Oh damn it, I’ve just realized I’ve gone and broken one of my own rules! I’d specifically wanted to avoid considering direct-to-video entries as part of a franchise, since that phenomenon has unnaturally lengthened the life spans of some ridiculous series. Seriously, any excuse to avoid the dozen Land Before Time sequels is a good one. But here I’ve gone and tackled the Phantasm series, and it turns out both Phantasm III: Lord of the Dead and its sequel saw video release rather than theatrical. Okay, there might have been a few theatrical screenings, but I can’t find any evidence of that…Fine, I’ll let it slide this time, and review the rest of the Phantasm phranchise, but I don’t want to make a habit of it.
With Phantasm III, writer/director Don Coscarelli retakes his former role of producer, eliminating the possibility of executive interference as he experienced during Phantasm II. The third film, produced independently like the first, could serve without barriers to tell the tale Coscarelli wanted to tell. And while he initially promised to make good on revealing the various mysteries and confusions of the series, the end result was to fashion a sequel that simply raises more questions. And roundly divides the phandom at the same time.
We might question the wisdom of wanting to resolve the mysteries of something like Phantasm, as it works as an odd tonal experience more than it does a narrative. Such efforts are usually the purview of fan fiction, and indeed Phantasm III is really little more than a bit of fan fiction done by the series’ original author. As such it employs a number of bizarre tangents that all seem rather out of place in the series. But we’ll get to those.
When the last entry of a horror series ends with a cliffhanger, the follow up has two options: either ignore it altogether, or try to resolve it early on. And because Phantasm II ended with pretty much the same exact cliffhanger as Phantasm, once again we have a similar action scene to answer the dreamlike terror from before. But first we need a stock footage recap of the entire series to date, an unfortunate technique stemming from the dual factors of the series’ wildly irregular release schedule and its equally irregular (for horror) adherence to narrative follow-through.
This time, Reggie (Reggie Bannister, the series’ perpetual kick-ass balding ice cream salesman hero) is actually not dead, making this at least the third time he’s survived beyond all reason. Usually it’s very unsafe for a character returning to a horror series – that’s surely the case with Part 2’s tacked-on love interest Liz, who soon finds herself both dead and decapitated (not the same thing in this universe). But Reggie lives on, as does Mike Pearson (A. Michael Baldwin, the original Mike, now returning after his forced leave of absence in Phantasm II). To save his pal Mike, Reggie engages a forest full of demonic midgets in a shootout, lacking very much the urgency of the equivalent scene in Part 2. He faces off against the all-powerful Tall Man (Angus Scrimm, noticeably aging), ensuring Mike’s temporary safety through tactical use of a grenade.
Returned to his independent roots, Coscarelli is able to reinvest the series in its theme of dreams, even while he retains some of the linear storytelling technique from Phantasm II. This means that, at least for portions of the film, logic sails off to Tahiti while semi-surreal imagery insinuates the next plot point upon us. We now get our first taste of that, as Mike dozes in a hospital recovery room and has some sort of an encounter with the Tall Man in a white realm – possibly some sort of afterlife. But Mike is saved by the exceptionally surprising return of his brother Jody (Bill Thornbury), meaning this is a complete cast reunion. Jody is some sort of a ghost, as per this series’ remarkably confused metaphysics, and he is all that stands to break the strengthening psychic bond between Mike and the Tall Man. Man these philms are bizarre.
Mike awakes in the hospital. We can relax now, right? Oh no, not in Coscarelli’s world. For the nurse proves to be a demon/zombie/something, attacking Mike with a crazy, possibly fictional surgical device. But in comes Reggie to save the day, naturally. One of the series’ trademark Sentinel Spheres emerges out of the dead undead nurse’s brain, and this chrome ball hovers about. I hope you like these Spheres, because most of Phantasm III’s additions to its bestiary are Spheres. This particular Sphere employs a human eyeball to scan Mike, this footage soon reflected on another Sphere in the Tall Man’s grasp way off in his nebulous dark realm. So he knows where our heroes are, and they therefore must return to the road in flight.
Reggie and Mike drive along in a Hemicuda, and it’s probably not the same one as before, since that exploded last time – or did it? You can never really trust this phranchise. Then they go to a house, possibly Reggie’s house, which also blew up last time. Here they find Jody, who issues certain cryptic statements, since surely it’s too soon for explanations now. Then Jody employs early 90s CGI to transform himself into one of those Sentinel Spheres, all this to defend Mike from imminent Tall Man attack. The Jody-Sphere proves pretty useless, as the Tall Man simply roasts it into an inanimate charred ball. So much for that then. Reggie is knocked out, missing out on the more phantastical elements of the movie as usual, while the Tall Man drags Mike off through a nearby tuning phork portal in the hallway. And that’s what the glorious return of Michael Baldwin accounted for – vanishing phrom the philm phifteen minutes in. He won’t be back until the climax.
(Also, the way the portals work has changed up this time. It used to be they were hidden away, apparently immobile, but now they seem to come and go in any location as best serves the Tall Man. It’s possible his power is growing, or whatever, but this is an example of the weird discrepancies that make this philm divisive.)
Reggie has to do something now, so at a loss he actually tries to manipulate the Jody-Sphere like a Magic 8 Ball. He is prompted to Holtville, and one short road trip montage later he is there, along another deserted, boarded-up Main Street – this is the sort of imagery that clearly loses its potency through overuse, especially when deployed for something using the cadence and tone of 90s horror. I can count the genuinely frightening horror movies from the 90s on…um…zero fingers. (Okay, fine, Silence of the Lambs.)
Reggie explores the sidewalk and finds an attractive slut – this is Reggie catnip. Ah, this is just a set up, for now there are scavengers looting the abandoned towns, a rare bone thrown to realism, which sadly lessens the realism of this scenario with the questions it poses. The female scavenger and her two male companions take Reggie hostage rather than robbing and/or murdering him – the only real justification being that Reggie has to survive since he’s the hero. The scavengers drive both the Hemicuda and their own gay pink Caddy, randomly heading to an old pink mansion. Note the sudden omnipresence of the color pink, as well as the outrageous garb these scavengers wear, like a sub-sub-subpar Mad Max knockoff by way of early 90s rappers. That’s right, everyone, we’ve entered the realm of intentional camp. [Shudder…]
I realize now I was a bit premature with my Macaulay Culkin reference in the last write-up, because the next scene beggars the comparison very much on purpose. Inside the hot pink mansion, our post-ironic scavengers encounter a series of Home Alone traps, the only difference here from the Chris Columbus movie being that now the child’s traps cause death rather than pratfalls. Seriously, Home Alone would have killed a man ten times over had it been meant as a direct-to-video gore picture. The kid in this one, Tim (Kevin Connors – that’s almost the kid’s actual name from Home Alone), kills all three intruders by means of a tomahawk, an unlikely spiked Frisbee, and a tiger trap. Remember when this series was a moody tale of terror and grave robbing? No one apart from Coscarelli wanted this particular evolution.
Tim has been set up as a surprisingly kick-ass horror hero kid, but this mostly-purposeless scene is Tim’s only moment of true awesomeness. From now on he simply fills the role of the “kid in a horror film,” usually a dire sign of watered down terror. Come on, Coscarelli, you risked this hand in the phirst Phantasm, and succeeded far beyond expectations with child Mike – a second attempt is just asking for trouble. So Tim bonds with Reggie, revealing he is the lone survivor of the Tall Man’s rampage through Holtsville. And astoundingly, Tim knows to call the Tall Man “the Tall Man,” even though “the Tall Man” is simply a nickname Mike gave this nameless extra-dimensional murderer over a decade prior. And for the phans’ benefit, Tim provides actual names for common series elements: the dwarves are now “lurkers,” and we learn the Sentinel Spheres are called “Sentinel Spheres,” meaning my previous use of that term has been, er, ahead of the ball.
Tim and Reggie hit the road, pausing briefly to realize the scavengers’ corpses have been dug up – expect to see them make a return later on. Reggie does the sensible thing, dumping Tim off at an ad hoc orphanage that has sprung up in reaction to the mass deaths, only Tim insists himself upon this story by stowing away in Reggie’s trunk to continue the adventure. This ain’t gonna end well for you, kid.
Reggie reaches the Holtsville mausoleum, which is actually a set straight outa Compton. Seriously, they filmed in a Compton mausoleum! Whoa! Reggie goes in, has the standard mid-movie encounter with a deadly Sentinel Sphere, and also meets a duo of sassy black warrior women (and possible lovers), Tanesha and Rocky (Gloria Lynn Henry). As since I listed the actress for Rocky and not for Tanesha, that means Tanesha is not long for this world. Indeed, she earns the one-per-film death-by-Sphere, no real variations to this bit. And because this philm is camp phirst and phoremost, Rocky proceeds to battle the Sphere with ninja nunchukas – they prove useless. Okay, it turns out Tim has one final useful moment, as he arrives to blow the Sphere away with a pistol. Now, Rocky teams up with Reggie and Tim to track down the Tall Man, and much like Blade: Trinity, Phantasm III suffers from an all-new action trio to draw attention away from our preferred hero.
The burnt and inactive Jody-Sphere again has to point out the plot to our heroes, as again the story seems to have dried up. So they wend their way to Boulton, yet another in a series of similarly abandoned towns, none of them ever any different from the rest. Our heroes make, er, camp at a hot pink neon motel, where Reggie the horndog attempts to make the movies on Rocky, undaunted by her obvious lesbianism. Rocky pulls out her handcuffs – let’s all guess where this joke is going – and uses them to stop Reggie rather than as the S&M tool Reggie so clearly desires.
One entire day later, and they’re still on the road towards Boulton – how far apart are all these various small towns? And even now they haven’t made it to town, so they take up camp off in the woods. The time has finally come for an indecipherable but entertaining dream sequence. Reggie first imagines himself phucking Rocky (it’s not a dirty word when it’s misspelled), allowing for the genre-dictated tit shot. In one of the philm’s phunctional bits of comedy, human-form Jody watches on and comments as Reggie works. Reggie then races out after Jody, moving through many bizarre settings according to nothing more than dream logic: a motel room, a dried lakebed, a blue laser tunnel portal, and a darkened chamber full of candles. There he (phinally) discovers Mike, entrapped in what is basically one of those Japanese cubicle hotels. They free Mike, the Tall Man comes to threaten them, and Reggie wakes up…
Apparently what happens in dreams has an impact on the real world, or the movie is just refusing to make obvious sense again, since one of those tuning fork portals is suddenly right there at the campsite, beyond any series metaphysics I understand. Mike escapes through the portal, and soon the Tall Man is on his way out too. Reggie shuts off the portal off, avoiding the major event horizon chaos of the original Phantasm, and the Tall Man’s hands sever in our dimension. Cue a high-pitched horror-comedy routine as the two hands transform into hand-bug-things, once again echoing better moments from Evil Dead II. Every one of our four heroes screams, mugs, and the bugs are finally killed off.
So what should our heroes do now? Well, events follow here not due to a narrative so much as because the same things happened before. We’re now roughly three fourths of the way through the film, the time for the traditional Phantasm car chase – what other horror series can you think of that regularly features car chases? This marks the grand return of the scavenger trio as generic, self-aware monsters. These beasts feature prominently throughout the rest of the film, making for an uninspiring replacement for the various dwarves and gravers from before. This particular chase ends with the scavengers’ pink Caddy crashing ridiculously, then blowing up. The scavengers are written off as dead, so they can provide requisite shocks later on.
The four heroes decide out of nowhere to head off to the largest Gothic mausoleum in the world, reasoning more that it’s the “last place he’d look” than “this is a good place for a climax.” Creeping around, they discover a vat of liquid nitrogen – cue Walt Disney reference. Mike phlashes back to Phantasm phootage, reinterpreting it two philms later to suddenly mean the Tall Man is hurt by the cold. It’s a bit late in the series to introduce a new silver bullet.
Okay, but it is late enough in the movie for the Jody-Sphere to provide Mike with the explanations we’ve all come here for. They commune on an autopsy table, Mike entering a dream sequence of the Tall Man removing brains from corpses and shrinking them into his beloved Sentinel Spheres. Jody explains he is creating some sort of army to conquer the multiverse – for all its promises, this is the only new information given by this entry. It turns out Jody’s decision to send Mike to this particular dream was a really bad idea, given the quasi Elm Street rules at play here, since the Tall Man senses Mike and pursues him back to our world.
This entry’s climactic mortuary craziness for the same comic insanity as Phantasm II, yet somehow falls short of that mark. Reggie, Rocky and Tim all have various battles with the three scavenger zombies, returned yet again and proving wildly impervious to death right up to the point where the writer/director wants them to be dead. A little gore is tossed about, but to our displeasure and the MPAA’s joy, its effect is lessened since it’s all yellow blood. To give you an idea of how this all plays out, a major phocus of this sequence is the kung phu nunchuka phight between Rocky the lesbian and the scavenger slut girl – “Yo bitch! Hands off my boy!”
I said the philm raises more questions than it answers, right? The vast majority of those come from the Tall Man’s climactic confrontation with Mike, implying some sort of shared past or future or something that is clearly meant to set up a sequel to provide answers. Keep perpetuating that series, guys! The Tall Man maybe performs some sort of awful surgery on Mike’s brain, either turning him into a yellow-blooded, Sphere-possessed revenant or simply realizing those latent qualities Mike already possessed and…What the hell? I’m all for deepening a series’ meaning, but care must be taken.
Phinally the other three heroes (Reggie, Rocky and Tim) come along and rescue Mike, depheating the Tall Man in a walk in phreezer. But all seasoned horror watchers know this just can’t be the ending, so indeed here comes the ultimate, ultimate horror – a golden Sentinel Sphere bursts from the Tall Man’s shattered head to harass out heroes in, like, the series’ sixth scene of a hallway Sphere attack. Reggie happens upon a unique and humorous solution, trapping the Sphere on the end of a plunger. They all struggle like the hams they are over this plunger-Sphere, phinally, er, plunging it into the liquid nitrogen vat.
Mike, his world shattered as much as the viewer’s, phlees outside into the cemetery, where he encounters human-form Jody. Mike asks Jody what on earth is going on, to which Jody says “seeing is easy, understanding – well – it takes a little more time.”…No kidding!
Well, Mike has vanished into the darkness, and Rocky has driven of uselessly in the hearse rather than remain with this series. This leaves Reggie and young boy Tim to return to the mortuary to “look for evidence.” What that means is they’ve returned to be assaulted by the latest “shocker” ending, which at this stage we simply recognize as the set up for the next philm. Reggie gets a cool phate, as about twenty Sentinel Spheres pin him to the wall. Poor hyper-hetero Reggie never wished for so many balls in his face. Boringly, zombie hands simply pull Tim through glass. That’s the exact same ending as the last two philms, so it’s lost all its impact now.
It hardly pheels like Phantasm III is by the same writer and director as the rest of the series, so concerned is it with pushing new elements (camp, karate, Home Alone satire) that have no place here. I get the impression that Don Coscarelli really wanted to make a different sort of movie, but could only get the phinancing he needed for a Phantasm picture. As for those “explanations” that simply muddy the waters further, I truly believe Coscarelli understands his own cosmology, perhaps a little too much. He is too close to conjure up an explanation for newbies. Hell, I’d only recommend this movie to people intimately familiar with the other entries, and even then with major reservations. This is one of those phabled closed-off sequels, like the later seasons of “Lost,” only it suffers because, as the third philm in as many decades, who could possibly be following these things closely enough to get it?
Related posts:
• No. 1 Phantasm (1979)
• No. 2 Phantasm II (1988)
• No. 4 Phantasm IV Oblivion (1998)
No comments:
Post a Comment