PHANTASM II (1988)

Studio:       Universal Studios
Director:    Don Coscarelli
Writer:       Don Coscarelli
Producer:  Roberto A. Quezada
Stars:     James Le Gros, Reggie Bannister, Angus Scrimm, Paula Irvine, Samantha Phillips, Kenneth Tigar, Ruth C. Engel, Mark Anthony Major, Rubin Kushner, Stacey Travis, J. Patrick McNamara

Review Score:

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Summary:

Several years after their first encounter with him, Reggie and Mike track the Tall Man to a new mortuary in an abandoned town.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

From her dream journal, psychotherapy patient Elizabeth Reynolds recounts her first vision of Mike, Reggie, and the Tall Man from eight years earlier. In the flashback, Reggie races upstairs at the sound of a dwarf grabbing Mike through the bedroom mirror. Upon seeing the Tall Man, Reggie runs downstairs for a shotgun and ends up confronting a horde of the Tall Man’s dwarves. Reggie escapes with Mike after rigging his house to explode using the kitchen’s gas stove.

Liz and Mike both feel connected to each other in the present through their mutual dreams and visions of the Tall Man.

After being institutionalized for seven years, Mike is discharged from Morningside Psychiatric Clinic. Reggie later finds Mike digging up empty graves in the cemetery and insists that blowing up his house was part of Mike’s ongoing delusion.

Reggie brings Mike home and watches in horror as his house blows up with Aunt Martha and her daughters Celeste and Bonnie inside. Because Mike saw the explosion in a vision before it happened, Reggie begins to believe his story about manipulated reality and agrees to join Mike’s hunt to kill the Tall Man.

Mike and Reggie stop at a hardware store for weapons and supplies. Reggie builds a sawed-off shotgun with four barrels.

On the trail of the Tall Man, Reggie and Mike explore Maritos Cemetery in an abandoned ghost town. They find Liz, but she turns out to be a trap left by the Tall Man with a monster in its hunchback. Speaking through the creature, the Tall Man taunts Mike and Reggie to follow him eastward.

Liz goes to the Perigord Mortuary for her grandfather’s funeral service and has a brief encounter with the Tall Man. Father Meyers, who senses the Tall Man’s evil, stabs the grandfather’s corpse and it bleeds yellow blood. The Tall Man resurrects the body, which later terrorizes the priest as well as Liz’s grandmother in their respective homes.

Reggie and Mike make their way to Perigord, the last ghost town before the Oregon state line. While Mike sleeps, Reggie picks up hitchhiker Alchemy, who goes by Kimmy for short. Mike warns Reggie that he has seen Alchemy in his dreams, but always as a corpse. Alchemy directs the men to Perigord Manor, a bed and breakfast owned by her uncle. The building is shuttered and abandoned like most of the town, but the trio stays there anyway. Alchemy remains at the inn while Mike and Reggie investigate the mortuary.

Liz wakes at home to find her grandmother missing and returns to the Perigord Mortuary to confront the Tall Man. She secretly watches a mortician exsanguinate a corpse and refill it with yellow fluid.

The Tall Man levitates and strangles Father Meyers with his rosary before letting the priest go. Father Meyers finds Liz and explains that the Tall Man is harvesting the town. Three silver spheres are released and one of them kills Father Meyers.

The Tall Man throws Liz against a wall before dispatching her resurrected grandmother in dwarf form to attack. Liz flees outside and meets up with Mike and Reggie. The three of them regroup with Alchemy back at the bed and breakfast.

Mike and Liz telepathically communicate their love for one another. Reggie and Alchemy have sex until they are interrupted when a grenade booby trap explodes downstairs.

The Tall Man kidnaps Liz and takes her away in a hearse. Reggie tells Alchemy to take Liz’s car and drive south to safety while he and Mike chase after the Tall Man in their Hemicuda. The Tall Man runs Mike and Reggie off the road and their car overturns. Mike manages to get Reggie free of the wreck before the car explodes.

Mike and Reggie make it to the mortuary on foot as the Tall Man has a mortician prepare Liz for cremation. Liz escapes her restraints and forces the mortician into the furnace instead.

A sphere chases Liz, but Mike rescues her. Another mortician briefly attacks the duo, but he becomes pinned to the wall when a silver sphere pierces his palm. The mortician severs his own hand to escape a second sphere. Mike and Liz flee while the ball continues chasing them. The mortician returns to attack again, but the sphere kills him.

Reggie has a chainsaw face-off with a graver, one of the masked men that the Tall Man uses to plunder graves. Reggie kills the graver. A group of dwarves emerges to attack, but Reggie kills all four at once with his custom shotgun. Reggie then throws the gun on the floor and leaves.

Alchemy's car breaks down on the road. After finding an abandoned hearse, Alchemy hotwires the vehicle and starts driving toward the mortuary.

Mike captures the silver sphere still embedded in the mortician's severed hand. Reggie reunites with Mike and Liz. Mike uses the sphere as a key to open the spacegate room. The Tall Man attacks. While Mike and Reggie are briefly pulled into the portal to the Tall Man's world, the Tall Man captures Liz and prepares to embalm her with hydrochloric acid.

The men exit the portal. Mike recovers the silver sphere from the keyhole and it attacks the Tall Man. A creature emerges from the sphere hole in the Tall Man's head and it bites at Mike. Liz comes from behind to jam the embalming tube into the Tall Man. Reggie turns on the machine and the Tall Man melts.

Reggie uses a blowtorch to destroy the mortuary. Alchemy arrives outside in the hearse and everyone escapes.

While driving, Alchemy reveals herself to be transformed and attacks Reggie. Alchemy leaves Reggie for dead by the side of the road and continues driving. In the back of the hearse, Mike and Liz try convincing themselves that they are only dreaming. The Tall Man appears suddenly in the front seat. Dwarf hands then pull Mike and Liz through the hearse's back window.

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Review:

“Phantasm II” is a mysterious movie, albeit in a different way than its predecessor.  It still has the same dream logic and non-sequitur element introductions that gave “Phantasm” (review here) its nightmarish distinctiveness.  But the switch from guerilla indie effort to $3 million studio sequel necessitates some behind-the-scenes influencing that elevates the film to a wholly different plane of inexplicably weird.

“Phantasm II” released nine years after the original, yet it has only been eight since new character Liz Reynolds had her first vision of Mike and Reggie with the Tall Man, and just seven since Mike was institutionalized for the supposed delusions suffered in the first film.  The number of minutes ticked off the clock from the opening title hasn’t even hit double digits and already facts aren’t lining up.

Psychic-powered blondes were all the rage in 1988 horror films like “A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master” and “Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood,” so “Phantasm II” would be crazy not to have one of its own.  Liz has never met the aforementioned men, though she has dreams of their Morningside misadventures regularly.  This gives her an unspoken bond shared with Mike that later sees the duo locking lips immediately upon their first meeting and telepathically professing their love for one another just two scenes after that.  You can practically see the studio note insisting on a love interest, and writer/director Don Coscarelli pulling some seeming “Dodgeball” ending defiance by rolling his eyes and force feeding Liz into the plot in as ludicrous of a manner as possible.

Back to the beginning.  “Phantasm II” picks up where “Phantasm” left off, sort of, with Liz recounting her vision of Reggie explaining to Mike by the fireplace that the first film was all a dream.  Then the Tall Man shouts “boy!” as a dwarf pulls Mike through his bedroom mirror.  Reggie suddenly confronts a horde of dwarves himself, forcing him to crank up the kitchen stove’s gas and blow up his own home to escape.  Reggie might not have believed Mike’s crazy claims before, but he certainly does now.

Except he doesn’t.  Mike lies his way into being released from a psychiatric facility several years later and Reggie finds Mike making the local cemetery his first stop.  Reggie tries telling Mike that the house exploding was also part of his ongoing delusion, and there is no such thing as the Tall Man.  Then Mike predicts that Reggie’s house will explode once again, which it does, with Reggie’s relatives inside.  Reggie might not have believed Mike’s crazy claims before, but he certainly does now.

Maybe that should actually read, “for now.”  Horror film franchises often work inadvertently hard to muddle their own canon to a point where not everything fits and sequels have multiple continuities to choose from.  (See “Halloween” for a textbook example.)  “Phantasm” may be the only series where nonlinear narratives are specifically part of the structure and continuity is as expendable as a Red Shirt on the Enterprise.  Again, “Phantasm II” has only passed about 12 or so minutes at this point and it is already on its third “reality.”

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                          RoboCop Easter egg?

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                          Sam Raimi Easter egg

Events in “Phantasm II” don’t become any more sensible from there, either within the movie or without.  As part of the franchise faithful, I’m certainly glad they did, yet why Universal ponied up $3 million to sequelize a nearly decade-old cult favorite is as much of a mystery as the Tall Man’s origin.

“Phantasm II” definitely goes bigger in the physical effects department by exploding a car, torching a mortuary, and blowing up an entire house (twice), among other stunts.  It’s evident where the majority of the seven-figure budget went.  Although in retrospect given the other installments in the series, one wonders if Coscarelli was merely making the most of the million-dollar money when “Phantasm” has generally been adept at getting by on far less spectacle.

The film’s greatest fault is that the addition of ancillary characters, at least a few of whom are unnecessary, gives Coscarelli more threads to work with than can be woven into an effective rhythm.  Scenes regularly jump from Mike and Reggie’s road trip search for the Tall Man to Liz’s memorial service for her grandfather to what the Tall Man and his minions are up to.  On top of that, the script adds a nervous priest and grandmother for silver sphere and dwarf fodder while hitchhiker Alchemy plays love interest for Reggie.  “Phantasm II” is so unsure of what to do about Alchemy specifically that after her introduction, she is left behind twice while main characters tend to more important business.

Juggling so much with already full hands results in long stretches of time spent covering minor subplots that often don’t include Mike, Reggie, or the Tall Man.  The Tall Man’s already limited screen time is further diluted by dispersing his devilish duties among dwarves, catatonic morticians, gas mask-wearing “gravers,” and of course, chrome balls that apparently could not care less about their target, even if that target is the Tall Man.

As already inferred, “Phantasm II” makes little sense.  The funny thing about that though, is that lack of logic is one of the series’ hallmarks and a big part of what makes the movies so endearing.  It can be likened to why no one minds when James Bond villains monologue.  007 films can get away with that trope because they more or less invented it.  The same standard applies to how narrative nonsense has engrained itself as an intrinsic part of the appeal for “Phantasm” films.  We’d probably be disappointed if it were any other way.

Despite an exponential increase in production value and the much-discussed swap of Michael Baldwin for more recognizable actor James Le Gros lending a studio sheen, “Phantasm II” still feels like “Phantasm.”  This is for better as well as for worse.  I can’t imagine newcomers or non-fans being wooed by so much wonkiness in both scripting and cinematic structure.  But affinity for the franchise and nostalgia for 1980s horror age the film far better than objectivity hints it has any real right to be.

Review Score:  75

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