PHANTASM (1979)

Studio:       Avco Embassy Pictures
Director:    Don Coscarelli
Writer:       Don Coscarelli
Producer:  D.A. Coscarelli
Stars:     Michael Baldwin, Bill Thornbury, Reggie Bannister, Kathy Lester, Angus Scrimm

Review Score:

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Summary:

Two brothers and their best friend uncover an otherworldly conspiracy involving a mysterious corpse stealer.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

Tommy has sex with the Lady in Lavender on top of a grave in Morningside Cemetery. The Lady in Lavender turns into the Tall Man and stabs Tommy to death.

Tommy’s friends Jody Pearson and Reggie attend Tommy’s funeral at Morningside. Jody’s little brother Michael spies on the ceremony from a distance and sees the Tall Man, who works as Morningside’s undertaker, stealing Tommy’s casket after lifting it by himself.

Having discovered that his brother plans to leave home and send him to live with their aunt, Mike visits a fortuneteller and her granddaughter to ask about his future. A strange box materializes on the table. Mike is forced to put his hand inside as a test of fear.

Mike secretly follows his brother to the Dunes Cantina where Jody picks up the Lady in Lavender. Mike spies on the couple as they have sex in the cemetery, but is frightened away by a dwarf in a brown cloak. Jody chases after Mike and the Lady in Lavender disappears.

While walking through town, Mike sees the Tall Man transfixed by cold air coming from Reggie’s ice cream truck. Later, dwarves trap Mike under a car in his garage. Mike tells his brother that the dwarves are the same creatures who chased him in the cemetery the night before, but Jody does not believe him.

Mike breaks into the funeral home to investigate the weirdness at Morningside. A silver sphere chases Mike until he is captured by an unknown man. Blades spring from the flying orb and it embeds in the man’s forehead, killing him by siphoning out his blood. The Tall Man chases Mike. Mike closes a door on the Tall Man’s hand, severs his fingers, and takes one of the digits with him as he escapes.

Jody believes Mike’s wild claims after seeing the finger, now kept inside a wooden box and still twitching in a pool of yellow blood. When the brothers attempt to take it to the sheriff, the finger transforms into an insect-like creature and attacks. Mike and Jody shove the creature down their garbage disposal.

Reggie comes over. The creature emerges from the drain and attacks before Jody kills it again. Reggie is brought up to speed on what is happening at the funeral home and cemetery.

Jody goes to the funeral home to investigate and fights off a dwarf. Mike arrives in Jody’s Plymouth Barracuda and rescues him from a dwarf-driven hearse. Jody fires at the hearse with a shotgun and it crashes. The brothers remove the dwarf’s hood and discover it is Tommy.

Mike and Jody regroup with Reggie to figure out why dead bodies are being turned into dwarves. Tommy’s body is stored in Reggie’s ice cream truck.

Jody has Reggie take Mike to Sally and Susie at their antique store for safety. There, Mike finds a vintage photograph of the Tall Man driving a horse and carriage in front of the funeral home. Mike insists that the women take him home. On the way, they find Reggie’s ice cream truck overturned and Tommy’s body missing. Mike assumes Reggie was killed. Dwarves attack the car. They drive away fighting with Susie and Sally while Mike is pushed out the back windshield.

Mike returns home and tells Jody what happened. Jody locks Mike in his bedroom for safety before setting off for the funeral home alone. Mike breaks out of his room, but is captured outside by the Tall Man. Mike uses a handgun to shoot his way out of the hearse. The vehicle crashes and explodes.

The brothers reunite at the funeral home. They discover that their father’s body is missing. Jody shoots down a silver sphere. Mike leads Jody to a door he discovered earlier. Reggie finds them and explains that he was captured. He also mentions that he freed Sally, Sue, and several other women being held captive.

Mike, Jody, and Reggie go through the door. They find a white room lined with columns of barrels containing dwarves in stasis. Two vibrating metal poles hum in the room’s center. Mike discovers a hidden portal between the poles. He enters and sees a line of dwarves trudging on a planet with a red sky. Reggie and Jody pull Mike out. Mike now understands that the Tall Man is creating slaves from dead bodies, but needs to crush them into dwarves because of the other planet’s gravity and heat.

The lights go out and everyone is separated. Mike is nearly stabbed outside by the Lady in Lavender until Reggie puts his hands on the portal posts and stops their vibrations, which halts the Lady in Lavender. Reggie escapes the room as a vacuum begins pulling dwarf barrels into the portal.

Reggie makes it outside and is stabbed in the stomach by the Lady in Lavender. The Lady in Lavender transforms into the Tall Man. After seeing Reggie die, Mike and Jody escape in the ‘cuda as the funeral home vanishes in a glowing light.

The brothers pull off a plot to lead the Tall Man into a 1,000-foot mine shaft near Singer’s Creek. Rocks and boulders cave in on top of the Tall Man.

Mike suddenly wakes in bed. In front of a fireplace, Mike explains his fear to Reggie that the rocks won’t hold the Tall Man. Reggie tries telling Mike that the Tall Man didn’t exist. He claims Jody died in a car wreck and Mike imagined everything that happened as part of his grieving process.

Reggie proposes a road trip. Mike goes upstairs to collect his things. The Tall Man appears in Mike’s bedroom just before dwarf hands break through the mirror and pull Mike inside.

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Review:

A delicate pinch of finesse is required in reviewing a movie four decades removed from release and nearly the same age as you.  Reconciling objectivity with subjectivity becomes an even greater challenge when filters of fondness for certain seminal films color perceptions with blinding rose tints.  Meanwhile, the same hard-to-articulate charms a devoted fan finds so fascinating may be unavoidably lost on an audience without the same sense of nostalgia to forgive all the flaws.

Such is the case with “Phantasm.”  Having easily earned its rightful place among late 70s horror classics such as “Halloween” (review here) and “Dawn of the Dead,” “Phantasm” is still so steeped in the strange horror psychoscape of 1979 that anyone immune to the era’s influence, e.g. perhaps someone born in the 21st century, might be too busy justifiably sighing at the silliness to fully grasp what those of us who grew up with the film find so unsettlingly frightening.

Something strange is going on at the Morningside mortuary and cemetery.  While his brother Jody and their buddy Reggie attend a funeral for a friend, teenager Mike spies the solemn ceremony from a distance and sees a black-suited undertaker, the mysterious Tall Man, lifting a casket with superhuman strength.  Mike doesn’t fully realize it yet, but he has just stumbled onto his first clue involving the most bizarre interplanetary corpse-stealing conspiracy since “Plan 9 from Outer Space.”

Indescribably weird almost from its outset, “Phantasm” continues growing even more wonderfully wild.  Dwarves in brown cloaks.  Flying silver spheres spearing skulls and siphoning blood.  Severed fingers morphing into softball-sized flies.  A seductive Lady in Lavender transforming into the sinister Tall Man.  Magically materializing tests of courage in a mute fortuneteller’s parlor.  Tuning fork portals to other dimensions.  A hero who drives an ice cream truck.

Nearly none of it makes rational sense.  None of it has to.  This is the kind of experience for which the phrase “it has to be seen to be believed” exists.

No matter how nutty the movie gets, everyone boards the lunacy train without so much as a batted eyelash.  Whether it is a severed finger oozing mustard blood and crawling on its own or a rushed explanation of realizing dead bodies are being refashioned as dwarf slaves after spending five seconds in a red-sky world, characters mutter an equivalent of, “makes sense to me” and move onward to the next nonsensical plot point.  Dialogue is goofy.  Excuses to separate characters are contrived.  But because “Phantasm” is inherently a movie about suspending disbelief and believing the unbelievable, you willingly take the trip with Mike, Jody, and Reggie, if only to see what oddity they encounter next.

“Phantasm” is what an Italian giallo movie looks like when envisioned by an American filmmaker.  Colors are vivid.  The score is mesmerizing.  Unforgettable visuals that belong unmistakably to “Phantasm” are imprinted in the mind’s eye.

Non-sequitur sequences seem as if scenes might be edited out of order, but it is all part of the intent to simulate a waking dreamscape built on incomprehensible logic.  And if 21st-century sensibilities can forgive the 1970s filmmaking foibles of Dario Argento, Lucio Fulci, et al., then the same must be done for Coscarelli’s unique vision of a paralyzing nightmare.

This is the true achievement of “Phantasm.”  The film succeeds because its surreal setting is always more entrancing, and always more interesting, than misaligned story beats or low-budget tech failing to tear at the seams.  The style is perpetually hypnotizing and the overall effect on the imagination is what matters most, and what is remembered first.

There is nothing else in film fiction like “Phantasm.”  Nothing even comes close, not even a single comparable imitator that followed after.  “Halloween” stands out as the king of all slashers.  “Dawn of the Dead” is at the top of the hill for zombie epics.  “Phantasm” sets itself apart even further in horror filmdom by belonging to a franchise/subgenre class that is uniquely its own.

Review Score:  90

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