PHANTASM IV: OBLIVION (1998)

Studio:       Anchor Bay
Director:    Don Coscarelli
Writer:       Don Coscarelli
Producer:  Don Coscarelli
Stars:     A. Michael Baldwin, Reggie Bannister, Bill Thornbury, Heidi Marnhout, Bob Ivy, Angus Scrimm

Review Score:

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Summary:

While Reggie returns to the road in search of Mike, Jody guides Mike through multiple time portals to uncover the mysteries of the Tall Man.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

Mike drives a hearse into the Southwestern wasteland in search of a way to escape his transformation and to uncover the mysteries of the Tall Man. Along the way, Mike reflects on past memories while experiencing strange visions inside the vehicle.

Back at the Boulton Mortuary, the Tall Man releases Reggie from the swarm of silver spheres and allows him to escape. Reggie repairs the disabled Hemicuda outside. Jody appears and appeals to Reggie to go after Mike. After his car is pulled over, Reggie fights off a mutated state trooper and blows up the officer’s patrol vehicle.

The Tall Man appears inside the hearse with Mike. The hearse begins driving itself and guides Mike to Death Valley until the engine overheats. Mike experiences more dreams and flashbacks, including visions of spacegates appearing in the desert.

Thinking he can escape the Tall Man by committing suicide, Mike hangs himself from a tree with a noose. Losing consciousness, Mike has a vision from the past of he and Jody trapping the Tall Man and hanging him from a tree in a similar manner. In the flashback, the Tall Man tricks Mike into cutting him down. Back in the present, the Tall Man cuts down Mike, explaining that Mike cannot take his own life because that is the Tall Man’s domain. Mike refuses to willingly go with the Tall Man and escapes into a spacegate instead.

Mike goes back in time and meets Jebediah Morningside, a kind undertaker who ultimately becomes the evil Tall Man. Sitting with Jebediah on the porch of his Victorian parlor is the fortuneteller Mike knew as a boy. Mike returns to the desert through the portal and sees that more spacegates have appeared.

Reggie spots an attractive blonde woman at a deserted rest stop and follows her. When the woman has an accident and her car overturns, Reggie rescues her before the vehicle explodes.

Mike uses psychic powers to levitate desert rocks and then drops them on a scorpion as well as a dwarf. The Jody sphere comes to Mike and morphs into a vision of his brother. Mike recalls Jody’s supposed death in a car accident, claiming he can only trust Reggie and not the vision of Jody. Jody claims that he did not abandon Mike, but was actually taken by the Tall Man.

More portals appear in the desert. Mike salvages car parts from the hearse and uses them to build a silver sphere of his own as well as a booby trap.

Reggie and Jennifer, the blonde woman met on the road, take shelter in an abandoned motel. Reggie wakes during the night from a dream in which Mike takes the Tall Man’s place as an evil undertaker. Reggie unbuttons Jennifer’s shirt and sees that her breasts are silver spheres. The chrome balls detach and attack. Reggie destroys both spheres, though not before one of them drills through his hand. Jennifer then attacks and Reggie kills her with a sledgehammer.

Mike wonders if he can return to the past and prevent Jebediah Morningside from becoming the Tall Man. The Tall Man appears and begins transporting Mike through dimensions. Jody helps Mike escape the Tall Man.

Reggie makes his way to Funeral Mountains and finds Mike’s hearse. Reggie prepares his weaponry, changes into his ice cream vendor uniform, and fights off a horde of dwarves with his four-barrel shotgun.

Mike and Jody return from the portal and reunite with Reggie. Mike whispers to Reggie that he should not trust Jody.

Mike asks Jody to take him back to where the Tall Man’s evil began. Mike is shown how Jebediah Morningside made it his life’s work to create a gateway that could bridge the space between life and death. Jebediah enters his experimental portal and comes back carrying a silver sphere as the Tall Man. The Tall Man confronts Mike, but Mike escapes through the portal.

Jody follows Mike through the spacegate and attacks Mike with a silver sphere. Mike stabs Jody and flees, but another Jody grabs Mike and takes him back into the portal.

Mike wakes on a table in a mausoleum. While Jody holds him down, the Tall Man starts sawing into Mike’s forehead with a silver sphere. Mike rings a tuning fork to freeze both men in place and gets the Tall Man to slash Jody’s throat with the sphere’s blade. Before dying, Jody tells Mike that he actually was killed in the car wreck all those years earlier.

Mike runs from the Tall Man and returns to Reggie in Death Valley. The Tall Man follows through the spacegate, chokes Reggie, and tosses Reggie to the ground. Mike summons his homemade sphere and it attacks the Tall Man. Mike’s eyes become spheres and he blows up the Tall Man by telepathically triggering the booby-trapped hearse to explode.

Another Tall Man comes out of the spacegate and forcibly removes the sphere from inside Mike’s skull. The Tall Man then takes the sphere back with him through the portal. Mike tells Reggie that he seems to be dying. Reggie promises to come back for Mike before collecting his shotgun and going through the spacegate in pursuit of the Tall Man.

Lying on the desert floor, Mike recalls riding in Reggie’s ice cream truck as a boy. In the past, Reggie seems to hear a disembodied speaking to him from another time, but Mike encourages him to dismiss it as they drive away in the truck.

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Review:

To appreciate “Phantasm IV: Oblivion,” or “Phantasm: OblIVion” if you insist, you first have to forgive all of the corners cut by writer/director Don Coscarelli in putting the film together.  This of course includes the usual “that didn’t actually happen” approach to smoothing out no longer convenient continuity bumps.  And instead of a purposeful, delineated storytelling intent motivating creativity, a fair portion of “Phantasm IV” comes from Coscarelli asking the question, “how can I put that unused footage from 1979 to good use?”

Caught with a character that had outlived her usefulness, “Phantasm III: Lord of the Dead” (review here) began with an unceremonious sendoff for Mike’s telepathic sweetheart Liz from “Phantasm II” (review here).  Burning to death before being decapitated by a dwarf within the first minute of that movie was a hero’s sendoff compared to how “Phantasm IV” treats poor little Tim from “Phantasm III.”

Reggie’s pint-sized partner, last seen being pulled through glass by a pair of disfigured hands, doesn’t even earn so much as a mention when “Oblivion” opens.  Reggie, last seen surrounded by a silver sphere swarm, is literally let off his levitation hook by the Tall Man, who simply dismisses the balls, says “meh,” and allows Reggie to immediately attend to the pressing matter of fixing his Hemicuda’s front tires.  It’s not like Reggie need be concerned about that boy who was just attacked by interdimensional zombies, after all.

After a montage of miscellaneous “Phantasm” series clips that look good as a highlight reel of the best action bits, but don’t compose any sort of sensible “Previously On…” recap, Mike drives away in search of answers about the Tall Man’s origin.  It takes some uncharacteristic coaxing from a vision of Mike’s dead brother Jody, but Reggie soon sets off after Mike.

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The Tall Man in front of L.A.'s El Rey Theatre.  Note the "Dunsmuir" street sign.  Dunsmuir House near Oakland was the original shooting location for Morningside Mortuary.  Coincidence or Easter egg?

For much of the movie, the two storylines play out separately, with neither of the main men on a noticeably intersecting arc until late in the last act.  Reggie’s thread follows a path of random encounters with a mutant state trooper and attractive blonde bystander.  Meanwhile, Mike experiences random visions and dreams, some of which are built by forcing the square peg of deleted “Phantasm” (review here) scenes into the round hole of a new storyline.  One wonders what “Phantasm IV” would have done for filler had it been made after home video special features became standard, when all of that previously unseen flashback footage would have already been a “Phantasm” Blu-ray bonus.

Nearly twenty years separates “Phantasm IV” from the original film, yet only seven or eight years has actually passed in the story’s timeline, as “Phantasm II,” “Lord of the Dead,” and “Oblivion” all take place one right after another.  There are a number of reasons why the “Phantasm” sequels don’t make for the best back-to-back-to-back viewing experience.  One of them is how much older everyone looks, even between “Lord of the Dead” and “Oblivion,” which filmed just four years apart.

Another reason why “Oblivion” has a harder time fitting in with the other sequels is because it has a more casual, less frenetic spirit about it.  The pace advances comparatively slower than previous films and the distinctively different storylines for Mike and Reggie have “Phantasm IV” feeling even more like a patchwork of loosely-connected vignettes.  Other than the clever way the ending uses the flashback footage, every other use of discarded “Phantasm” scenes shows its hand as a shoehorned insertion, rarely reading as an essential inclusion for the current movie.

It is still fun for fans to finally see some of those fabled shots of the Tall Man’s hanging or Jody’s alternate fate from the first film.  Though that partially explains why “Phantasm IV” is a film for the dedicated franchise base, and not necessarily casual viewers eager for cohesive, standalone horror entertainment.

Teasing the Tall Man’s origin as tinkering undertaker Jebediah Morningside is a terrific stroke, and possibly the first meaningful movement in the franchise’s mythology in quite some time.  As unmatched as he is at it, horror icon Angus Scrimm rarely has much to do as the Tall Man aside from scowling, opening one eye, and strutting menacingly in slow-motion.  “Phantasm IV” affords Scrimm the opportunity to truly act, briefly, in a kindly gentleman role no less, and it is a treat to see the switch in his usual onscreen demeanor.

Those familiar with the series know what to expect from the rest of “Phantasm IV.”  Tongue-in-cheek humor inspiring chuckles or eye rolls (e.g. Jennifer with the silver sphere breasts), fan service at the expense of logic (why in the world would Reggie have his old ice cream uniform with him?), and a whole mess of things making even less sense than that.  “Oblivion” has a lot of the characteristics that make it distinctly “Phantasm,” but the tired energy powering proceedings makes the movie the weakest entry in the series.

Review Score:  65

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