Phantasm is a movie that defies genre titles in many ways. It has the tropes and appearance of a horror movie, but the plot wouldn’t seem out of place in a sci-fi film. It’s the first movie in a film series that has been closely guided by writer/director Dan Coscarelli, the same director behind both The Beastmaster and Bubba Ho-Tep.
So, really, I knew it was gonna be weird even before that flying murder ball came along.
After a young man is murdered during sex in a cemetery by a blonde woman who may be a tall man, we cut to the funeral. No one saw the poor fellow dying, and he had a few friends and family there to see him off, to to speak. But while one mourner, Jody (Bill Thornbury) finds the Tall Man (Angus Scrimm) a bit disturbing, his kid brother Mike (A. Michael Baldwin), tooling around the cemetery afterwards on a motorbike sees something even weirder: after all the mourners have left, the Tall Man single-handedly lifts the 500 pound coffin and puts it back in the hearse. Oh, and said Tall Man seems to be aware Mike was watching. What follows is a very strange movie with some shocks and oddities.
In other words, it’s the sort of thing I really dig. It’s weird, it’s odd, and it’s rather fun. This is a movie where the badass friend Jody calls in to help is a balding guy who drives an ice cream truck. There’s a flying silver sphere that pierces people’s skulls and sends out a stream of blood to kill its victims, but it can be taken out with a well-aimed shotgun. The Tall Man’s plan involves aliens, stolen corpses, and slaves, and he bleeds yellow fluid. It’s a movie with few explanations for how anything works the way it does, but just a head trip where our heroes need to stop the Tall Man from taking the recently deceased, and while he may or may not be willing to murder a few folks here and there, he really doesn’t seem to need to.
There have been, to date, four Phantasm movies, all filmed in different decades, with Coscarelli directing three and co-writing the fourth. Most of his original cast likewise has returned, and the whole thing does come across as a labor of love. It’s a fairly unique vision for what a horror movie could be, with a mysterious Tall Man–an inspiration for the Internet-meme monster Slenderman–monstrously strong and with a few other vaguely defined powers, doing his evil with little to stand in his way aside from a pair of brothers and their buddy the ice cream man. I may have to check out the other films in this series. I doubt Phantasm itself had much of a budget, but it still came across as a well-crafted movie that was really just weird and fun. I wish more low budget horror movies were weird and fun.
Grade: B+
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