This throwaway line from a completely different movie probably sums up what most of the population knows of director Joe Chappelle‘s film. However there is a line actually in Phantoms which is more appropriate: “I needed the money” renowned professor Timothy Flyte (Peter O’Toole) replies to the question of why he works at a trashy tabloid. I suspect that would be the response from most when questioned about their involvement to this movie.
Adapted from his novel of the same name, writer Dean Koontz takes what I recall was a decent, if largely forgettable, tale of a band of survivors in a deserted town against an unknown enemy and turns it into a clusterfuck of random occurrences and plot points that make no sense whatsoever. When sisters Jennifer (Joanna Going) and Lisa (Rose McGowan) arrive in the quaint town of Snowfield, they find streets, houses, and idling cars barren and Jennifer’s housekeeper dead on the floor in the kitchen. They go to the police station to report the death but there too is a dead deputy.
Sheriff Hammond (Ben Affleck) and two deputies randomly appear and the group tries to figure out what has caused the majority of the town to vanish as they wait for backup. When Flyte arrives with a military brigade and monster-fodder scientists, he explains in a lengthy diatribe that whatever it is that has wiped out the town is responsible for numerous lost colonies throughout history as well as the extinction of the dinosaurs.
You would think that having Koontz adapt his own book would be beneficial to retain not only the basic structure but the character’s attributes. After all I’d image it is quite difficult to take a several hundred page book chock full of internal dialogue and other side plots and fit everything into an coherent hour and a half long movie. Yet any character development and eerie scenes poking around in the abandoned town is almost entirely absent here (this is going off of my insanely horrible memory of a book I read over ten years ago FWIW). It kind of works for the movie as the weird stuff gets going almost immediately but that excises any reason to give a damn for the characters.
It also leads to things that I assume were fleshed out in the book but recreated here with the broadest of strokes. Is there a reason why most of the town disappeared while some bodies remained in a gelatinous form and still others were able to get up and strike back at the remaining townsfolk? How can this prehistoric creature kill the electricity to all of the town and bring it back at will? Same thing with the phones being down except for when the being wants to call and make some scary gargling noises. It seems the story was written in individual scenes and then lazily stitched together without any contemplation about how to blend them together. Not only was it quite jarring but really bizarre.
While he is able to conjure up a few decent scares or effectively creepy shots, Chappelle shows (as he did in Halloween 6 before) that he has nary a clue how the basics of horror movies work aside from borrowing heavily from other films like The Thing. Coming off of his Good Will Hunting acclaim, Affleck brings a slight waft of respectability that not even O’Toole with his silly ramblings can manage. Affleck’s Sheriff Hammond is the calm and level headed guy of the bunch and while I’d stop short of saying he was “the bomb” at least he was manageable.
McGowan comes off badly but look at this line: “Well, its the devil don’t you think, come up from hell tonight? I think he wants to dance with us.” Yikes. Pretty much everyone other than Affleck is either horribly underwritten or saddled with lines like that which even the most renowned Shakespearean actor would come off as bad while reciting. Going’s character is painfully dull and even the normally reliable Liev Schreiber is just wasted in his flash of screentime.
At a certain point, I was heavily considering a crap category here but the complete batshit crazy randomness that occurs is at least entertaining even if it isn’t particularly well done or coherent for that matter. As such, it is probably best that the world at large is largely ignorant about Phantoms. If you’ve seen the movie and someone asks about it, it is probably best just to say “Affleck was the bomb in Phantoms” and move on.
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