Killing is an art form. That’s what the Professor — returning from Sidaris’ film Seven— says before giving our heroes a ton of weapons. They’re gonna need them after double agent Picasso Trigger is assassinated in Paris by even more duplicitous big bad Miguel Ortiz (Rodrigo Obregon, who shows up in plenty more Andy Sidaris films). Now, he’s after anyone who worked for the Agency in the wake of his brother’s death.
Sadly, there’s no Cody or Rowdy Abeline around. Travis, another relative, appears. However, Donna (Dona Speir), Taryn (Hope Marie Carlton) and Edy (Cynthia Brimhall) are back, joined by November 1984 Playmate of the Month Roberta Vasquez as Pantera, Guich Koock as L.G. Abilene, Bruce Penhall from CHiPs as Hondo, Patty Duffek as Pattycakes and Kym Malin as Kym (hey, they can’t all be crazy names).
It’s an Andy Sidaris film, so none of the good guys can shoot a gun to save their lives, there’s a cane that shoots both shotgun and mortar rounds, exploding boomerangs and RC cars, as well as more showers than anyone has ever taken in 99 minutes.
They don’t make movies like this anymore. I’m not sure who else — other than probably me — wants to see James Bond-esque spy adventure with wacky gizmos while everyone is in Speedos and spandex. I know it’s silly and yet I love this film as one does a childhood friend who has never grown up and moved out of their mother’s house. Actually, more films today should look to be as entertaining as this.
Plus, how great of a title is Picasso Trigger? It just begs you to watch whatever it is.
Somebody, somewhere, probably in South Africa where this was made, thought that Space Mutiny was a good idea. Certainly, it has an all-star cast (well, for me). It has great special effects (stolen from Battlestar Galactica). And it has…well, nothing else going for it. I really can’t even fathom how anyone looked at the final results and said, “Cut. Print. Magic.”
This entire movie takes place on the Southern Sun, a generation ship that carries a large number of families on their way to colonize a new world. For over thirteen generations, it has seen people live and die who will never leave the walls of the ship until it reaches its destination.
The fact that he’ll never leave the ship and see another planet doesn’t feel right to Elijah Kalgan (Danger: Diabolik star John Philip Law!). Along with the ship’s Chief Engineer and some space pirates, he uses the ship’s police group, the Enforcers, to hijack the Southern Sun and take it toward another system. Hence, a Space Mutiny.
As all of this is happening, an important professor is about to visit the ship. He dies as his shuttle lands, but his pilot, Dave Ryder (Reb Brown, who is Yor, Hunter from the Future!) survives. For weeks, Kalgan takes over the ship while the flight deck is sealed off. But Commander Jansen (Cameron Mitchell!) has a plan. Ruder and Jansen’s daughter Dr. Lea Jansen (Cisse Cameron, whose first movie was Billy Jack) will take back the ship.
Yes, this is a Star Wars ripoff bold enough to call a female character Lea and have her look pretty much exactly like Debbie Reynolds. It’s also rife with errors, supposedly because its original director, Dave Winters, was called away because of a death in the family. Winters also directed the filmed concert of Alice Cooper’s Welcome to My Nightmare, The Last Horror Film with Joe Spinell and Caroline Munro and, of course, Thrashin’, a movie that was constantly checked out of my local video store.
For example, the engineering areas of the ship were filmed in an industrial building with very 1980’s looking brick walls and concrete floors. The bridge? That should look high tech, right? Nope. It literally looks like an office cubicle farm. And while the guys wear silver or white jumpsuits, the ladies for some reason all get to wear spandex camel toe creations.
Why should we be upset that one of the officers, Lt. Lemont, is dramatically killed off in a scene when she shows up just fine in the very next one? And be on the look out for that Lorne Greene cameo via a stock shot of the bridge! Truly, Space Mutiny is a movie above such concerns. I mean, how do you can explain a ship that is in space, but the windows show blue skies outside?
Cameron Mitchell made this one a family affair, with his daughter Camille Mitchell doing the voice for an alien named Jennara and his son Chip is in this as Blake, a mustachioed member of Kalgan’s gang.
You have to see Space Mutiny to believe it. You can watch it on Amazon Prime, or choose to see it with either Mystery Science Theater 3000or Rifftrax commentary.
Everybody got really excited about Horror Comedy Week and had plenty of requests, so many that I’ve worked on this second week of films. This one was requested by Adam Cicco, who I’ve been friends with a long time and was on our World Series of Pop Culture team when we tried out for the VH1 show. That’s a story for another time.
Joe Piscopo was a big deal in the 1980’s. He and Eddie Murphy were the only two members of the 1980 cast of Saturday Night Live to stay on after Dick Ebersol took it over. His impressions of Frank Sinatra were his calling card and even the Chairman of the Board loved what Joe did with him. Supposedly, he got so into the character that he’d refuse to do certain sketches, saying “Frank wouldn’t do that.”
After leaving in 1984, he had a comedy special, released an album and started appearing in movies, notably as Danny Vermin in Johnny Dangerously and Moe Dickstein in Wise Guys. Dead Heat comes near the end of him being a movie star, although he’s appeared in several more in the past few decades. He now supports Donald Trump and has a radio show in New York City.
But let’s talk about Dead Heat, a movie that horror fans truly don’t remember.
Detectives Roger Mortis (Treat Williams) and Doug Bigelow (Piscopo) start the film in the midst of a violent jewel robbery. For some reason, the criminals take bullet after bullet and survive, which means that the guys have to go extreme to defeat them. After a trip to the morgue, they learn that the criminals already had autopsy scars and records. There’s also a harrowing trip to a Chinatown butcher shop where barbecued corpses of animals come back to violent life. Look for pro wrestler Professor Toru Tanaka in this scene!
The detectives meet with the PR person of Dante Laboratories, Randi James, and get a tour of the labs. As Doug encounters a reanimated biker, Roger is knocked into a decompression room (used to humanely kill animals used in testing) and dies. One of the doctors in the lab, Doctor Rebecca Smythers, and Doug use the machine to bring Roger back from the dead.
Now, our hero has no heartbeat, his skin is cold to the touch and he’ll be a puddle of gore in 12 hours. Plenty of time to close this case.
Roger goes to Randi’s house where two thugs attack them. She explains to him that she’s the daughter of a rich industrialist, Arthur P. Laudermilk (Vincent Price!). After learning that he can either save his life or solve the crime, Roger goes to get more clues. At Laudermilk’s tomb, Randi reveals that she isn’t really his daughter, but his protege.
When they get back to Randi’s home, Doug has been killed, drowned upside down in a fishbowl. This movie suddenly has taken a super dark turn that surprised me, but it’s not done yet. Randi looks at Roger as she begins to decompose, as she was one of the first experiments. Seriously, this scene totally took me by surprise. I didn’t expect two of the main characters to violently be destroyed like this. It’s not pretty and it really breaks what had been a funny buddy cop movie with supernatural elements up until this point.
Roger confronts the head coroner Dr. Ernest McNab (Darren McGavin!) who ends up getting the upper hand on our hero and locking him in an ambulance with Dr. Rebecca’s dead body. Man, everyone is getting killed! Our hero emerges from this trap looking like a scarred up zombie.
He makes his way to the hospital, where McNab and a resurrected Laudermilk are auctioning off the resurrection machine to the highest bidder. Almost everyone dies, but McNab reveals his final boss: a reanimated Doug, who is now an obedient zombie. Roger somehow restores his memory and they hook up McNab to the machine and he promptly explodes. Laudermilk begs them to use the machine to stay alive forever, but they destroy it and wonder if they’ll be reincarnated in the dark conclusion.
Writer Terry Black, who created the Red Steel video games, was approached by New World Pictures to write a sequel, but he wondered how, as everyone was dead. They responded, “You’ve got a resurrection machine… you figure it out.” No sequel has been made.
Director Mark Goldblatt would go on to direct the Dolph Lundgren The Punisher in 1989 before moving on to be an editor. He’s worked on everything from the Terminator movies, Rambo: First Blood Part II, Chappie, Pearl Harbor, Showgirls and True Lies.
Dead Heat is a weird movie. It’s funny in parts, shocking in others and isn’t afraid to hit you with plenty of gore. There are lots of cool cameos too, like Martha Quinn as a reporter, Linnea Quigley as a zombie stripper, Shane Black as a cop, pro wrestler “Judo” Gene LeBell as a guard, Dick Miller as another security guard, Keye Luke as a Chinatown gangster, Robert Picardo as a lieutenant and Mel Stewart from All in the Family as the police captain.
I’m kind of obsessed with young James Spader. Let’s face it, in movies like The New Kidsand Tuff Turf he exuded either a coked-up menace or hardscrabble heart that’s hard to beat. Here, he plays two roles. First, he’s a young doctor that becomes a suspect in a series of Jack the Ripper copycat murders. But then he dies — and his twin brother may or may not be the true killer.
Written and directed by Pittsburgh native Rowdy Herrington (Roadhouse, Striking Distance), this film also stars Cynthia Gibb (the TV version of Fame), Jim Haynie (the dockmaster from The Fog), character actor Robert Picardo and Rod Loomis (Zed from The Beastmaster).
Herrington wanted the movie to be titled Red Rain and for the Peter Gabriel song to be in the film. However, this was his low budget debut, he couldn’t get the rights, so he had a song composed called “Red Harvest,” which sounds exactly like the Gabriel ditty. However, the studio felt that the title had nothing to do with the movie, so they renamed it.
The story isn’t any great shakes: the good twin has found one of the victims before becoming one himself, while the troubled brother becomes the prime suspect. It’s also one of those movies packed with red herrings and endings that aren’t endings. So it’s kinda sorta an American giallo — minus the black gloves, inventive camerawork, fashion and neon colors. But the story — where a protagonist is dragged into a situation that he must investigate himself — comes off that way. And despite all the things I’ve said above, I ended up enjoying this one.
Spader is great — he always is — and you have to wonder about Cynthia Gibb’s character. It seems weird for the same woman to be involved with two brothers, but I guess identical twins makes that a little easier, if no less creepy.
After Easy Money, Saturday Night Live veteran James Signorelli directed one more film. This one — starring Cassandra Peterson as her Elvira character.
In 1981, six years after Sinister Seymour, the producers of LA’s Fright Night decided to do another show and asked Vampira — Maila Nurmi — to help them with the project. There were creative differences — supposedly Nurmi wanted Lola Falana to play Vampira — and soon the station just did the show themselves (for her side of the story, please watch Vampira and Me).
Peterson had already lived a crazy life before she auditioned and won the role of the new horror host. She was a Vegas showgirl at 17, briefly dated Elvis, played a showgirl in Diamonds Are Forever, posed for men’s magazines like High Society, tried out to be Ginger in a new Gilligan’s Island, was on the cover of Tom Waits’ album (she claims that she doesn’t remember but it totally could be her), played in rock bands in Italy, ended up in Fellini’s Roma, joined the improv group The Groundlings and then ended up as a DQ on KROQ.
Is this Elvira?
Anyways, back to Elvira. The station allowing her to create the image of her character. Originally, she wanted to look like Sharon Tate in The Fearless Vampire Killers, but ended up with the punky and busty look we’ve all come to know and love.
Before the first episode even aired, Normi sued, claiming that Elvira was too close to her character. I’ll leave it up to you, dear reader, but they are quite similar. However, her Valley Girl delivery and sarcastic tone was a real difference and Elvira went from local star to pop icon. That all led to this, her first movie.
Elvira, Mistress of the Dark quits her job in LA after the station’s new owner has a #metoo moment with her. She wants to start an act in Vegas, but needs $50,000. Luckily, her great aunt Morgana has just died and she has to travel to Fallwell, Massachusetts to claim the inheritance.
So what does she get? A mansion, a recipe book and Morgana’s pet poodle, Algonquin. But once she’s in town, she learns that no one is allowed to have fun and she sets out to change everyone’s grey demeanor. Oh yeah — and her uncle Vincent just wants the cookbook — which is a book of spells — and he also wants to sacrifice her so that he can take over the world. Thus, magic battles ensue, Algonquin becomes a rat at one point and the town’s morality club gets hit with a sex spell that gets them all arrested for indecent exposure.
Fellow Groundling Edie McClurg shows up as one of the villains, as does former Grease and Taxi heartthrob Jeff Conaway. Other Groundlings in the film are Lynne Marie Stewart, Deryl Carroll, Joseph Arias, Tress MacNeille and John Paragon.
Scripted by Sam Egan and Paragon, who is better known as Jambi and Pterri from his Pee-Wee’s Playhouse days, along with Peterson, this movie’s entertainment level will depend on how much you love puns and Elvira.
Peter Plunkett is the owner of an Irish castle that’s seen better days. However, it’s the only employment for many of the local villagers. But now, he’s in debt to an Irish-American businessman named Brogan, so Plunkett has one last plan: to transform it into the most haunted castle in Europe. That means making ghost costumes for everyone that works there, but the truth is that the castle is more spectrally challenged than Plunkett could have ever dreamed.
The guests that come to stay, like Jack (Steve Guttenberg), Sharon (Beverly D’Angelo), get to meet the real ghosts of Castle Plunkett: Mary Plunkett (Daryl Hannah) and Martin Brogan (Liam Neeson). Even more, Mary and Jack fall for one another, as do Martin and Sharon.
Sean Connery was originally going to star in this but dropped out and his role as Plunkett was replaced with Peter O’Toole, who is perfectly cast.
Writer and director Neil Jordan (The Crying Game) was excluded from the editing process of the final cut and insists that his version of the film has never seen the light of day. What did emerge is a strange film, which at times is comedic and at others — like when the sea monster attacks on stage — can be quite horrifying.
If all Frank LaLoggia had made was the utterly bizarre Fear No Evil, he’d still be a filmmaker to celebrate. Luckily, he also gifted us with this film, a ghost story that bombed on initial release but has gone on to be a celebrated film, one that’s just as much about growing up as it is about murder.
Horror author Franklin “Frankie” Scarlatti (as an adult, he’s played by the director, but in the film itself, it’s Lukas Haas) is on his way back to Willowpoint Falls and relates the story of how way back in 1962, over Halloween, he was attacked and nearly strangled to death by a mysterious figure in black. Even more frightening, he witnesses the death of a young redhead girl, who has ties to the mysterious lady in white, an urban legend that all of the schoolboys live in fear of.
The police arrest the school’s black janitor, Harold “Willy” Williams, for the killings and the way the town reacts to this forms the moral backbone of the film. There’s also a lot about family, with father Angelo (a welcome Alex Rocco), his adopted brother and the near comical shenanigans of Frankie’s grandparents.
Along the way, Frankie becomes obsessed with bringing closure to the redhead girl’s ghost, solving her murder and bringing her back to her mother. There’s also the matter of the real or unreal lady in white (Katherine Helmond from TV’s Who’s the Boss?).
The film has a really great scene where the killer reveals himself within the foggy woods as the lighting in the scene progressively grows darker, a really interesting camera trick that is all but forgotten in our CGI era. In fact, all of the night scenes in the woods almost feel like an otherworldly affair, as if shot just outside our reality.
LaLoggia wrote, directed, produced and scored this film, which was based on the legend of the Lady in White,a woman who roams Durand-Eastman Park in Rochester, New York searching for her daughter. It’s a place hat the auteur knows well, as he grew up there and filmed much of the movie on location.
It’s a shame that LaLoggia didn’t get to make more films, because of the two I’ve seen, he is able to tell a simple story that still feels intensely personal and nuanced. He’s teased several projects over the years, including being attached to the Cannon Spider-Man movie that never got off the ground. Here’s to another film coming from him, someday, someway.
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!”
One would imagine that by now, I wouldn’t be snowed by a great poster. But nope. This Italian-Spanish-Mexican film is proof that if the poster looks awesome and has sharks murdering people, I will ignore all the warning flags and dive right into a movie that lulls me into a fugue state of sheer pain.
David (Treat Williams) just wants to live in quiet along with his neighbor Paco (Antonio Fargas, Huggy Bear!) and his man-eating shark buddy Cyclops. However, his brother gets all tangled up in a conspiracy involving a businessman named Rosentski (John Steiner, who we all know was Overlord in Yor, Hunter from the Future).
There’s also an appearance by Janet Agren, who was the few bright spots of Panic and Ratman, two other movies that had awesome posters and not much else to write home about. Then again, she’s also in Fulci’s City of the Living Deadand Eaten Alive!, two much better movies than anything else that will be discussed in this article (she’s also in Hands of Steel, a movie that has an incredible poster that promises more than the movie delivers, yet I’m coming around on that one).
Plus — Christopher Connelly — Hot Dog from 1990: The Bronx Warriors and the dad from Fulci’s incomprehensibly awesome Manhattan Baby — plays a priest in his final film role.
I’m just telling you these facts to cover up the fact that I could barely make it through this movie. Seriously — a movie where a man uses traps and a shark to fight gangsters couldn’t sustain my interest.
Maybe you’ll like it better than I did. You can watch it on Amazon Prime with a subscription.
Sometimes, you encounter things on Amazon Prime that you feel were made for just you. Take this 1988 forgotten horror movie, which stars Linda Blair and Tab Hunter as family members at war with a gang of street punks while something even more terrifying waits in the wings.
An insane woman tells a deformed man that he has two choices: to kill her or make love to her. He then bites her neck, murdering her as we soon learn that this is all a movie within a movie, the latest from horror special effects master Orville Kruger (Guy Stockwell, younger brother of Dean).
After finishing the movie, Orville plans a family get-together in the San Bernardino Mountains with his wife, daughter Lisa (Blair, the main reason I picked this movie) and her friend Kathy (Donna Wilkes, Angel herself!). His brother, Rod (Hunter), will join them later. But before any of hat can happen, Lisa and Kathy run afoul of a gang of punks led by Scratch, who are coming back from Nevada where their last home invasion led to them killing off an entire family.
Lisa asks her mom her Patrick is. Her mother cryptically mentions that he has good and bad days, then later mentions feeding him.
The movie then gives us jump scares galore, as Orville frightens Kathy with a sea creature and a series of his props. He wonders if she’s able to tell the difference between his effects and reality.
Lisa and Kelly go to bed, only to awaken to the punk gang arriving and holding everyone hostage with threats of rape, torture and worse. They’re convinced that Orville is hiding a fortune in the house, but when he tells them he doesn’t have one, they beat him to death. We notice two eyes watching everything.
The girls escape, but Lisa’s mother isn’t so lucky. The gang catches up to Kathy, who is stabbed by a female member of the gang that thinks that she’s in La Venganza de los Punks. Lisa jumps through a window to escape, running through the snow, as the deformed man appears, takes out most of the gang and saves Lisa.
The police soon arrive, as does Uncle Rod. They start looking for suspects and come upon the deformed man attacking Scratch and Shelley, the last two punks. The police shoot first and don’t really ask questions later, killing the mystery man and taking the gang members into custody.
This is where — in a normal film — we’d be close to the conclusion. But not here. Nope. Lisa has a blood clot and a 50/50 chance of survival, but ends up on the bad half and dies. Since she was the only witness, Scratch and Shelley are due to be released. That’s when Uncle Rod explains that the deformed man was named Patrick (is he Australian?) and that he was an abandoned child that the Krugers raised as their own son.
Rod takes the law into his own hand, forcing Scratch and Shelley back to the Kruger home and explaining how he has the same facial deformities as Patrick because (dramatic music) he’s his father! This Tourist Trap twist kind of makes sense, if only for the meta reason that Chuck Connors and Tab Hunter were both cowboy actors who did horror movies at the end of their careers. It turns out that Orville created the special effects that allowed him to live in normal society. But now, even Rod’s horrifying face is beautiful compared to what he’s done to the two villains.
You’d think that this twist is also where the film ends, but nope. Yes, in a movie of pre-meta meta, this has all been another movie. But that’s still not the end. No, Frankenstein’s Monster and the Wolfman are in the projectionist booth, arguing over the film. The lycanthrope states his case that the film doesn’t accurately depict monsters by smashing the projector while Dr. Frankenstein’s greatest creation gives this one 8 out of 10. They agree to disagree and attack everyone watching the movie because after all, they’re the best.
I’m not certain that the makers of this movie had any clue what they were doing at any moment in its production, but that’s OK. The end result is so totally strange that you can’t help but adore just how off the rails it goes by the end. There’s no way you can sum this one up in a sentence. It really is a movie that not only jumps mood but also main characters and even genre by the end of the film.
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