Roughly 85 trick-or-treaters this year. We had friends over
to help hand out goodies for the first time and watched THEM! and our traditional House
of Wax as the little ghouls and goblins came and went. Tough finding a
movie to watch as the final this year, as I try and make sure it's something
both my wife and I can watch. This year I just went with a movie I wanted to
see, which was a bit of a mistake as it's more of a cult classic than a
mainstream film and Moe ended up not liking it much.
"You play a good game boy, but the game is
finished."
Two deaths in my extended family when I was young affected
me greatly in different ways. My grandfather's death seemed random and
pointless and made me question the world and God and family and pretty much
everything. My cousin's murder reinforced those things and I often daydreamed
about having the ability go back in time and change things or finding the
people responsible and making them pay for what they did. They both made me
intimately familiar with the ins and outs of grief.
I think Phantasm
is a movie about grief.
I mean, don't get me wrong, it's also a movie about a Tall
Man stalking people through marble corridors, murderous dwarfs and killer flying
metal balls. I'm just saying on another level it's about a kid trying to come
to grips with the deaths of his entire family. I think that might be one of the
reasons I liked the movie so much when I first saw it. At some point over the
intervening years Phantasm II became
my favorite, but I still have a soft spot for the first one - as surreal and
random as it is.
 |
| And it's pretty surreal and random. |
The Medium
J.J. Abrams' Bad Robot Productions got involved in a
restoration of Phantasm sometime in
2015 and completed it earlier this year. Phantasm:
Remastered got a limited theatrical release and will be out on blu-ray
later this year. It's now available
streaming and I rented it from Amazon. Odds are I'll pick up the blu-ray at
some point. (I still need to re-watch the entire series before watching the
newest film, Phantasm: Ravager, which
was also released recently.)
This is a movie I've only ever seen on VHS, so it was
amazing to see it all cleaned up and in high def. It's still a low budget 70's
exploitation film, but it's well worth the upgrade.
The Movie
Phantasm is hard to describe without giving much away. No,
that's not fair - it's just hard to describe. Let's try this - after a strange
death (involving the second most ludicrous use of boobs in a horror movie), a
young man named Mike, his brother Jody and their friend Reggie become embroiled
in a game of cat and mouse with the local mortician, a strange individual
dubbed "The Tall Man."
 |
| "He's right behind me, isn't he?" |
There, that seem straightforward enough, right? Makes
absolutely no mention of super strength, strange dwarfs, guitar jams, psychics,
grave robbing, animated fingers that turn into insects, other planets or
abandoned mine shafts. All of those things and more will make an appearance over
the course of the film, which is weird and disconnected and dreamlike from the
get-go.
Mike is suffering from fears of abandonment after the death
of his parents. After spying on his brother during the funeral - where he
witnesses the Tall Man lift a coffin all by himself - he visits a psychic because he's afraid his
brother is going to take off on him. The psychic responds by going all 'Bene
Gesserit' on him. She makes him put his hand in a black box, his hand starts to
hurt, he tries to pull it out all while the psychic's daughter says in flat
monotone "don't fear, Michael, don't fear." To his credit, at no time
does Mike say "this damn box is eating my hand and if you say 'don't fear'
one more time I'm hitting you with it!" The point - other than to get cred
with Dune fans - is that fear is
Mike's problem, and that only in overcoming his fear can he triumph.
 |
| "They tried and failed?" "No. They tried and died." "You're just going to rip the entire scene from Dune, aren't you?" |
Mike investigates the funeral home and is discovered and
chased by the Tall Man, a flying silver sphere that uses blades to lodge into
your face before drilling into your skull, and dwarfs that look so much like
jawas that I expected them to yell 'utini!' every time they appeared. He
manages to escape with a severed finger - the result of the Tall Man getting
his hand caught in a door (and with a little help from Mike's knife). Mike uses
the finger - still sitting in a goopy bed of the yellow fluid that passes for
the Tall Man's blood, to convince Jody that something weird is definitely going
on.
 |
| Yeah, that's not disturbing at all. |
Oh, also, the finger turns into a crazy, sharp-toothed
insect that is then ground up in a garbage disposal. So there's that.
So weird and surreal - or cheap and half-assed, depending on
your point of view. I actually like how random and disconnected things are, but
they could be read as the filmmakers not having a clue as to what they're doing.
If you haven't bought in by the time the bug shows up, then you're probably better
off not finishing the film because it just gets weirder. Which is something I
actually said to my wife as we were watching it - "this just gets weirder."
She didn't believe me.
 |
| To be fair, we'd seen this already. |
Mike, Jody and Reggie enter the mausoleum to... actually,
I'm not sure why. To confront the Tall Man? Find evidence of his crimes (the
dwarfs are actually dead townsfolk - including their friend from the opening
scene - that have been crushed to a smaller size)? I'm not sure, and it's
probably not important. There are more dwarfs, the Tall Man, the sphere and
finally a room full of black, plastic barrels that contain a bunch of the
dwarfs. And two silver pillars in the middle of the floor. Mike falls partly
between the pillars and finds himself halfway into another world, with the
dwarfs being used as slaves under a red sun.
 |
| Not Krypton, I'm fairly sure. |
At this point my wife turned to me and said, "okay, you
were right, it got weirder."
The two brothers escape, but Reggie is stabbed by the Tall
Man in his guise as a beautiful woman. Jody and Mike hatch a plan to trap the
Tall Man in an abandoned mine and Jody heads off to set the trap, leaving Mike
to wait for the all clear. Unfortunately for Mike, the Tall Man knows where he
lives and attacks - causing Mike to have to escape and head to the mine on
foot.
 |
| I think Reggie was killed for pretending to be Magneto in that X-Men movie. |
As Mike flees the Tall Man the very ground beneath his feet
seems determined to hinder him, turning to mud and sucking at his feet. He
chants "don't fear, don't fear" and this somehow allows him to escape
the mud and keep running toward the mine. The Tall Man follows, rocks fall,
everyone dies. Wait - no, just the Tall Man dies. Jody appears at the top of the
hill, his hands raised in triumph - they've finally defeated the evil...
 |
| Everything's okay now... |
So that should be the ending, but isn't. What follows should
feel like a cheat, but somehow doesn't. In fact, it makes what went before a
bit easier to understand - and for me, touches on that element of grief, of
being unable to let go of the people we've lost. And then the movie pulls the
rug out from under you with one more twist.
The Bottom Line
Phantasm is a
weird film, and it's just not going to be for everyone. My wife spent a fair
portion of the film asking "what the hell is going on?" By the end of
the film I think she'd pretty much given up on it. It's surreal and low-budget
and extremely 70's, but those are all part of the charm for me.
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