PHANTASM 3 & PHANTASM 4: Revisited
Earlier this month, horror fans received two long-awaited wishes: a 4K digital restoration of the 1979 cult classic Phantasm, and a final entry to the phantasmagorical film series with Phantasm: Ravager. The original film, shot on a shoestring budget with director Don Coscarelli's friends filling out most of the acting roles, has become legend in American horror movie lore, but also an outlier: whereas Halloween, Friday The 13th and A Nightmare On Elm Street were much more straightforward slashers, Phantasm was just as much a fantasy and buddy movie as it was horror. That's not to detract from it's terrifying elements; while it may seem a bit dated now, the Tall Man - played to perfection by Angus Scrimm - was the walking and talking embodiment of fear and the unknown. He wasn't lurking in the woods or chasing you with a knife, he arrived in your town and slowly, unassumingly sucked the life from it. Film (and series) protagonist Mike (A. Michael Baldwin) was an average teen kid in an average small town, and when he finally realizes what's happening, his helplessness and confusion mirrors our own pubescent struggles.
The first Phantasm rightfully gets the most praise, and Phantasm II - with it's bigger budget, better acting and much-improved special effects - was a regular on cable television for years, particularly TNT's MonsterVision with Joe Bob Briggs. Lesser-known, and much less frequently viewed, are 1994's Phantasm III: Lord Of The Dead and 1998's Phantasm IV: Oblivion. After dusting off my VHS copies, I decided to revisit these two entries in the Phantasm canon to see if they still hold up to the first two.
Lord Of The Dead picks up immediately after the end of II, where (spoiler alert) the Tall Man had trapped Mike (portrayed in II by James Le Gros) and his love interest Liz (Paula Irvine) and seemingly killed off ice cream man/series hero Reggie (Reggie Bannister). Reggie survives, but Liz is brutally killed. Reggie saves Mike and the two escape into the night. A fundamental problem, which reappears in Oblivion, is that Liz is never mentioned again. Her character was Mike's entire motivation for the plot of II. He and Liz had a psychic bond, and were both being pursued by the Tall Man. He fooled the head doctor of a psychiatric hospital after seven years of being committed (following the events of the original Phantasm) just to find her and protect/save her. The Tall Man literally takes her head off, and not even a single line of dialogue addresses it; Mike and Reggie simply move on as if she never existed.
The narrative in Lord Of The Dead mostly follows the same template as its predecessor, with Mike and Reggie pursuing the Tall Man through decimated small towns across the West Coast. At one point they are separated and Reggie teams up with Tim (Kevin Connors) a young boy surviving on his own after his parents were killed by the Tall Man. Like II, the film is more linear than the original. The other major addition (and ultimately, detraction) to the story is the reintroduction of Jody (Bill Thornbury), Mike's older brother who supposedly died in a car wreck in Phantasm. His presence is ostensibly based on some sort of nostalgia for the chemistry of the three main characters in the first movie; here, he shows up at mostly arbitrary times and drops convoluted, sometimes contradictory statements that don't help anybody. Oh, and he's also now a flying sphere, like the Tall Man's signature weapon. As Lord Of The Dead concludes, Reggie is left hanging while Mike, seemingly under the Tall Man's spell himself, takes off into the night, followed closely by Jody.
At one point in the Nineties Coscarelli was quoted as saying if he did make a fourth Phantasm, it would strictly be for the money. I'm not sure what kind of payday Oblivion had, but outside of hardcore series fans, it may as well not exist. It begins, again, right as Lord Of The Dead ends; another main character - this time, the survivalist kid Tim - is grabbed and most likely killed by the Tall Man's minions, but Reggie escapes and doesn't even bother looking for him. Most of Oblivion's running time is filled by special effect set pieces that do nothing to move the plot forward, but they all end with car explosions, so...cool, I guess?
One aspect of the story that goes critically underdeveloped is Mike's search for the Tall Man's genesis; at one point he goes through a dimensional portal and ends up in a post-Civil War funeral home where the Tall Man is simply Jebediah Morningside, a mortician haunted by death and looking for clues to the afterlife. Another positive element in Oblivion is Coscarelli weaving unused footage from the original Phantasm into the movie at several key points, most effectively after the final showdown between Reggie, Mike and the Tall Man. The idea of infinite dimensions is introduced, Jody's true self is revealed, and we're left with another cliffhanger for almost twenty years.
I have yet to watch Ravager, but the consensus from fans and critics alike is all over the map, which for the Phantasm series is to be expected. Whether you're a Phan or totally indifferent, there's no denying that all the films are unique within the genre. Angus Scrimm's passing earlier this year marks the true conclusion to Phantasm. For all their faults, the sequels are still an enjoyable watch.
