PHANTASM III: LORD OF THE DEAD (1994)

Studio:       Anchor Bay
Director:    Don Coscarelli
Writer:       Don Coscarelli
Producer:  Don Coscarelli
Stars:     Reggie Bannister, A. Michael Baldwin, Bill Thornbury, Gloria Lynne Henry, Kevin Connors, Cindy Ambuehl, John Chandler, Brooks Gardner, Angus Scrimm

Review Score:

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Summary:

When Mike is captured, Reggie enlists new allies to help in his ongoing battle against the otherworldly evil of the Tall Man.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

A new Tall Man emerges from the spacegate inside Perigord Mortuary and throws the melted body of the previous Tall Man back through the portal.

Left on the side of the road, Reggie watches the hearse driven by Alchemy speed away and explode. Liz dies and her corpse is mauled by a dwarf, who presents Liz’s severed head to the Tall Man. Reggie recovers his four-barrel shotgun and threatens to blow up Mike, who lies unconscious. The Tall Man says he will come for Mike at a later time and leaves with his minions.

Mike recovers in a hospital where he dreams visions of his dead brother Jody and the Tall Man. A zombie nurse attacks Mike and Reggie in Mike’s room. A silver sphere emerges from the nurse’s skull and flies out the window after she is defeated. Reggie and Mike flee from the hospital.

The men return to Reggie’s house for supplies and find Jody, who morphs into a silver sphere. The Tall Man suddenly appears, knocks Reggie unconscious, renders Jody’s sphere immobile, and takes a catatonic Mike back with him through a temporary spacegate in the hallway.

Reggie regains consciousness and recovers the Jody sphere, which leads him to the abandoned town of Holtsville. There, Reggie is captured by thieves Edna, Rufus, and Henry.

The criminal trio breaks into a house booby-trapped by a boy named Tim. Tim ends up killing all three thieves before rescuing Reggie from the trunk of his Hemicuda.

Tim tells Reggie how the Tall Man murdered his family and destroyed the town. Reggie and Tim take to the road in the Hemicuda to search for Mike and the Tall Man. Reggie tries dropping off Tim at a nearby orphanage, but the boy secretly stows away inside Reggie’s trunk.

Reggie explores Holtsville’s cemetery and mortuary. A sphere chases Reggie through the mausoleum. Reggie is briefly captured by Rocky and her girlfriend Tanesha until the sphere kills Tanesha. As Rocky prepares to battle the sphere with her nunchucks, Tim enters and shoots down the ball with his pistol.

Reggie and Tim later regroup with Rocky when they find her hitchhiking. After staying overnight at a motel and fending off an attack of gravers, the three of them make their way to the abandoned town of Boulton.

Jody interrupts Reggie’s dream of having sex with Rocky to show him that the Tall Man has Mike imprisoned in a wall crypt. Reggie and Jody free Mike in the vision and then return to reality with Rocky and Tim. The Jody sphere opens a spacegate and Mike comes out of it. Reggie uses his hands to stop the portal’s vibrations before the Tall Man can follow. Closing the portal severs the Tall Man’s outstretched hands, which transform into creatures and briefly attack.

Reggie, Mike, Rocky, and Tim return to the road. Resurrected as zombies by the Tall Man, Edna, Rufus, and Henry chase the Hemicuda in a pink hearse. Reggie and the others manage to destroy the other vehicle, but blow out the Hemicuda’s front tires in the process.

Everyone makes their way to Boulton’s mortuary on foot. There, Mike meditates to communicate telepathically with the Jody sphere. Jody reveals that the Tall Man is amassing an army to conquer other dimensions. Dwarves are created as a byproduct of the zombie resurrection process. The Tall Man amputates each body’s brain and uses them to power the silver spheres. Shortly after the vision, the Tall Man confronts and captures Mike.

Edna returns to attack Reggie. Rufus and Henry capture Tim and take him to the Tall Man, though the Jody sphere later cuts Tim’s restraints, allowing him to escape. Rocky rescues Reggie from Edna. Tim is recaptured, but uses the Jody ball to kill Rufus and break free. Reggie and Rocky arrive, and Reggie uses his shotgun to destroy Henry.

The Tall Man lobotomizes Mike in the embalming room. Reggie, Rocky, and Tim interrupt the procedure by trapping the Tall Man in a freezer. The Tall Man cracks apart and a large gold sphere emerges from the head of his corpse.

Edna returns to attack Rocky, but the gold ball kills her. Reggie, Rocky, and Tim fight with the sphere until they are able to dispose of it inside a cryogenic freezer tank.

Mike discovers that the Tall Man replaced his brain with a silver sphere. As his eyes also turn into spheres, Mike exits the mortuary in a trance state. Reggie follows until Jody appears. Jody tells Reggie not to believe everything he sees and cautions that understanding takes time. Jody morphs into a sphere once more and disappears with Mike.

Rocky parts ways with Reggie and Tim, driving away in a hearse. Reggie and Tim go back inside to look for clues about what happened to Mike. As Reggie recovers his shotgun, Tim discovers that the cryogenics tank overturned in front of a spacegate. Reggie is swarmed by dozens of silver spheres. Tim prepares to shoot at the balls, but the Tall Man appears just as hands reach from behind to grab Tim and pull him through a window.

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Review:

Keeping up the series’ sequel tradition, “Phantasm III: Lord of the Dead” picks up from “Phantasm II” (review here) in the same way that the first follow-up did from “Phantasm” (review here).  Which is to say that it completely disregards any previously established detail that doesn’t jive with the always-in-flux storyline’s current needs.

Left for dead on the side of the road when the previous installment concluded, Reggie is very much alive at the start of “Phantasm III.”  His car ride companions however, aren’t faring so well when the getaway hearse they were riding in suddenly explodes.

In a middle finger move proving once and for all that the series never had any use for her in the first place, love interest Liz dies in the blast and has her face chewed off by a dwarf who presents her severed head to the Tall Man.  Mike and Reggie never mention the girl again, as if the only person who even cared about her at all was the Universal Studios suit who insisted on her insertion into “Phantasm II.”

Reggie recovers his custom four-barrel shotgun, the same gun he left on the floor of Perigord Mortuary, and eventually makes his way back home, the same home that blew up (twice) in the previous movie.  After the Tall Man kidnaps Mike, it’s time for Reggie to take to the road once again and search for both men in his Hemicuda, the same car that belonged to Mike and Jody in the first film and overturned before exploding in the second.

Hey, I understand that fluctuating reality is a signature part of the series, and I even affectionately snicker that the franchise has such a wacky “Tall Man May Care” attitude about its own mythology.  But there comes a point where you wonder if “Phantasm” mastermind Don Coscarelli is creatively going his own way to maintain that nightmare state sensation, or just arm swiping the other movies off his desk when they inconvenience the drafting of a new screenplay.

For all the fuss made before, during, and after the swap of A. Michael Baldwin for James Le Gros as Mike in “Phantasm II,” Coscarelli goes through the trouble of bringing back both Baldwin and his onscreen brother Bill Thornbury as Jody only to sit them on the sidelines 14 minutes into the film.  That’s bad news for “Phantasm” phans excited to see the original trio reunited after 15 years, though it is good news for anyone interested in watching ice cream vendor Reggie step up as the movie’s main man.

“Lord of the Dead,” a subtitle presumably referring to the Tall Man although who knows for certain, follows the “Phantasm” formula to a fault.  This starts by teaming Reggie with a Robin to his Batman as well as a pseudo-femme fatale certain to lead him into trouble when blood rushes below the belt.

The fresh faces dodging silver spheres at Reggie’s side belong to gun-toting tiny tike Tim and martial artist Michonne precursor Rocky.  Kid sidekicks are often more annoying than they are entertaining in many movies.  Child actor Kevin Connors luckily keeps Tim on the latter side of that line by not overstaying his welcome when it comes to screen time and generally spending more of that time getting out of trouble than getting into it.

Tim surprisingly comes across as a better addition to the “Phantasm” fodder roster than Rocky.  Actress Gloria Lynne Henry comes to her role with a light voice and soft-spoken edge that doesn’t exactly fulfill the Grace Jones vibe of no-nonsense, nunchuck-wielding badassery the character aims for.  It’s hard not to rate Henry’s performance with a downward-turned palm pivoting at the wrist.

That hand-waving technique turns out to be a fair way of grading the film as a whole.  The good includes the mustard-colored gore of FX maestro Mark Shostrom complimenting increased insanity from chrome ball carnage and shotgun-blasted dwarves.  The bad consists of too much treading on trodden trails without meaningfully advancing the overall arc, right down to the third straight time a “Phantasm” film climaxes with hands grabbing someone through glass.  The ugly is an overdose of humor in the form of one too many nyuk-nyuks and a goofball thief trio with a bad penny habit of clawing back into the story whenever a new beat of action is needed.

Of course, being a bizarre blend of such all over the place tones and incongruous concepts is par for the course when it comes to “Phantasm.”  And here’s the thing about being three movies deep into the series:

By this point, you either “get” the “Phantasm” films, or you don’t.  Not in a logic or narrative sense, mind you.  No one “gets” that, not even creator Don Coscarelli, who can’t seem to keep his own continuity consistent from one scene to the next.  Rather, revisiting these misfit characters and their weird world carries a magnetic appeal that can be difficult to articulate to anyone outside its influence, no matter if the movie is mediocre.

“Phantasm III: Lord of the Dead” features some of the best ideas in the series, though it also includes some of the worst.  That leaves 7/10 as a perhaps generous final score, even by franchise faithful standards.  But there is no discounting that a not so hot entry in the Tall Man and silver sphere oeuvre can still be entertaining, in spite of a scatterbrained imagination reliant on reusing old tricks… or reinventing them when they are no longer useful.

Review Score:  70

Phantasm II Review

Phantasm IV: Oblivion Review

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