Random Movie: Phantasm (1979)

Written by: PBF

Phantasm is bad ass and piss poor at the same time. But it is a good kind of piss poor.

Jody and Mike are brothers who have lost their parents. Mike is younger, 13. Not wanting to be alone, he follows his brother everywhere. Mike follows Jody to a funeral of his friend Tommy, and sees the funeral director, who is simply called the Tall Man, pick up Tommy’s coffin by himself and put it back in the hearse rather than bury it. This suspicious activity, coupled with odd visions and noises, start to freak Mike out, and in standard horror movie fashion, his brother doesn’t believe that these things are actually happening. Well, until Mike shows him a severed finger in a box. The two (along with Reggie, an ice cream man) discover that the Tall Man is taking bodies, bringing them back to life as dwarf slaves, and taking them to another planet. The gateway to this planet is in a room in the mortuary and is between 2 sliver poles. Yeah that’s right. Didn’t see that coming, did you?

This film actually is pretty good for the most part. The main plot of the movie really is not discovered until late in the film and it does a pretty good job of not foreshadowing anything. It is certainly not the usual horror plot that you have become used to. The movie starts out in a rather jarring fashion by just throwing the title at you with menacing music before anything happens. There is a death less than 2 minutes in to the film. Right away you get the impression that this will be a freight train of horror. Sadly, you get a train wreck of obligatory and boring exposition. It drags for a bit, but it does make the randomness of the events to follow that much more interesting. There are some parts of this movie that did make me jump a bit. Considering this movie is 30 years old, that is pretty impressive. I would be remiss if I did not mention the sweetest part of the film: the sphere. You see, the Tall Man, (Angus Scrimm) employs this metal sphere with blades and a drill in it to kill intruders. We get to see it kill a man in probably one of the best movie deaths ever. The sphere sticks itself in to this one fella’s forehead, and as the drill bores a hole in him, it spews his blood out the back of it like a fire hose spewing water. The man falls to his death and promptly pisses himself and the floor. Oddly enough, this is one of the worst edit jobs, as the gallons of blood seem to have disappeared after he hits the ground. This scene apparently warranted an X rating, but an L.A. Times Critic talked the MPAA down to R. The acting is pretty bad, but you don’t really mind it. The movie is so bizarre, you kind of pay more attention to the story. Angus Scrimm actually does a pretty good job of creeping you out as the Tall Man. Don Coscarelli wrote, directed, edited and was even cinemeaographer of this thing. He also wrote and directed all of its sequels, which also, is bad ass.

If you have not seen this film, which is largely considered to be classic, give it a watch. It is certainly not without its flaws, but it ultimately outweighs those flaws with its successes. It certainly surpasses a lot of garbage that has been released in the 30 years that have gone by.