Phantasm is pure guilty
pleasure. It’s the kind of movie that you enjoy, but you find
yourself desperately trying to justify your enjoyment. The film was
shot on a low budget with an outline instead of a script. Director
Don Coscarelli mostly used his friends and acquaintances from
previous films who he grabbed whenever they were available, since
most of them had other projects they were involved with or other
jobs.
This style of shooting creates a movie
in which characters frequently spell out important plot points and
events often seem to simply happen. While it’s normal for horror
movies to open with an expendable character’s murder, in this film,
the character is established in the next scene as a friend of the
protagonist’s, and the film attempts to continue milking the death
of this person we never knew for drama.
So then, what makes the movie good?
I’d say it’s one of the few films to ever properly capture the
logic of a dream. The Tall Man (Angus Scrimm), a mysterious local
undertaker, is an alien from another universe. He takes the bodies
of the recently deceased (far more than a single funeral home should
ever have access to), reanimates them, shrinks them down and sends
them back to his home universe as slaves. It’s necessary to shrink
them down because of the higher gravity of his home universe. Also,
he uses flying spheres with blades to attack people, because his
attack midgets aren’t sufficient. This is exactly the kind of
bizarro stuff that I experience when I have bad dreams.
This sort of reality allows Phantasm
to get away with giving the Tall Man the ability to do pretty much
whatever is most convenient at a given moment. He can teleport when
he’s off screen. He has super strength, except when he doesn’t.
A door will magically open for him, but he has to punch his way
through a window. Even beyond him, events within the movie can be
undone, as characters die and come back to life because the story
wasn’t done with them yet.
I’m not sure how to interpret the
ending. This movie may have been the origin of the old “all a
dream...or was it?” cliché. Only, there isn’t a question mark
here. The main character, Mike (Michael Baldwin), wakes up to find
that his brother (Bill Thornbury) died by means other than those
depicted in the film, and he’s now the ward of his brother’s
friend Reggie (Reggie Bannister), who’d also died. The final shot
with the Tall Man returning and attacking through a mirror
establishes that the events weren’t merely a dream. So then, what
happened? Did he wipe their memories? If so, why bring back Reggie?
I understand that many consider
Phantasm 2 an improvement over the first. But I have yet to
see it, and I’m interested in how they even address the events of
the first film. That said, I’m not sure I want my confusion at the
ending of the first film to be resolved. It’s that atmosphere of
the truly bizarre that makes the film enjoyable, not any story
elements that could be carried over to the next movie. (You’ll
notice how long it took me in this review to even mention any
character’s other than The Tall Man himself).
I definitely recommend checking this
movie out. It’s weird fun.
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