Phantasm (1979)

Rated R for the most immediate unnecessary nudity you've ever seen in a movie.  While the movie really gets the R for the death and dismemberment that comes with movies of this ilk, there are all these excuses to do some raunchy stuff.  Like, the movie is a fundamentally unsexy conceit.  But the movie decided to really try to shoehorn some horndog stuff in there, making it all the more uncomfortable as I hate-finished the movie.  There's also some language and kids with guns.  R.

DIRECTOR:  Don Coscarelli

I have half a memory stuck in the back of my brain.  I went to a very conservative college, but I still really dug horror movies.  I don't know how I got a copy of Phantasm, considering that streaming wasn't a thing yet.  Maybe there was some kind of "On Demand" option with our cable box.  Long story even longer, I remember trying to convince people to watch Phantasm at my conservative Catholic university, thinking that this movie couldn't be that offensive.  Start up the film?  Immediate sex scene that only focused on a topless woman.  Yeah, we shut that one off pretty quick.  I did manage to pull a fast one though and convinced the theatre department to do a public screening of Night of the Living Dead.  Yeah, I wonder why my wife questions my choices.

I never did finish Phantasm.  But my wife was out of town and I wanted a movie that I knew that she wouldn't be all that interested in.  The same philosophy that went into wanting to show classmates this movie back in my old college days hit me today.  Phantasm was always one franchise that I felt like I never had an excuse to watch, despite the fact that it isn't a completely unknown horror franchise.  Even more so, I loved Bubba Ho Tep. Now, before I start lambasting Phantasm by stating that it is barely a movie, I really would like to stress that I am older and my tastes are very different from my college days. Those were the days that I swore that Moulin Rouge! was the greatest film ever made and I would watch shlock horror all the time.  

Yeah, old me doesn't like this.  Part of me really wanted to like this.  In my mind, there are mythical horror movies made on shoestring budgets filled with heart that made up for lack of budgets.  Maybe it's the Sam Raimi origin story applied to all of these horror movies that don't really earn those kinds of reputations.  Based on what I read on the Phantasm Wikipedia article (I needed to know both what I watched and what happens in the sequels so I can potentially spare myself the misery of hate watching an entire franchise), maybe Don Coscarelli and Sam Raimi share a lot of the same DNA.  From what I understand, there were a billion cuts of this movie that were attempted to be sold to distributors before the version that we ultimately got with this cut.  A lot of that makes sense.  The movie has a really hard time finding a unifying identity.

I need to put a hard break in what I am writing right now.  There's a bunch of stuff that needs to be said right here.  Let's imagine a world where Don Coscarelli is an auteur right out of the gate.  He knows the message he wants to tell and he knows that he's going to have to have his first movie break a lot of rules to say that message.  The Phantasm that I watched wanted me to believe that the events of this movie are Mike's dream, processing the death of his brother Jody.  I mean, I'm shorthanding what is ultimately meant to be an ambiguous ending considering that the Tall Man appears in Mike's mirror and captures him.  Okay, that's the best ending that can come out of a mess of a movie because it explains why the movie is so disjointed.  So much of the story can be written off as "Kid has weird dreams."  

But I absolutely refuse to believe that Coscarelli made a movie mimicking the chaos storytelling of dreamland.  One of the key things that I tell my student writers and is one of the most challenging pieces of advice that I have to force myself to listen to is that "writing is ultimately in rewriting."  First drafts are fundamental to the process.  But sometimes you need to throw the whole thing away and learn from your mistakes.  My students often don't listen to me when I tell them that they need to start from scratch, treating the rough draft as a learning experience.  A lot of their writing reads like Phantasm.  Phantasm has a lot of core stuff wrong about it.  It knows it wants to be spooky.  They got a really creepy dude.  They had a visual effects guy who is more than functional.  They have someone scoring the thing who knows how to make the whole thing creepy.  I love it. These are important.  What the movie doesn't have is an understanding of both plot and characterization.

Let's first break down the characterization in this movie because I cannot tell you why these characters are acting the way that they do.  The movie starts off almost in medias res.  A major character, to these people, has been murdered.  We don't really understand it.  We don't get to see the investigation into Tommy's death.  Instead, we're catapulted to the funeral, where Jody, one of our protagonists, seems put out by being at a funeral.  From the fact that Mike is always spying on Jody and always mad at Jody for leaving, we have to assume that Jody leaves a lot?  We don't really get a concrete dynamic between these people because a lot of Jody's character can be written as "cool guy archetype."  For the first time ever, the archetype isn't helping. 

It's also like the characters kind of just fell into a horror movie.  These evil monsters almost start the film as a version of the Munsters, but without the self-awareness.  The Tall Man is a mortician who can deadlift a coffin with a body inside of it one handed.  He's doing nothing to hide that behavior.  It's almost like he's welcoming people to investigate the cemetary because he has nothing better to do.  Usually, the supernatural have a purpose to their haunting.  But everything in Phantasm reads like these ghouls have nothing better to do than to simply mess with Mike and Jody.  There's an explanation later about why The Tall Man and the dwarves are attacking folks, but it doesn't make a lick of sense. There's a weird white room and an invisible door to another dimension.  As a guy who consumes a lot of media, my only response to all of that explanation what "What?"

Do you understand the amount of willpower it takes for me to not hate watch these other movies just so I can understand the lore of a movie I did not care for?  You may find that easy.  I am almost put off by it.  You'll know if I have succeeded in ignoring the sequels if you find no more Phantasm blogs.  (I mean, there are only five movies and they are made almost a decade apart.  I could do it, if only to see if Coscarelli becomes a better filmmaker.) 

I was talking about how I find Evil Dead guerilla filmmaking charming.  Phantasm isn't charming.  I know that Coscarelli has a handful of sets.  He's got the characters' house.  He's got the mausoleum. That's really about it.  Also, he likes to steal scenes from the novel Dune with the "Fear is the mindkiller" pain box.  So almost the entire movie is Mike and/or Jody have a bad feeling about the creatures at the cemetary.  They argue for a few minutes about whether or not Mike should go to the cemetary.  One or both of them go to the cemetary, fight off some kind of oogie-boogie and then they run home, question whether or not they saw what they clearly just fought off, and then repeat all of that over again.  Honestly, this movie had no real ending.  It ended because it told us that it was over.  But any one of the sequences at the cemetary could have been the final confrontation between Mike and the Tall Man.

Also, what is Reggie's relationship to these people?  One of the cuts of the movie had clearly had the plan to make the Tall Man and his minions vulnerable to sonic vibrations and, because Reggie played music, that music was going to take them down.  But that seemed really downplayed.  I kind of felt like Coscarelli had access to an old ice cream truck and a uniform, so they had Reggie show up for more scenes than what made any amount of sense.  (Also, all those people lived?  Why didn't the Tall Man kill all those people?) 

The movie is really bad, guys.  I wanted to like it.  That sphere was pretty cool, but this is a movie that depends on spooky imagery as opposed to any kind of actual storytelling.  It felt like a local haunted house that didn't have a narrative, but just wanted to scare you with scary looking things.  I really hope that I'm not bored enough to shotgun this franchise because I still haven't decided which horror movie I'm going to watch while folding laundry.