Phantasm (1979) RE-Review

Phantasm (1979) RE-Review

 

When I reviewed all the Alien films back in my first Sequel-a-Thon, I re-reviewed Alien: Covenant because I had a lot more to say about it since my initial take. So, here is another re-review, this time for a movie I reviewed five years ago. My original Phantasm review was pretty brief, and I left out many of the details that make it so great, so since this is a Sequel-a-Thon, I’m going to take a second look at the first film in the Phantasm series before continuing on to the sequels and spoiling the hell out of them all, so if you want a more concise and mainly spoiler-free explanation, check out my original review. 

Older shorter review:

https://cccmovies.blogspot.com/2017/10/phantasm-1979-review.html

The title fades in with red capital letters on black and eerie music playing right away—no other opening titles, no pussyfooting around, just PHANTASM. Don Coscarelli, who wrote the script, produced, photographed, directed, and edited the film, made it for dirt cheap, estimating the budget to be only around 300,000 bucks. It was a big oversight for me not to include it in my Top 10 Low Budget Horror Movies list (CCC Issue #67). Coscarelli’s original cut of Phantasm was much longer, so maybe that’s why he wasted no time in throwing the title card up on the screen and cutting right to the first scene. It fades in to a spooky cemetery at night where a girl is having sex with a guy at the foot of a grave. This dude is Tommy, but this chick isn’t a chick at all, she stabs him with a dagger and turns into an old man! The transition is simple but works.

Tommy’s brother Jody believes Tommy killed himself, but we know that's not true, so there’s already tension. Their younger brother, Michael, isn’t invited to the funeral, but he still comes to the cemetery, riding his motorbike amid the gravestones. He wasn’t invited because he had a hard time at his parent’s funeral—this kid has had a rough childhood: his parents are dead and now his brother is dead, too, and his other brother Jody wants to leave town. This familial connection between the characters gives them a bit more weight than average horror movie fodder. Mike catches glimpses of something running behind gravestones. Right away, we know there’s definitely weird stuff going on at this place. The music works really well to create a scary atmosphere. The main theme (also used in all the sequels) is especially chilling, and reminiscent of the tubular bells from The Exorcist.

The proprietor of Morningside Cemetery, a tall old guy, has a familiar face. He looks the same as the guy that the chick who killed Tommy turned into. This is our intro to “The Tall Man” who is an underrated horror villain, and I think he is one of the main reason this series of movies is worth watching. The Tall Man lifts a full coffin into his hearse by himself, which strikes Michael as particularly odd. Tall Man spots him and seemingly throws him off his motorbike with telekinesis. Then we jump to Mike visiting a fortune teller and being asked to put his hand in a box. Something in the box grabs his hand and he’s told not to fear it. This is straight out of Frank Herbert's Dune, with basically the same message, too, that he must overcome fear. It’s more than a homage, it straight up copies the concept, except it feels weirdly random in Phantasm compared to how it’s used in Dune.

What’s more random than Mike’s hand in an evil box is cutting from that to the family pal Reggie driving over to Jody’s in his ice cream truck (it’s his day job) and jamming on his guitar with him on the front porch. However, this scene sets up Reggie’s tuning fork as something that will come back later. That night, Jody goes to a bar called “Dunes Cantina.” Hey! Dune? Don Coscarelli must be a big Herbert fan. Mike spies on Jody as he takes a woman home from the bar—oh, wait, no, he doesn’t take her home, he takes her to the cemetery! What is this, a weird kink that runs in the family? It’s a bit of a cheap ploy to wring tension from a familiar situation, but hey, it works despite being kind of dumb, because it’s a bit funny, too, with Michael watching and saying “wow!” when she exposes her breasts (right as Jody says the same thing, too). This is the same woman that seduced his brother Tommy, too. The sounds of a creature draws Michael into the woods, and he is chased by a creepy dwarf in a brown hooded cloak. It’s a scary-funny-combo as he runs past Jody and Jody has to run after him, leaving the girl behind, and of course he doesn’t believe Michael once he catches up to him and the dwarf is nowhere to be seen. Jody returns to the cemetery and the girl has disappeared, or was it the mysterious Tall Man in disguise again?

Michael has a terrifying nightmare of his bed being in the cemetery and The Tall Man looming over him as two zombies come out of the ground and try to rip him apart. Later, when Michael is working on his brother’s Barracuda in the shop, the dwarf comes back to mess with him and he almost gets squished under the car. Jody shows up and Michael hits him on the foot as a mistake. His line that follows is funny, but Michael starts to come off as whiny and annoying. At least Mike takes action after this. He gets a weapon and goes out investigating at night to prove to his brother he’s not making anything up. He breaks into Morningside in the dead of night, snooping around until someone walks in and he has to hide in a coffin. Michael follows The Tall Man and another dude and finds himself in the creepy marble hallways of the mausoleum we saw earlier. Roaming the hall is a flying chrome ball with a spike that comes out. It hits the man in the head as he is about to catch Michael and drills into his skull, causing a fountain of blood to spray everywhere. It’s shocking and absurd and awesome.

Michael narrowly escapes from The Tall Man, closing his wrinkly hand in a door then cutting his fingers off, but instead of blood he bleeds yellow liquid that looks like mustard! This Tall Man is no man at all! Mike puts one of the severed fingers in a box because they're still moving and waits on the stairs with a shotgun all night, but in the morning do you think Jody believes him? Uh, yeah, you bet he does! That finger is still twitching and bleeding yellow! It’s a pretty funny moment. Mike opens the box again because it stops moving and the finger has turned into a freaky little bug with red eyes! They catch it in a jacket and stuff it into the garburator just before Reggie comes over, but it flies out of the sink right at them, so now Reggie knows something weird is going on, too.

Jody sneaks into Morningside the next night to investigate this time, and when he’s attacked by a dwarf he shoots it, but it seems to be like a zombie, then The Tall Man drives after Jody in the hearse and nearly runs him over. Michael shows up in the Barracuda and there’s a car chase. It turns out The Tall Man isn’t driving the hearse—no one is! Jody shoots at it until it crashes and then they check it out, discovering a dwarf was driving, and it got impaled on a branch in the crash. Here’s a big twist: the dwarf is Tommy! Jody says “We buried him on Monday now look what they've done to him!” Tommy weighs the same, looks dead, but is less than half the height, so this opens up a whole slew of questions, but Mike, Jody, and Reggie seem pretty chill about this revelation, and the main question they want answered is why The Tall Man is crushing people down to such a small size.

In their pursuit for answers, the dwarves run Reggie and his ice cream truck off the road. Michael finds the truck and gets attacked by them too, then goes back home to Jody, who locks him in his room to keep him safe. Jody goes to Morningside to kill The Tall Man while Michael breaks out of his room, but The Tall Man is at their front door! He kidnaps Mike and suddenly things are pretty tense as we go into the final act, with that theme music kicking in big time. Michael shoots his way out of the hearse and it crashes into a telephone pole in a spectacular fiery explosion. Jody saves Michael from the chrome ball in the mausoleum by shooting it with the shotgun, and we discover Reggie didn’t get killed, he’s back to help them finally solve this mystery.

They look behind the door the ball was protecting and find black canisters with dwarves in them and two metal poles in a white void which is a gateway to another world with a red sky and dwarves enslaved in an empty desert.

Damn.

It’s a crazy twist, and this part of the film has great sound design and clever directing to make these ideas easier to buy into despite the small budget. Expository dialogue from the brothers seemed to be the only way to explain it to the audience: heat and pressure in this other world compress the zombies into dwarves. The concept is super random, but kind of great.

The two metal poles is where the tuning fork analogy comes in: Reggie touches them both at the same time to stop the frequency and triggers the portal to suck everything into it. Reggie escapes, but then he gets stabbed by The Tall Man, who is in his sexy woman form. It’s not at all satisfying or scary after Reggie's first fake out death. Michael and Jody escape in the Barracuda as the mausoleum disappears, then Michael lures The Tall Man from the house into an old mine shaft. It’s a trippy pursuit, and the creepiness of Tall Man has been built up to this point that he is now genuinely frightening as he calls him “BOOOOYYY!” and pursues. The moment Tall Man falls into the mine and Jody rolls rocks down the hill to block the shaft is unintentionally funny because of how evidently low-budget it looks, but like the similarly-low-budget-independently-funded The Evil Dead released two years later, these janky effects are part of the entertainment value.

Michael talking to Reggie at the end about how Jody died in a car wreck makes it seem like maybe Mike imagined the whole thing (or at least the climax) but one last scare at the end makes it seem like maybe it was all real, after all. What was real and what was not is brought into question by this ending, though, and the ambiguous conclusion is confusing at first, but makes more sense upon repeat viewings and watching the sequels. Many fans have come up with multiple interpretations of the film’s messages and meanings, which says to me there is more going on than just what’s on the surface.

Phantasm is a very unique combination of horror, science fantasy, and comedy, and I think it’s the kind of movie that tends to elicit a dramatic response. Those who like it really like it, and those who don’t like it really hate it. I don’t love everything about it (there’s some overdubbed dialogue that sounds really unnatural, for instance), but I find the low budget look rather charming and the concepts bizarrely intriguing. Even though the acting isn’t that good, that too is part of the charm. Jody is my favourite character in this one; he’s just a cool dude, his line delivery is pretty good, and he has the best dialogue. I won’t go quite as in-depth with reviewing the sequels, but if you’re going to watch (or re-watch) at least one Phantasm movie, it has to be the original. It’s a must-see for fans of low budget horror from this era.