Phantasm: Ravager (2016) Review

Phantasm: Ravager (2016) Review

 

Rumours of a fifth Phantasm movie swirled around for years, and it was made in secret in 2012/2013, but took a while to find distribution, eventually coming out in 2016 and dropping the five—well, masking it at least, sticking the roman numeral in the title (RaVager), like the fourth movie (OblIVion). This was after the Tall Man actor Angus Scrimm passed away in January of that year. However, Scrimm finished all of his scenes in the years prior, and all of the other original actors returned to the roles they first played 37 years earlier. It begins, fittingly enough, with Reggie wandering the desert and narrating, plus a recap of the previous four movies that doesn’t overdo it, which I appreciated. If we’re this far into the series, we get the gist by now.  

Reggie reclaiming his stolen Barracuda is a pretty awesome way to start things off, but then two cgi chrome balls fly down the road after him and things get less awesome. Unfortunately, Phantasm V is not the same kind of campy, spooky fun the series used to be, and the new director, David Hartman, has a different style that isn’t quite the same as Don Coscarelli’s (who still produced and co-wrote), which is more of a downgrade than an upgrade. An elderly Reggie wakes up in a wheelchair being pushed by Mike, and whether any of the past four movies really happened or not is brought into question, because Reggie has been diagnosed with dementia. But, as we find out, Reggie might be existing in two places at the same time.

The Reggie who just got the Barracuda back (the one we last saw at the end of Oblivion) picks up yet another mysterious female hitchhiker. Hasn't he learned by now? Unfortunately it feels cliché and repetitive at this point, even though she doesn’t turn out to be evil, and it's a little bit charming seeing him sitting in front of an open fire playing his guitar for the first time since the original. The Tall Man has looked old since the first movie, but now he looks ancient, and Reggie wakes up next to him in a hospital bed, which is super confusing since he refers to himself as Jebediah, but Angus Scrimm is as great as ever and still unsettling in every scene he’s in. The original actors are the best aspect(s) of the movie, but the movie they’re in is largely lackluster.

There’s a part where a chrome ball kills a horse and it looks terribly fake, but not in the same way some of the stuff in the original and other sequels looks fake. It’s badly shot and the cgi is of poor quality, so it just feels synthetic, but then when the ball kills a farm hand right after, it's all practical with fake blood and no computer effects, and it looks much better. Cutting back to Mike and old Reggie talking about potential scientific explanations for what Reggie believes happened to them doesn’t have the narrative thrust the movie needed or create any nostalgic charm by having them together again, it's just boring. Still, there are some fun new concepts in Ravager. Reggie encounters a mega-sized chrome ball, and later we glimpse a whole armada of them.  

Reggie faces the Tall Man in a white void and they have an intense conversation. Scenes like these make it feel more worth watching than the cheap gore, and even when they meet up again in a cartoony computer-generated hellscape it's still great. After this, Reggie meets up with two strangers and Mike in a weird post-apocalyptic world, and it should be cooler than it is. The exterior of this world looks like a video game cut scene. It just takes me out of the experience instead of excites me. After a while there’s too much mixing of dreams and reality and illusions for any of it to feel concrete or meaningful, and starts to feel frustrating in a way the previous sequels avoided. Mike rattles off the history of the Tall Man’s invasion of earth and the subsequent apocalypse, but that would've been the far better (and, admittedly, harder to make) sequel/conclusion to the series instead of this.  

Phantasm: Ravager is not exactly the long-awaited sequel most fans were waiting for. The picture and sound quality are low budget, but more cheap than charming. Everything is overly bright and saturated. It doesn’t look or feel like the Phantasm’s of old, lacking the gritty grainy low budget look of the original AND lacking the more polished but sure handed look and feel of the other sequels. For all the negatives I’ve pointed out, there are positives to be sure, even beyond the original cast reprising their roles. The music is epic, and they got as ambitious with the visuals as they could, but it looks like a fan film rather than a real movie much of the time. At the end, it's pretty satisfying when Mike, Reggie, Jody, and the Barracuda all reunite, making it feel like the bumpy journey wasn’t all for nothing.

I thought the fifth Phantasm was pretty disappointing the first time I saw it, and figured I’d sum up the review by saying it’s only worth a onetime watch for the biggest fans, but actually, I think there’s a little more to it than that. I respect the effort put into making the best sequel they could in a similar way to what they did with the fourth movie, and even though the bad effects and bad directing bring it down in many ways, it still has a bit of the heart of the original and previous sequels, and is a good enough ending for the series. They can’t do another one without Angus Scrimm, he could never be replaced—in fact, none of these guys could be, and that's part of what makes this horror movie saga unique.

For the next franchise in Sequel-a-Thon, I’m taking a little break from the weird and the macabre, so get ready for some laughs as we take a look back at a series of spoof films I’ve enjoyed since I was a kid and have wanted to review for a while now. I reviewed the series it was primarily inspired by back in my first Sequel-a-Thon—you might have an idea of what’s up next!