Phantasm (1979)

Brilliant and touching

It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

This is a must-see and one of the best documentaries - and films - of this year.

Excellent characters with emotional depth. My wife, daughter and granddaughter all enjoyed it...and me, too! Very good movie! You won't be disappointed.

Mike (A. Michael Baldwin) and his older brother Jody (Bill Thornbury) are mourning the death of their parents in a small Oregon town. Together with their friend Reggie (Reggie Bannister), an ice cream man, they must do battle with a nefarious undertaker known only as The Tall Man (Angus Scrimm) and his various minions...not to mention a neat flying sphere that can puncture skulls.Writer / director / cinematographer / editor Don Coscarelli truly hit paydirt with this enduring fan favorite, a horror / fantasy classic that spawned a franchise spanning over three and a half decades. A great film it is not, but it sure is a fun and entertaining one. Admittedly, the acting is mostly amateurish and our heroes less interesting than our villain. But Coscarelli clearly enjoys himself playing with as much "it's all supposed to take on the tones of a nightmare" shtick as he can. He never does worry about any of this making sense.Baldwin, Thornbury, and Bannister are at least likable as our heroes, especially Bannister, whose character turned into more of a badass as the series went on. Kathy Lester is alluring as a mysterious "lady in lavender". But "Phantasm" ultimately belongs to the imposing Scrimm, whose appearance is very memorable. "BOOOYYY!!!"The film also benefits from a music score by Fred Myrow and Malcolm Seagrave that is pretty catchy, in particular its haunting, somewhat "Halloween"-esque main theme.The main set piece involves the sphere mutilating a caretakers' face; Coscarelli fought the MPAA to keep this sequence in the film and actually succeeded.Worth watching, at least once, by devotees of the horror genre.Seven out of 10.

This eerie supernatural horror has lots of weird moments which help to make it a cult classic film. Numerous sequels have followed, each composed of the key cast in this, the original. This film is very strange and surreal. Some parts of it are frightening too, such as the dwarf attacks. It blends a lot of different aspects of different genres - horror, thriller, mystery, action, comedy - and it works, although the film just may be too confusing for some. It's a very low budget type of film with cult written all over it.This is my main complaint with the film. With all the plot twists and strange dream-like scenes, it's difficult to keep track of just what is going on exactly. In fact it gave me a headache, and the loud noise didn't help much in that respect. The acting in the film is all excellent; even the young boy isn't too annoying. Angus Scrimm gives a tour-de-force performance as the Tall Man, totally creepy and mysterious. The special effects, although somewhat dated, are still entertaining and the dwarfs look strangely like the Jawas from STAR WARS. PHANTASM is a good film but not one to watch with your brain switched off, you've got to be on the ball in this case. It's just so odd and out there that it's pretty unique too (well, at least it was until the sequels followed).

PHANTASM is an uneven work, too fantastic to be genuinely scary but ferociously unique and fascinating on numerous levels. I think there was a desire to create a warped and entirely original Universe where nothing is as it seems and anything can and probably will happen. Logic is quickly cast aside and indeed has no place in the crooked landscape that PHANTASM paints. Into this bizarre, Dali-like twisted and surreal cosmos, are thrust a group of characters who - perhaps even by virtue of their acting inadequacies - seem somehow as much a part of the fabric of that Universe - even in their struggles to survive and make sense of it. For me, PHANTASM has a hypnotic effect for all those reasons. Flying sphere drills, a gender bending alien cemetery keeper, hooded shrunken corpses refined for slave labour in some parallel Universe, a severed finger that morphs into a grotesque (if admittedly comical) fly and countless other wild fantasies are all episodic nightmares that work their way into my head and stay there - however well or not they may be executed. They are indeed, the essence of all the darkest, unfathomable episodes that invade our deepest sleep. Also, the film's tendency to bounce us in and out of reality - if indeed there is a reality present at all - without warning, keeps us permanently on unstable ground. Dreams are very prominent and indeed prevalent in PHANTASM. So much so, that by the end there seems no dividing line between that which was real and which was not. In this sense, the film explored the territory that NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET would later make it's own but somehow achieves a dream-like quality that even Craven's classic would not surpass. Only Dario Argento's similarly bizarre INFERNO comes to mind as a rival to PHANTASM for the closest we might get to a dream realised on film.PHANTASM is a unique, mind bending vision of quaint, small town America, infused with hellish fantasies of death, loss and isolation, unleashed from the subconscious mind - perhaps even in the end, from that of it's young, insecure and lonely adolescent protagonist. Poe said "Is all that we see or seem, but a dream within a dream?" PHANTASM presents a case. I urge those who are not impressed, to watch it again with these notions in mind.

As far as horror films go, Phantasm is a film with much on its mind. It is at once an elegiac meditation on life and death, a poignant story of a boy on the verge of manhood, while also serving as a macabre funhouse ride, bouncing recklessly between reality and the dreamworld, offering a robust mythology encompassing alternate dimensions, zombie dwarfs, and, most iconically, flying silver spheres that drill into the brains of their victims.The story is set in small town America circa the late 1970s, and focuses on two young men, 13-year-old Michael and his older brother Jody, in the wake of the tragic death of their parents. Jody has taken a break from his exciting life as a musician on the road to take care of his little brother, who idolizes Jody to the point of following him around town, in the fear that he will one day abandon him as their parents did. Michael's constant surveillance of his brother leads him to Morningside Cemetery, where Jody attends a friend's funeral, after which, Michael witnesses Morningside's enigmatic undertaker, known only as the Tall Man, scoop up the 200-pound casket in his arms, toss it back into the hearse, and drive off, leaving an empty grave. From there, the film's focus turns to Michael's investigation of Morningside, eventually uncovering the Tall Man's fiendish plot to wipe out the entire town in order to resurrect their corpses as demonic dwarfs and use them as servants in his ever-growing army of the undead.The loss of liberty, characterized by enslavement and brainwashing, is the central issue in the film. Those unlucky enough to be buried in a Morningside Cemetery plot are dug up by the Tall Man, shrunk down to dwarfs, and resurrected, only to serve for all eternity as the mindless minions under his control, tasked with furthering his reign of terror and harvesting more cadavers for his army of ghouls. It is no coincidence that the Morningside Funeral Home greatly resembles a Southern plantation (the shooting location was the historic Dunsmuir estate in Oakland), just as the Tall Man is dressed impeccably as a Southern gentleman of considerable means, for the character is playing the role of slavemaster, and his dwarfs, gravediggers, and murderous spheres are his slaves.