Bob Clark always surprises me. How can the same director create Porky’s, A Christmas Story, Black Christmas, Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Thingsand Deathdream? Here’s one more movie that doesn’t seem like it belongs in his list of films: a Jack the Ripper movie where the real-life killer battles with Sherlock Holmes.
Written by playwright John Hopkins (Thunderball) and based somewhat on Elwyn Jones’s book The Ripper File and the work of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Hopkins kept Holmes’ detective skills and scientific abilities while cutting out his drug use. Hopkins had a history of editing. He was removed from the movie version of Man of La Macha for deleting most of the songs from his script!
Peter O’Toole and Sir Laurence Olivier were originally cast as Holmes and Watson, but the two actors could not overcome their differences.
Instead, Christopher Plummer (Starcrash) and James Mason (Salem’s Lot) play Holmes and Watson here, but they aren’t the characters you’ve seen in other films. Holmes is more human and caring, while Watson’s medical skills take over instead so that he appears as anything but the bumbling fool that other actors portray him as. Mason would only take this role if he could play Watson this way and even went so far as to write two of his scenes.
David Hemmings (Deep Red) shows up as a police inspector; Susan Clark from TV’s Webster is Mary Kelly; Frank Finlay plays Inspector Lestrade, the same role he did in A Study in Terror; Anthony Quayle (who was also in A Study in Terror) plays Sir Charles Warren; Donald Sutherland is British spiritualist Robert Lees, who claimed to know who Jack the Ripper was and John Gielgud plays the Prime Minister.
With the police unable to stop the murders of Jack the Ripper, Holmes is approached by some concerned citizens who ask him to investigate. Soon, Holmes divines that the victims are all connected with Annie Crook, an institutionalized woman.
Much like the later From Hell, Freemasons get involved to protect their own. Even worse, Inspector Foxborough, the man in charge of it all, wants to the government to fall when they can’t solve the case.
This film was shot in England at the same time as The Shining and Alien (which was shot in the very same studio).
Of all the Ripper films I’ve watched this week, this one looks the best. It has that 70’s color look that I love so much mixed with some gorgeous visuals of London. I’ve always loved both Plummer and Mason, so seeing them play such classic characters was a real joy.
I love the scene where Holmes wins over the Chief Inspector with the Signs of Masonry, such as the Duegard of the Entered Apprentice (right hand placed palm down, placed over the left hand held palm up), the Sign of the Entered Apprentice (drawing the right hand from left to right across the throat), the Real Grip of a Master Mason (the handshake with the thumb and little finger extended) and the Sign of a Fellow Craft (drawing the right hand across the body from the left breast to the right hip).
These Signs all refer to the penalties for those who reveal secrets to outsiders, such as having your throat slit, your chest torn open and your heart ripped out. This refers to Hiram Abiff, who is the character of a lesson that third degree Masons must learn. The chief architect of King Solomon’s Temple, Hiram is killed by three men in the very temple that he has designed when he refuses to reveal the Master Masons’ secrets. This is to teach Masons the importance of fidelity and the certainty of death. When Holmes reveals that the Chief Inspector is a Thirty-Third degree Mason, he is able to speak directly to him about the fact that he’s actively covering up facts and turn the tables on the man.
It also points to the Masonic implications of the Ripper murders, with the throats of each woman being cut and their bodies being presented in ways that echo the way the three killers of Hiram were punished.
In my week of Jack the Ripper movies, I can honestly say that this was the best that I watched. It’s also the best Sherlock Holmes movie I’ve seen and one that does the best job of showing why Holmes and Watson have remained steadfast friends and worked so hard to defend the people of England.
Nicholas Meyer wrote the Sherlock Holmes novel The Seven-Per-Cent Solution and for directing the second, fourth and sixth Star Trek movies (you know that story that only the even ones are good?) as well as the TV movie The Day After which forced every kid in my 1983 elementary class to realize that we were all going to die in a nuclear holocaust. Time After Time is his directorial debut.
In 1893 London, H.G. Wells (Malcolm McDowell) is showing off his time machine to his dinner guests when the police arrive, on the hunt for Jack the Ripper, who they believe may be a surgeon friend of Wells, John Leslie Stevenson (the always welcome David Warner). By the time our author hero finds where the potential killer is, he’s stolen the time machine and is off for 1979 San Francisco.
Wells is shocked by our future, expecting it to be some kind of socialist utopia. Instead, he finds a world where even Jack the Ripper must admit is awash with horror and bloodshed. The maniac confesses to Wells that “Ninety years ago, I was a freak. Now… I’m an amateur.”
Our hero must protect his new love Amy Robbins (Mary Steenburgen), catch the killer and make it back in time — cue Huey Lewis — to London. Sadly, there was no time machine available to speed up this film, which confuses the words plotting and plodding. It’s a slow-moving affair that lumbers to a conclusion, but perhaps my brain is addled from years of Hong Kong cinema that rewards my short attention span.
That said, McDowell and Steenburgen have great chemistry, which makes plenty of sense when you realize that they fell in love making this movie and were married for nearly a decade. Also, despite how romantic the movie claims Wells was, his marriage to Robbins was anything but. He was an unapologetic cheater who believed that men could have as many lovers as they wanted while wives must be faithful.
Time After Time was rebooted in 2016 as an ABC TV series which only lasted for five episodes. It completely slipped by me, to be perfectly honest.
The Late, Great Planet Earth started as a best-selling 1970 book, released as the hippie occult generation’s dreams flamed out at Altamont and was annihilated on Cielo Drive. Written by Hal Lindsey with Carole C. Carlson, it was adapted by Rolf Forsberg and Robert Amram and became the film we’re about to get into.
That’s the thing about tabloids in the 1980’s. The world was constantly about to end. One of my first tabloid memories was in a SHOP ‘n SAVE near Ross Park Mall when I was probably 11 or so. A man was cutting the UPC codes off tabloids near the registers and I asked him what he was doing. He explained to me that he was removing the Number of the Beast and handed me a mimeographed explanation before security dragged him away.
The world was on the constant brink of collapse — pre-millennial tension — and from an unhinged Catholic church in New Castle that was eternally battling Communism to finding copies of Jack Chick tracts that promised the endtimes were coming soon (“HAW HAW HAW”), I was sure that Armageddon was happening before I’d get into middle school.
The Late, Great Planet Earth was the first Christian prophecy book to be published by a secular publisher (Bantam, if you’re interested). By 1990, it sold 28 million copies. This is the movie that resulted.
On Wikipedia, they refer to The Late, Great Planet Earth as “literalist, premillennial, dispensational eschatology.”
Literalist: A reading of the Bible that takes it literally and doesn’t attempt to determine the meaning or symbolism behind the Word.
Premillennial: Before 2000, the world kind of went crazy for a bit. It didn’t recover.
Dispensational: This religious interpretive system and metanarrative for the Bible divides time into eras.
Eschatology: A division of theology that is devoted to studying the endtimes.
By studying passages in the books of Daniel, Ezekiel and Revelation, Lindsey suggests that there are signs that Armageddon started when Israel was formed in 1948. Throw in an increase in war, famine and natural disasters, then you can see why tabloids routinely featured doomsday predictions. Soon, the European Union would be ruled by the Antichrist and go to war with Russian over Isreal. It was just a matter of time.
The beauty of this movie is that it doesn’t just feature interviews with authors like Tal Brooke and Paul Ehrlich or experts such as Dr. Emile Benoit and Dr. Norman Borlaug. It has a witch in it named Babette who explains why people are starting to believe in the occult and even claims that most New Age gurus are part of the Bible’s prophecy of false prophets. And then it gets even better, because Orson Welles lends his amazing voice to the film, making even the flimsiest of thoughts into concrete truths.
Imagine a movie that infuses Biblical ravings with the mondo framework. Congratulations — you’ve just envisioned what this movie is all about. If none of these revelations ever came true, that’s fine. Lindsey would be back with a new book every few years, ready to explain to you that he wasn’t wrong and what would be happening next. As for Orson, the money for this probably went right into one of his unfinished projects.
If you’re enjoying what this movie is revealing, Lindsey and Carlson wrote several sequels, including Satan Is Alive and Well on Planet Earth and The 1980s: Countdown to Armageddon. Today, he hosts a right-wing news report on the TBN network known as The Hal Lindsey Report.
Scorpion Releasing put out a blu ray of this and you can get it from Diabolik DVD.
René Cardona Jr. didn’t stop with making a softcore porn shark movie with Tintorera…Tiger Sharkor the utterly baffling Bermuda Triangle. Now, he’s back to shock you senseless with the kind of true retelling of the Jonestown Massacre, Guyana: Cult of the Damned. He’s no stranger to strangeness — after all, his father made Santa Claus vs. The Devil.
Reverend James Johnson — just pretend they say Jim Jones — the fanatic and paranoid leader of the Johnson Temple — again, let’s just say People’s Temple — is about to move his 1,000 followers from San Francisco to Johnstown — Jonestown — in the jungle of Guyana, all so he can create a utopia that’s far away from the sins of the rest of th world.
If you know anything of the real tale, Johnson soons gets out of control, inflicting brutal punishment on anyone that dares go against him. He becomes convinced that a conspiracy — the same one that killed both Kennedys, Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X — is ready to take him out.
That’s when Congressman Lee O’Brien — Leo Ryan — goes on a fact finding mission and discovers that it’s more like a slave colony than heaven on Earth. And if they don’t get the people out now, they’ll soon go to Russia. By the end of the film, Johnson has unleashed hit squads on the Congressman, the reporters he’s brought along and the defectors they’re saving from Johnson. And that’s when everyone starts drinking the Kool-Aid (for the sake of fact, it may have either been that brand or the generic Flavor Aid, which they camp also had in its supplies; the flavor was grape, in case you’re wondering).
This movie is rife with historical fallacies, but what can you expect from a Mexican grindhouse movie that was released 14 months after the actual incident? You may notice that most of Johnstown was white in this film, while the reality is that most of the People’s Temple members were black. Also, Susan Ames — Susan Amos — is murdered in this movie by a man with a knife, but the truth is that she killed her two youngest children and then herself with a butcher knife and asked her daugher Liane to kill her, then kill herself.
There are two cuts of this, with the Mexican cut adding 8 more minutes of torture and gore, if you’re looking for that kind of thing. I mean, if you’re reading this far, you probably are.
Stuart Whitman (the boxing priest from Demonoid) owns this movie as the Reverend. He’s just chewing the screen up, as he totally should, giving huge speeches and being a maniac. This is like a dream scum movie role and Whitman grips it and wrings all he can out of it. It’s pretty much as perfect casting as you can get.
Gene Barry plays the Congressman, Bradford Dillman (Piranha) plays the doctor of Johnstown, Yvonne De Carlo plays Susan and you even get a special guest appearance by Joesph Cotten! And look out for Hugo Stiglitz from Nightmare City and Nadiuska, who played Conan the Barbarian‘s mom!
There was a later TV movie, Guyana Tragedy: The Story of Jim Jones, which won Powers Boothe the 1980 Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Limited Series or a Special. But for my money, I always go with the grindhouse version of things. This is a sordid, grim affair and that’s pretty much why you’re going to watch it.
You know how you can tell how scuzzy 1979’s Play Motel is? I had a hard time finding a SFW poster to share along with this article. The giallo genre has the tendency to veer toward the seamier side of the tracks, but this one jumps into the filth, rolls around on it and then never takes a shower.
Patrizia and Roberto (Ray Lovelock, The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue, Murder Rock) are a married couple who’ve just stayed at the Play Motel, a no-tell motel where couples meet up for “adult encounters.” Kind of like DJ Island, the swinger’s club on the outskirts of my hometown where the high school English teacher who told me I’d never become a writer overdosed on Viagra in the hot tub.
They discover the body of Maria Longhi, a famous man’s wife, in the trunk of their car. After calling the police, they discover the body has been moved. Following giallo tradition, our heroic couple decides to help the police with the case.
We get to see some of the scenes within the Play Motel, like a couple where the man dresses like the devil and his lover dresses like a nun. There’s some blackmail too, along the way. Just where the film seems like it’s becoming a mystery story, it decides to throw in a ten-minute long love scene. To the shock of the film’s leads, the producers inserted hardcore scenes into the film upon release, which I’ve only seen in one other giallo — The Bloodsucker Leads the Dance, which also features Patrizia Webley. There’s also an appearance by adult star Marina Hedman, whose debut mainstream film was in Lucio Fulci’s My Sister-in-Law, opposite giallo queen Edwige Fenech.
Is it any surprise that this film comes from Mario Gariazzo, the deranged mind behind the most morally repugnant rip off of The Exorcist I’ve ever seen — that’s a compliment — Enter the Devil?
If there’s one nice thing you can take away from Play Motel, it’s the theme song. Seriously, it sounds like the most demented Wings song ever. It really feels like it comes from a completely different movie!
Want to see this for yourself? You can grab the blu ray from Raro Video or watch it on Shudder.
When I was 16 years old, I probably watched Phantasm II every single day. Honestly, I was completely obsessed with the film and its gliding metal spheres that promised destruction every time they whizzed past the screen. At that stage of my life, I hated where I was and couldn’t wait to be where I was going. Its nihilistic tone and brutal violence suited me just fine. In fact, when I finally watched the original film, I found it silly and stupid by comparison.
Now that I’m in my 40’s, I can see how totally stupid sixteen year old me was.
Phantasm (1979)
Directed, written, photographed, and edited by auteur Don Coscarelli, the original Phantasm makes much more sense if viewed less as a linear film and more as a collection of imagery, a “complete movie” to use the words of Fulci.
However, if we were to look at the basics of the story, they’d concern the evil Tall Man (Angus Scrimm), an undertaker who comes from a red dimension where he transforms dead people into dwarf zombies and commands an army of flying metal spheres. He’s obsessed with a young boy named Mike (Michael Baldwin), who is trying to convince his brother Jody (Bill Thornbury) and friend Reggie (Reggie Bannister) that their town is being taken over.
Sure. It’s kind of about that. It’s also a surrealistic rumination on how teenagers see death and the worry that they won’t be there for those they love. Or worse, that those they love won’t be there for them.
This is the kind of movie that has a villain who can also become a woman, the Lady in Lavender, who transforms back into the Tall Man at the moment the men orgasm. There’s some strange commentary at play here, right? It also has fortune tellers who tell you that fear is the killer, characters dying and coming back and characters that lived actually dying and chopped off fingers filled with yellow blood being transformed into winged monsters that can only be stopped by garbage disposals. And it’s also the kind of film that can completely stop the narrative for everyone to play “Sitting Here at Midnight.”
For all the narrative and psychological questions that Phantasm raises, I often wonder: exactly what kind of ice cream man wears a leather vest over his uniform?
This initial offering also introduces a trope that will endure for the rest of the series: at the end, when it seems like everything is making sense,nothing does and the villains end up exploding out of a mirror or from hiding, dragging our heroes back into the void.
I’ve watched Phantasm at least once a year since my first viewing and each time I watch it, I am struck by its strange power. Unlike so many of today’s independent movies, it looks and feels like a big budget film, except it’s been beamed to Earth from another dimension.
Phantasm is available on Shudder along with commentary by Joe Bob Briggs.
Phantasm II (1988)
Liz Reynolds is a young woman who has a psychic bond with Mike, the hero of the first film, as well as the Tall Man. She finds them in her nightmares, where she begs for Mike to save her before her grandfather dies and is taken away by the villain.
We then see how Mike escaped the end of the last film — Reggie saved him by blowing up the house, but our hero has been institutionalized from seven years. He then must convince Reggie that the Tall Man really exists. He learns when the Tall Man blows up his entire family (yes, this movie has two exploding houses within minutes of one another).
It’s time for a road trip — not the last they will take — that takes them to Périgord, Oregon. Liz’s grandfather dies and her sister Jeri disappears. The priest who does the funeral knows all about the Tall Man, so he desecrates the body which rises anyway.
On their way to Périgord, Reggie picks up a hitchhiker named Alchemy who looks like a ghost they saw earlier. This is where you learn the lessons that Reggie will never learn for the rest of the series: never pick up hitchhikers, never sleep with strange women and every girl who will actually have sex with you is really the Tall Man.
Regardless, Liz arrives at the mortuary where she learns that her grandmother is now one of the Tall Man’s lurkers (she was taken by her grandfather, who we can also assume is part of the Tall Man’s crew). The priest gets killed by a ball, which is always nice. And then one of the saddest moments in the Phantasm series happens: the Tall Man blows up Reggie’s Hemicuda.
What follows are plenty of guns (a quad-barrelled shotgun!), a chainsaw battle, more spheres, the portal to the Red Dimension and the Tall Man pumped full of embalming fluid, which causes him to melt all over the place.
Alchemy has taken a hearse, but she’s really the Tall Man, killing Reggie (again, but of course, not really) and Mike and Liz convinced they’re trapped in a dream. The Tall Man utters the best line of the movie: “No, it’s not!” before pulling them through the back window.
While the lowest budget Universal film of the 1980’s, they also exerted a lot of control over the film. The, well, phantasmagorical style of the first movie was asked to be toned down with a more linear plotline and character voiceovers. Honestly, any time you hear a voiceover in a film, you should read that as a note from the producers saying, “No one will understand this if we don’t spell it out to them.”
Plus, no dreams were allowed in the final cut and a female romantic lead was created for Mike. And most distressing, Universal wanted to recast both leads but allowed A. Michael Baldwin and Reggie Bannister (neither of them had acted in the nine years in between the films, with Reggie actually working at a funeral home as an embalmer) to audition for the roles they originated. Big of them. Coscarelli was allowed to keep one of them in a Sophie’s Choice and went with Bannister, casting James Le Gros in Baldwin’s place. Seriously, were the Universal executives supervillains? That’s some crazy thinking there.
Actually, the Tall Man has plenty of great lines here, like “You think that when you die you go to Heaven… you come to us!” This movie pretty much dominated my teenage years and nothing that followed it would ever top it. But hey — they took three chances trying.
Phantasm III: Lord of the Dead (1994)
Universal Studios was going to put this out in theaters before differences with Coscarelli, yet the direct to video release of this film was in the top 100 rentals of that year — ah, the magic days when video rental could help a movie succeed!
Right after the end of the last film, the Tall Man comes back from the Red Dimension just as the hearse with Liz and Mike in it explodes. Reggie finds that Liz is dead and saves Mike from the Tall Man by threatening to set off a grenade. The Tall Man just laughs and says that he will come from Mike when he’s well again. This takes two years of hospital time, as he wakes up after a dream with his brother Jody and the Tall Men in it. The minute he wakes up, his nurse turns into a demon with a ball inside her skull.
Soon enough, the Tall Man is back, transforming Jody into a sphere and taking Mike with him, sending Reggie on a road trip. He ends up in a small town where three gangsters — somehow this movie becomes The People Under the Stairs for a bit — throw him into the trunk of his car but are thwarted by Tim, a young kid who has been fighting the forces of the Tall Man.
Of note, Tim’s house is the same house from House!
Much like how Princess from The Walking Dead comic has to be directly influenced by Alma from Warriors of the Wasteland, the way Carl Grimes dresses seems like too much of a coincidence when we see Tim in the film.
Reggie and Tim make their way to a mausoleum where they team up with Rocky, a tough woman who is good with nunchakus. They follow a whole bunch of hearses to the Tall Man’s base, where they rescue Mike and use the portal to cut off the Tall Man’s hands, which of course become monsters.
Mike then talks to his brother who is now a ball and learns that the Tall Man is making an army to conquer every other dimension, using human brains inside his spheres and shrunken down dead people as his slaves. “There are thousands of them!” yells Mike as the Looters wheel in Tim, who is saved at the last minute by Jody, still a metal ball. Whew!
Reggie and Rocky arrive just in time to shoot the Tall Man with a spear and liquid nitrogen just as a gold ball emerges from his head. Reggie destroys that as everyone learns that Mike also has a gold ball inside his head that turns his eyes silver. He warns Reggie to stay away from him and leaves with his brother, still a ball.
Rocky leaves just as Reggie is pinned to the wall by a ton of spheres. Just as Tim tries to save him, the Tall Man comes back to say, “It’s never over!” and pulls Tim through a window.
There was an alternate ending filmed where Reggie and Tim travel to Alaska, where they bury the Tall Man’s gold sphere in the ice and leave a plaque over it that says “Here Lies The Tall Man – R.I.P.” Reggie then exclaims, “Now, all we have to worry about is global warming” as they leave.
As a rule, the less money the Phantasm films have in the budget, the better they generally are. This one is considered the roughest by fans as it deviates so much from the storyline. I’d argue that these films have no real storyline and are all over the place, necessitating the use of stimulants any time you try and watch them.
You can watch this on Shudder with Joe Bob Briggs commentary.
Phantasm IV: Oblivion (1998)
This one opens right where the last one ended, with Mike leaving town and Reggie trapped. The Tall Man lets him go to play one last game while the ball form of Jody becomes human long enough to tell Reggie that he has to search for Mike.
Reggie saves a woman named Jennifer from some of the Tall Man’s soldiers and just when it seems like our ice cream dude is finally about to get lucky, her breasts rip apart to reveal two silver balls — yes, really this happens — before Reggie uses a sledgehammer and his tuning form to stop her.
Mike has flashbacks to his younger days — using footage shot during the original Phantasm that was never used — to try and determine who the tall man is. He tries to kill himself, only to be stopped by the Tall Man. He escapes through a gateway where he meets a kindly old man named Jebediah Morningside, who looks exactly like the Tall Man (the old lady on the porch is supposed to be the fortune teller from Phantasm).
Then, Mike learns that he can move things with his brain. Jody finds him just in time to escape the Tall Man again.
Reggie arrives in Death Valley, fighting off some dwarves as Mike and Jody reappear, yet Mike tells him not to trust Jody. Mike and Jody then go through another gate back to Jebediah’s house, where they learn how he created the first interdimensional gate and became the Tall Man, who chases them back to another cemetery where Jody turns on his brother. Mike kills his brother with a sphere he built out of car parts and runs from the Tall Man.
If at this point your head is spinning from reading this, imagine watching it. This installment tries hard to keep the crazy narrative shifts from the beginning, constantly shifting the questions when you think you have all the answers.
Mike and Reggie use the car sphere and the hearse’s motor, now an interdimensional bomb, to destroy the Tall Man, who of course emerges seconds later from the gate, unharmed. He reveals that he is one of many as he removes the gold sphere from Mike head and leaves. Reggie arms himself and jumps through the gate, just as Mike has a memory of them riding in his ice cream truck together.
This installment’s budget was minuscule when compared to the last two Phantasm films. In fact, if you look at inflation, it was shot on a lower budget than the original. That’s why so many scenes are set in the desert. And the film wasn’t afraid to call in some favors, like the swarm of spheres, which was created by fans and KNB cutting Coscarelli a break on the cost of their effects.
Sadly, this movie could have been even bigger. Roger Avery, who co-wrote Pulp Fiction as well as Silent Hill, is a super fan of the Phantasm Series and suggested an epic ending called Phantasm 1999 A.D. This post-apocalyptic film would also star Bruce Campbell but cost way too much to get made in the pre-Kickstarter world.
Here’s the synopsis from IMDB, which will make you crestfallen that we never got this sequel: “The year is 2012 and there are only three U.S. states left. Between New York and California is the wasteland known as the Plague Zone. Unfortunately, the evil Tall Man controls that area. Since many people are dead, the Tall Man is able to make thousands of dwarf slaves for his planet daily in the Mormon Mausoleum. Besides him, the other residents are “baggers,” human-like creatures that are infected by the Tall Man’s blood, the dwarves, and, of course, the silver spheres, all trying to break out of the barrier that contains them and into the real world. A group of hi-tech troops are sent in to destroy the red dimension where the Tall Man gets his power. Reggie follows so he can find Mike after a series of nightmares he had. Will they be able to finally destroy the Tall Man for good?”
There’s one awesome scene in this one, where the Tall Man chases Mike down Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles, which is completely deserted, an effect achieved by shooting it on Thanksgiving morning.
Oh yeah — where is Tim? The kid who ended up being a main character in the last film was to have been eaten by the dwarves in this one, but the budget kept that from being filmed.
You can also watch this one with Joe Bob Briggs on Shudder.
Phantasm: Ravager (2016)
Directed by David Hartman and produced by Coscarelli, this final sequel was done in secret and announced a few months before it was released. It’s the final word — one imagines — in the series, as it ends at least Reggie’s story. Or maybe it doesn’t. It’s hard to tell with Phantasm.
In development since 2004, this one starts with Reggie still hunting the Tall Man. Or perhaps he’s suffering from dementia in an assisted living facility. Or perhaps he’s at a farm where a potential love interest and everyone but him get killed by the Tall Man’s spheres. Or maybe he’s in a hospital in the 1860’s and there to die alongside Jebediah before he became the Tall Man or maybe even in a reality where he never becomes the Tall Man. And oh yeah, the Lady in Lavender shows up again.
The Tall Man then meets Reggie in 1979, where he tells him everything that will happen and offers to save his family if he never gets involved. He replies that he’d rather be loyal to his friends Mike and Jody.
My favorite part of this one is the gigantic spheres that are battling whole cities as Mike leads a hi-tech future squad (shades of the Avery script) against the Tall Man’s forces. Reggie has been in a coma for ten years (shades of Mike in Phantasm II) and now, the Tall Man has taken over the world.
The ending is up for debate: does Reggie die in the real world? Is that a dream? Is the reality where Reggie, Mike and Jody — joined by heroic dwarf Chunk and the surprise return of Rocky from Phantasm III — continue to fight the Tall Man’s gigantic spheres the truth? Are all of them?
As Reggie himself said when he was on with Joe Bob for the Shudder marathon, “Well, it’s Phantasm.” Eventually you have to stop asking questions and just enjoy. I guess it’s just nice to see everyone together again, no matter if the last film doesn’t live up to what it could be.
You can — you guessed it — check this one out on Shudder with Joe Bob Briggs.
In case you didn’t know, the Star Wars character Captain Phasma was named for this movie and Star Wars: The Force Awakens director J.J. Abrams is such a big fan of the film he personally oversaw the new cleaned up version of the original film.
So many movies can cite Phantasm as an influence — Poltergeist 2, A Nightmare on Elm Street, One Dark Night and the TV series Supernatural has its protagonists drive around in a black muscle car…kind of just like Phantasm.
Its influence can also be felt in the world of metal, as Tormentor covered the theme, and the line “The funeral is about to begin, sir” has been sampled by the bands Splatterhouse, Marduk and Mortician. You can also hear the band Entombed play the theme at the end of their song “Left Hand Path.”
Someday, someone is going to get the idea to make an entirely new Phantasm. But it won’t be so strange and it won’t be so special. Until that time comes, we’ll always have five movies — one awesome, a few ok and a few stinkers that I still love — to enjoy. And remember: “If this one doesn’t scare you, you’re already dead!”
Enzo G. Castellari gets plenty of love around these parts. After all, he brought us 1990: The Bronx Warriors, Escape from the Bronx and Warriors of the Wasteland, amongst others. Of course, we already covered his JawsXerox that is The Last Shark this week, but that’s not the only shark movie he made. And get this — he’s bringing Franco Nero along for the ride. And you know how we feel about Franco (Top Line), for he makes all things crappy, wonderful.
Mike Di Donato (Nero) is a man with a past, living a hermit’s life on a sea island while his woman works at the market. We meet him after he beats up an entire bar full of people with no problem just to rescue one loud troublemaker, who becomes his partner.
The past never stays buried — an unidentified organization wants Mike’s help in taking back the one hundred million dollars that have sunk beneath the ocean. Mike’s the only guy who can do it — but he planned on grabbing it himself. There are also tons of sharks (and a comical paragliding sequence) to contend with.
There’s also quite a bit of wacky music from the De Angelis brothers, who also recorded as Oliver Onions. They did the music for a metric ton (well, maybe 1000 kilograms, as Italy follows the metric system) of Italian films, such as Torso, Death Rage, A Blade in the Dark and, of course, Yor, Hunter from the Future. Becca would like everyone reading this to know that they basically take one song and loop it for the entire movie. So if you like this song, you’re in for a treat.
The Great Alligator should be, well, great. And there are moments where it feels like it’s going to be, as it attempts to be a mash-up of Jawsand Cannibal Holocaust, which again, seems like a great idea. Throw in the gorgeous Barbara Bach before she married Ringo Starr, Claudio Cassinelli (Murder Rock) and Mel Ferrer — who went from the A-list and marrying Audrey Hepburn to appearing in some of the most crazed films, like The Visitor, Nightmare City and Eaten Alive! to name but three — and you have a cast ready to make it happen. And the central theme of the movie — tourists anger the god of a resort island who then becomes a giant alligator and eats them all — is great, too.
Turns out that Kuma, that river god, doesn’t like how Mel Ferrer runs Paradise House and wants none of his native people to work with the whites any longer. The natives then wipe out anyone that works there, no matter where they come from and Cassinelli and Bach must climb the waterfall that Stacy Keach fell off of in The Mountain of the Cannibal God to find the only person who may be able to save them, Prophet Jameson (Dr. Menard from Zombi 2).
That said, once the face painted natives and a giant alligator attack everyone, burning down Paradise House and menacing screaming tourists, who survives and what will be left of them is up for grabs. Look for appearances by Bobby Rhodes (the pimp from Demons), Romano Puppo (Trash’s father from Escape from the Bronx) and Sylvia Collatina (Mae Freudenstein, the ghost girl of The House by the Cemetery)!
The huge body count, numerous alligator attacks and attempts at being something more than a Spielberg clone — outside of the way the attacks are filmed and that Ferrer keeps everything a secret so tourists keep coming — make this a movie that I enjoyed on some level. But much like Martino’s post-giallo efforts, I keep wishing for him to go from simply good to flat out amazing. The ideas are there. The execution, however, is not.
We’ve covered Zombi2 before. If you’ve spent any length of time speaking to me, no doubt you’ve probably heard me go on and on about either this movie or another Lucio Fulci film. But the truth is, Blue Underground new 4K version of Zombie is the absolute best looking version I’ve ever seen, making it feel like I’m seeing one of my favorite movies for the very first time.
There’s a fact covered by both Stephen Thrower and Guillermo del Toro on the bonus features of this blu ray that sum up why this movie is so essential: when other horror films only promised shock, this is one of the first times that it was truly delivered. Even though Romero’s Dawn of the Dead is packed with Tom Savini’s trademark gore, the zombies therein are blue and colorful, the blood is neon red and there are moments of slapstick and humor. There is none of that in Zombie. From the moment the police arrive upon the boat, everything is filthy, covered in grue and worms and festering decay. The dead here are truly dead, continuing to rot, spreading their putrefaction onto the living as they rise from shallow graves, mouths full of insects.
The collectible booklet features a new essay by Stephen Thrower that highlights a very important point. No matter how successful this film is — both artistically and financially — it has never been appreciated. Even an Academy Award-winning filmmaker like del Toro can proclaim that this is one of his favorite films, one that features an economy of art and storytelling while feeling like it emerged from another world, a film that could not be, made by a borderline insane director who has “gotten high off his own supply.”
How much do I love Zombie? I have three copies of it: on DVD, then I upgraded to Blue Underground’s 2K blu ray a few years ago and now, this 4K reissue. The first time I saw it was at the drive-in and a pivotal moment sold me on the film: during the infamous moment where Olga Karlatos meets a giant shard of wood eye first, someone opened their car door and puked all over the parking lot. That’s the kind of review that means more than any of the horrible reviews that appear in Thrower’s essay.
There are moments of sheer bliss here. What other movie has the audacity to include a zombie fighting a shark underwater, in a scene of breathtaking stuntman bravado? Even hardened gorehounds have to pay respect to this film that doesn’t flinch from horrific moments of flesh being devoured. Where Herschell Gordon Lewis promised a camera that did not look away and showed you the fakest of blood and guts, here realism and disgust rule the day.
Zombie is the movie that reignited Fulci’s career. It is the film that created the golden age of Italian splatter cinema. And it’s proof of one of my maxims: in a world of elevated horror that desperately wants to escape the exploitation ghetto, this is a movie that can never and will never be embraced by the mainstream. It is too raw, too brutal, too slick with blood.
Blue Underground’s new 4K version looks as gorgeous as a film about zombies tearing out peoples’ throats can look. I’ve always been in love with the look and color tones of Fulci’s late 70’s and 80’s output. The effect is multiplied here, looking at once clearer and grimier than it ever has before.
This three disk package includes new commentary by Troy Howarth, author of Splintered Visions: Lucio Fulci and His Films, as well as the Ian McCulloch commentary track, trailers, TV and radio spots, gallery and del Toro intro from the 2K blu ray. A second disk contains the extras from that package and a third disk contains the soundtrack to the film. Best of all, there are three different covers, with your choices of a zombie’s face, the zombies on the bridge or the injury to Paola’s eye.
My only negative — and it’s incredibly minor — is that the enclosed book is difficult to read with its white on black type. Several of the pages appear to have printing that is off register, resulting in thin and difficult to read type. If you have older eyes, reading Thrower’s essay is near impossible, which is a shame because its packed with valuable insights and information, much like his interview on the disk itself.
If you are a horror fan and this movie isn’t in your collection, you don’t have a collection. If there were a word stronger than essential or mandatory, that would be the one I would use here. Other than a crowded theater or drive-in with an engaged, appreciative and loud audience, there is no better place or way to watch this film than this new edition.
Disclaimer: Thanks to Bue Underground and their PR team for sending us a copy of this set. That has no bearing on this review, as obviously, we were going to love it no matter what.
Originally airing on January 20, 1979, the pilot called Salvage debuted to high ratings — and was brought to us by Harve Bennett, who previously gave us The Six Million Dollar Man. It was an intriguing start to a series. Harry Broderick (Andy Griffith) and his Jettison Scrap and Salvage Co. have a dream, as stated in the show’s opening words: “I want to build a spaceship, go to the moon, salvage all the junk that’s up there, bring it back and sell it.”
Along with former astronaut Addison “Skip” Carmichael and NASA fuel expert Melanie “Mel” Slozar (who have a past history), they create The Vulture, a spaceship made entirely from reclaimed salvage and powered by monohydrazine (Isaac Asimov was the science consultant for this program).
The TV movie was followed by 15 episodes (20 were produced), with the last 4 shows only running decades later. Despite the initial success, ABC put this show up against WKRP in Cincinnati and Little House on the Prarie. That explains why it died a quick death.
I remember loving the initial TV movie and this was discussed often in our home as a series that had so much potential and was stopped too quickly. Luckily, CBS Late Night would replay the original pilot and the two-part episodes “Golden Orbit” and “Hard Water” as movies. CBS Late Night was an amazing, wonderful way to spend the summer as a kid in the 1970’s and 80’s, as in the pre-digital (and even VCR era) it was the only way to see shows like Kolchak: The Night Stalker, The Avengers, Return of the Saint, Thriller and The Prisoner. That said, a 60-minute show would be stretched out and padded with commercials. But we didn’t have many options back then!
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