Phantasm II (1988) Review

Phantasm II (1988) Review

 

Apparently original Phantasm creator Don Coscarelli had a hard time thinking up a story for a sequel, which surprises me, since there were so many great ideas in the first one that it seemed like he could barely contain his imagination to a single ninety minute film. But, after nine years, he came up with something, and Phantasm II was born.

It doesn’t start the way you might expect. Some girl we don’t know yet talks about Mike and the ending of the first movie, then we follow up with where we left off: Mike getting captured by the Tall Man. Reggie grabs a shotgun and tries to save him, but then a bunch of zombie dwarves attack and we see their grotesque undead faces. We didn’t really get a good look at them under those cloaks before; right away the bigger budget is evident. This one ended up having the highest budget of any Phantasm film—and yet it was the lowest-budgeted production for Universal Studios the year it was released. It lacks that grainy, gritty, shoestring independent look and feel the first one has, but still exists in that same world Coscarelli created, in much the same way Sam Raimi’s third Evil Dead film, Army of Darkness, still felt true to the comparatively small original The Evil Dead (Army of Darkness was also a Universal-released sequel).

Reggie is more of a main character this time, and he is instantly more badass than before. To reference Evil Dead again, I think Ash Williams is to that film series what Reggie is to the Phantasm series. After escaping the zombie dwarves Reggie turns the gas on for the stove and blows up the entire house! What a way to start with a (literal) bang, and Tall Man doesn’t even care, he’s too cool to look at explosions. It turns out the girl from the intro is also having visions of the Tall Man, and we skip ahead a number of years to see Michael in the Morningside Psychiatric ward. The actor was recast at the behest of Universal, which was too bad, because Reggie Bannister returned as Reggie and Angus Scrimm returned as Tall Man, so it’s the one piece of the puzzle that doesn’t really fit, so to speak.

Mike is released from the hospital and goes directly to the graveyard to dig up graves and reveal the empty coffins buried below. Reggie comes and tells him what happened wasn’t real, so once again reality and imagination are heavily blurred, but then things become a bit clearer. On the way home the house blows up again! Only this time for real. The explosion kills Reggie's family who was staying there, so now Reggie is on board with going after the Tall Man and bringing him down. These earlier scenes are punctuated by narration, which is a little peculiar and probably wasn’t necessary, but it’s understandable why it was included. The studio likely wanted things easily explained for the audience.

They break into a store and steal a bunch of guns and ammo and a chainsaw, and both of them make custom weapons: two double barrel shotguns combined for Reggie and a flamethrower for Mike. It seems places the Tall Man visits turn into post-apocalyptic wastelands, so they easily follow his trail in the Barracuda. Mike has been having visions of Liz, the girl from the beginning. The Tall Man sets a trap for them with a creature that looks like her, but Mike sees through the disguise and they escape. It’s a creepy scene, but it ends pretty abruptly and transitions hard to Reggie and Mike resuming their journey, and then we go to Liz at her grandfather's funeral and it gets a bit slow, but there are some good moments with a corpse with sewn up lips coming back for some spooks.

Phantasm II is definitely slower and less crazy in the first half compared to the first one, but there’s more action this time, and I do think Reggie and a more grownup Mike make for a solid duo. When we go away from Liz and back to Reggie and Mike it gets more interesting, because Reggie picks up a hitchhiker that he thinks is hot, but she's in Mike's visions, so can she be trusted? Liz sort of goes through a similar thing to what Mike went through in the first one with losing family members and discovering the evil of the Tall Man, which feels a little repetitive at times. At one point she’s attacked by a zombie dwarf that she realizes is her dead grandma! She doesn’t seem that bothered by it. It’s kind of funny but also kind of dumb.

The scenes with the Tall Man are all highlights. Whenever Angus Scrimm is on screen it's great, but he isn’t overused. There are a couple great moments with him, one when he chokes a priest with his own rosary, and another when he crumples one of the chrome balls in his hand like it's an empty aluminum can. That’s right: the poster doesn’t just say “The Ball is Back!” and not follow through on the promise. It doesn’t appear until over halfway through, but the flying ball makes multiple bloody kills and mutilations, and they give it new features like laser scanning and the ability to open the portal to the other dimension. There’s also a new golden ball, which is pretty rad.

Phantasm II is more straight-forward than the first Phantasm, for better and for worse. I'd put it about on par with most direct sequels in other horror series’ from around the same time, like Friday the 13^th, Halloween, and Nightmare on Elm Street. There’s fun to be had, and some scary moments, but it’s just not as compelling from beginning to end as the original. There are more guns, more explosions, more flying killer balls, and more zombie dwarves, but more doesn’t equal better. The ending is pretty thrilling and makes up for the slower first half, and a cliff hanger ending ensured another sequel, though it wouldn’t come out for a further six years.