I am going to cheat a bit and use Phantasm III: Lord of the Dead as a vehicle to discuss the entire Phantasm franchise. The plan was to just watch this one movie. But I found myself drawn in by this singularly beautiful horror series. So I went a bit overboard and watched them all.
There are dozens of horror franchises, more than you could
ever imagine. Most horror
franchises are less about a continuous story than dumping new parties of fresh meat for the killer to devour. There is rarely an overarching plot, just every season new teenagers come to Camp Crystal Lake to fuck around and find out. The franchises are rarely one artistic vision either. It's new directors coming in, rarely with new spins on the formula. Maybe this time Jason kills a paintball club, that's as creative as it gets.
Phantasm though is unique in that it has a core cast of five men who are constant in almost
every movie. Those five are director Don Coscarelli and his four principal leads: Mike (A.
Michael Baldwin), his big brother Jodi (Mike Thornberry), their buddy Reggie (Reggie
Bannister), and of course, the villain, The Tall Man (Angus Scrimm). Over forty years, against all
the odds, with decreasing resources, these five men managed to pump out five movies, each
one feeling like more of a miracle than the last. They all managed to tell one continuous epic of a horror story. Every few years they reunited and continued Mike, Jodi, and Reggie's lifelong battle against The Tall Man and his forces of chaos.
In 1979, Don Coscarelli, with a tiny budget, managed to make a small horror movie with his buddies. He actually wrote a lot of the script just to include them. That's why Reggie Bannister got to play Reggie, the role was written for him. The movie they made was Phantasm, a unique combination of cosmic horror, a fluid dreamy narrative, and a blue-collar American cast. Phantasm is an American movie but Italian horror logic. It never makes sense, but it's terrifying terrifying and fascinating all the same.
Angus Scrimm played an instantly icon horror villain with his Tall Man. Nobody has ever said the word “BOY!!!!” with more power and menace. Any idea Coscarelli had, he threw it into this movie. So we have a movie with flying death spheres that drill into your forehead and alien planets. I love the first Phantasm. If you must see any of these movies, see that one.
Phantasm II is the one movie that broke up the core cast. A. Michael Baldwin was replaced by Studio demand and the character of Jodi is missing entirely. There is an alternate timeline where Phantasm becomes purely a product of the studio, pumping out nonsense sequel after nonsense sequel. Hellraiser went down this path, losing all creative energy and everything that made it cool and unique. (More on that in 1996's post.)
However, by our movie, Phantasm III in 1994, Coscarelli was back to independent production. He was able to bring back Baldwin and Thornberry, so the full cast was back. Just to prove that Phantasm would remain uniquely Phantasm, Phantasm III opens with the love interest character from II getting her head ripped-off. She was a studio demand, and so Coscarelli didn't want her
Phantasm III is a difficult movie to discuss since it is right
in the middle of a continuous story since Part 1. And there’s still two movies after
this. Within III, not a ton happens in the overall plot either. Mike and his brother Jodi both
are missing through most of the movie. Jodi is dead and his soul is now living
inside one of the Tall Man’s signature flying death balls. He keeps
reappearing somehow as a kind of Jedi Ghost. This leaves, of all people, Reggie as the star.
Reggie Bannister is a bald, schlubby guy. He looks like a friendlier Dean Norris with a ponytail. As the Phantasm franchise progressed, Reggie went from an everyman to the kind surreal kind of action star and sex symbol. Imagine if your high school shop teacher was Ash Williams. It’s so patently ridiculous, and the movies know it. Reggie carries around a four-barreled shotgun and kills two ghouls with one shot. His character is proof that if you're an honest good guy, you too can fight Cthulhu or cenobites.
Most of Phantasm III is about Reggie running into various beautiful women who kick his ass. He's then unfortunately creepy around them, which is just bad. However, before Reggie can ever get murdered or laid, they're attacked by supernatural monsters, and have to run away. There isn't much of a plot as much as Reggie wandering from one individual episode to another.
Along the way Reggie runs into Rocky, (Gloria Lynne Henry), who tries to fight a Sphere with nunchucks. He also meets Tim (Kevin Conners), who despite being a tiny child, introduces himself by killing three outlaws. Then this strange team wanders the American West, in search of answers that never arrive. Then the crew just kind of run into The Tall Man in a mausoleum for a final confrontation that leaves us with more questions than answers.
You might ask yourself, what is going on? Wasn’t Phantasm about cosmic
horror at one point? Why do we have nunchaku and four-barreled shotguns and Tim’s
killer frisbee? (That’s a frisbee with razor blades taped to the rim, which
actually does work in killing a bad guy.) And yeah, that kind of Evil Dead action
schlock does not fit in a dream-like story of Lovecraftian horror. But that’s what
Phantasm is. It’s a bunch of ideas that don’t fit together. The story beats miss more than they hit and it never makes sense. But there’s still
something wonderful at the heart of it. There's really nothing else it.
Phantasm never got huge budgets, and after Coscarelli broke
with Universal, he sent the franchise on a rapid decline through the sequels.
Phantasm III still looks like a proper movie, though one that had a tiny
theatrical release and mostly was sold straight-to-video. By Phantasm IV in
1998, they were working with well under a million dollars and struggling to
keep the camera rolling. A good chunk of Phantasm IV is repurposed footage from
the first movie. It's barely-finished, and you can tell. 2016’s Phantasm
V (which Coscarelli did not direct) was shot by an amateur team. Its production values are roughly that of fan films.
But even as Phantasm declines, there’s something deeply charming about how these five men somehow keep coming back. Even as the cast visibly ages and grows out of practice with acting, they're all still here, and still are buddies. There's real friendship on the screen that's heartwarming, even if most of the movies are objectively not great. These five men beat the odds and kept a franchise going for nearly forty years. Even at Phantasm’s worst, that kept it wacky and special. Phantasm is the ultimate underdog horror franchise.
Next time: we travel to 1995, the year of the OJ Simpson Trial, Oasis, and our next movie, Lord of Illusions.
No comments:
Post a Comment