Am I getting jaded?
The first two Phantasm movies were not exactly masterpieces of storytelling, but they were a lot of fun, with great special effects, and in the end they needed a good plot like a barbecued chicken needs a peanut buttery nougat. But they didn't give us anything that could be perpetuated on-screen indefinitely, without elaboration, without wearing thin. Writer/director Don Coscarelli seems stuck for ideas here, and he must've been stuck for cash too if he pushed this through to the end with as few ideas as he offers up.
You can't keep a Tall Man down, as Reggie Bannister finds out yet again in this second sequel. Again, it picks up mere moments after the conclusion of the last film, and there are no closeups on the character of Mike at the beginning here. Oh, there's a reason for it: Michael Baldwin, who played the oh so annoying Mike in part one, is back after being replaced for one film by James LeGros. He's barely here at all anyway until the film's last act. For that matter, the same goes for Angus Scrimm as The Tall Man.
There's no plot to speak of, just The Tall Man and his minions (the super-strong Jawas are kept to a minimum this time) pursuing Reggie & company, and vice versa. Nevertheless, Coscarelli manages to fit in a pair of militant black chicks and a threesome of ghost-town-robbers, not that any of these people matter in the least. Mike's all grown up and nowhere near as annoying as he was when he was a kid, so Coscarelli for some reason wrote the character of Tim (Kevin Connors), apparently under the impression that the absence of annoying kids in Phantasm II was something to be corrected. Tim is pretty much everything you'd expect your precocious movie youngster to be: smarter than all the adults around him, a crack shot with a handgun, he gets snappy one-liners, yada yada yada.
Phantasm III makes that annoying sequel mistake of cruising along without actually adding anything to the story of the series it's in. Okay, there are a couple of new kinds of spheres, but I liked the ones in part II better. You almost expect this kind of repetition when a series slogs on under different writers and directors over the years; we waggle our fingers at the producers and studios for taking a perfectly good film and turning it into a franchise. But when it's all written and directed by the same guy, where can the blame go but to him?
Still, it's diverting enough for its running length. Bannister is still having a ball (heh heh heh) in his role as this hapless guy who's STILL trying to get some tail in the middle of total chaos. It's nice to see Bill Thornbury back as Mike's big brother Jody, appropriately the big brother (not in a scary Orwellian way, or a dopey TV gameshow way, I mean in a good, big-brotherly way). Scrimm, as always, makes a great impact when he's here, the problem is, he's almost never here! (and yes, if you're wondering, the end credits again brings "the wrath of The Tall Man" into its list of possible punishments for copyright infringement)
With a few minutes left to go, Jody warns us not to believe everything we see, and that seeing is easy, understanding takes longer. C'mon, quit pulling my leg, there's nothing to understand here, and as for believing what we see, I gave up trying to believe what I see after the first fifteen minutes of part II.
BACK TO MAIN PAGE BACK TO THE P's