I’ll be featuring a Phantasm movie each day leading up to my review of Phantasm RaVager.
Mike and Jody, 13 and 24 respectively, are a couple of boys just trying to get by after the death of their parents. Following the funeral of a mutual friend, which only compounds their grief, Mike witnesses the freakishly tall caretaker (Angus Scrimm) lift the casket with one arm and effortlessly toss it into the back of his hearse with inhuman strength. To explain what the Tall Man is up to would ruin the best part of the mythology, but I will say it’s ambitious for a $300,000 movie.
Mike visits the local fortune teller who not only makes him do the Gom Jabbar test from Dune, she actually says, “Fear is the killer.” (Later, a scene is set in a bar called Dune’s, suggesting the references to Frank Herbert’s novel are more homage than rip-off.) The fortune teller can make things magically appear out of thin air, but Mike is curiously unaffected by this. The prediction the fortune teller makes isn’t just wrong, it feels like a setup for a payoff the filmmakers abandoned by the time they got around to making the end of the movie.
There’s a lot of improvisational filmmaking, which somehow adds to the charm more than it detracts, even as the logic steadily drains out of the story. Reggie Bannister’s character, Reggie, is killed once off screen and once again on screen, but both times he comes merrily strolling back into the picture (fake-killing him in the sequels becomes a bit of a tradition). The first time he cheats death, he tells the main characters he totally rescued some characters off screen, but they’re safe now so don’t worry about them anymore; in reality, the actors were probably no longer available and director Don Coscarelli needed a throwaway line to explain their sudden absence.
Despite the constant attempts at jump-scares, Phantasm is likely too tame and pleasantly paced for many viewers, but it’s rarely boring. Angus Scrimm’s performance, though brief, is right on the edge of over-acting, which is actually perfect for a movie like this. The minimalist yet skillful cinematography evokes Kubrickian framing, which compliments the simplistic score. I’ve always admired Phantasm, but I think I like it a little more with age. It’s much better than it has any right to be.
Phantasm 2 was my favorite of the series. We’ll see how it holds up tomorrow.
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