Phantasm (1979)

A small town sees the arrival of the Tall Man, a mortician, who carries with him an air of mysterious evil. There are an increase of deaths in the town and it seems the Tall Man has something to do with it. Mike, a 13 year old boy follows his older brother Jody and his girlfriend into the cemetery at night and is frightened out of his wits by some kind of robed monster. This sparks off a journey into terror of which Mike could never have imagined.Phantasm is undeniably a cult classic. It is a strange film in the way that it has some fantastic, iconic moments yet is very shallow in script and direction/development of the story line. This is somehow echoed in the visuals when showing us the stark wasteland that is the alternate universe where the Tall Man is from. Dwarfs are enslaved, snaking across a desolate wasteland, which mirrors the emptiness of the script. This somehow feels fitting.For me I enjoyed the visuals of the Tall Man striding through the town, knowing he was being watched and stopping to stare back. As kids we all had a creepy person we were scared of but liked to watch from a distance and then run away if the person got wind of you. The Tall Man is the epitome of this. The silver orbs are fantastic, absolute class, I love everything about them. Got to be my favorite weapon of all time.This movie has an air of Stephen King about it which I say as a compliment. It's one of those films you watch and are not particularly impressed with at the time but it stays with you and plays out in your mind.Every horror freak must watch this franchise, be part of it and enjoy the honor of knowing the Tall Man.

I saw this first in the mid 80s on a VHS. Was terrified by the Tall man. Revisited it recently on a DVD. Don Coscarelli (his episode- Incident on n off a mountain.. from Masters of horror is my fav), did an awesome job with this film. His direction, writing n cinematography were all very good considering the tiny budget. The film has a very eerie music adding to the tension. The plot is about two brothers, one of em a teen, dealing with the recent death of their parents n how they are pulled back to the mortuary when one of their friends turns up dead. It gets weird when the teen brother sees the frightening mortician single-handedly lift a coffin into the back of a hearse. The film is creepy, fast paced n inspite of low body count there is enuff violence n scares. It is full of surreal images – the drilling spheres were scary n tension filled, the entire film n its characters r isolated with just the mortuary. The scariest part bah the film is the sinister figure of the Tall Man, always walking in slow-motion with the accompanied sound of the drumbeats n his shoes.

"This review is of the newly released remastered version on DVD/blu-ray" Horror fans are the most dedicated fans you will find. The only group that comes close are those who love the tear jerking romantic films like THE NOTEBOOK, movies that will be watched again and again. But horror fans will not only watch a movie multiple times, they will buy every edition that comes out, will watch every extra in detail and will watch the film with every commentary track included. That's how dedicated they are.So when it was announced that the 1979 horror classic PHANTASM was being restored this year in a 4k version supervised by J.J. Abrams, the director of the first two movies in the new STAR TREK movies, SUPER 8 and the recent STAR WARS: THE FORCE AWAKENS, fans were thrilled to know the movie was in good hands. It turns out that Abrams was a fan of the film as well and contacted director Don Coscarelli to help with the restoration. Not only have they cleaned up the look they've polished up the soundtrack as well.If you're not aware of the film it's an interesting tale. Mike (A. Michael Baldwin) is a pre-teen troubled after the death by accident of his parents. When his older brother Jody (Bill Thornbury) helps with the funeral of his friend Tommy, Mike sneaks about the cemetery watching the funeral. Rather than the normal situation he watches as the funeral director known only as the Tall Man (Angus Scrimm) returns to the gravesite after everyone has gone and single handedly lifts the coffin into his hearse to take back to the funeral home.This is just the first encounter Mike has while dealing with the deaths around him, Jody possibly leaving town and leaving Mike with his aunt. With each encounter with the Tall Man Mike finds himself drawn into something bigger than a few deaths or the mysterious behavior of the man. In the funeral home he wanders the halls of the mausoleum and is nearly caught by a groundskeeper. But as he is grabbed a flying silver sphere suddenly comes down the hall with three protruding blades in it, sticking into the groundskeeper's forehead and draining him of blood.Mike tries to tell his brother about what is happening and eventually convinces him he's not seeing things. With the aid of Jody's best friend Reggie (Reggie Bannister), the three determine to enter the mausoleum and discover just what the Tall Man is up to. Shrunken humans, odd shaped people, a portal to places unknown and more flying spheres help to make this film a combination of science fiction and horror with a little heavier lean on horror. The story might sound simple but the visual storytelling of Coscarelli makes it all work and holds your interest from start to finish.The movie did decent at the box office but nothing spectacular. Even though it was considered a low budget film the look, style and feel of the film make it seem all the more impressive. While it does have that low budget drive-in atmosphere about it the movie offers more than most films made for those locations ever offered. This could be the reason that the film has drawn such a dedicated fan base.It had enough fans that the film spawned 3 other sequels over the years. Oddly enough most were never completed under the same studio banner making their release in a box set nearly impossible (and yet it happened). Each sequel left an open ending with more story to tell. That has resulted in what has been called the final installment, PHANTASM: RAVAGER, which also comes out this week.Fans of the film will be ecstatic over the look of this restoration. I've never seen the film look better than this and I've seen it a number of times, from my first viewing at the local drive-in to VHS to DVD. The images here are sharper than ever before, the darks are actually dark rather than the milky look they've had in some incarnation and the clean up on some of the effects make them better than they've ever appeared. Abrams and his crew deserve recognition for the wonderful job they've done here.If you love the film you'll want this edition in your collection. It also includes some notable extras including an episode of GRAVEYARD CARS where they recreate the classic car from the film, interviews from 1979 with Coscarelli and Scrimm, deleted scenes and a commentary track with Coscarelli, Baldwin, Scrimm and Thornbury. And if you've never seen the film before now is your chance to do so with the best edition you will more than likely ever find. With Christmas around the corner this is the perfect gift for any horror fan. Just look for PHANTASM: REMASTERED.Speaking of horror fans those who can't get enough of trailer compilations, those previews shown before movies, will want to get their orders in for TRAILER TRAUMA 3: '80s HORROR-THON from Garagehouse Pictures. With over 250 trailers and running over 7.5 hours, this trailer compilation will most likely be one of the best ever offered. It comes out December 21st, just in time to make it under the Christmas tree.

PHANTASM is an uneven work, too fantastic to be genuinely scary but ferociously unique and fascinating on numerous levels. I think there was a desire to create a warped and entirely original Universe where nothing is as it seems and anything can and probably will happen. Logic is quickly cast aside and indeed has no place in the crooked landscape that PHANTASM paints. Into this bizarre, Dali-like twisted and surreal cosmos, are thrust a group of characters who - perhaps even by virtue of their acting inadequacies - seem somehow as much a part of the fabric of that Universe - even in their struggles to survive and make sense of it. For me, PHANTASM has a hypnotic effect for all those reasons. Flying sphere drills, a gender bending alien cemetery keeper, hooded shrunken corpses refined for slave labour in some parallel Universe, a severed finger that morphs into a grotesque (if admittedly comical) fly and countless other wild fantasies are all episodic nightmares that work their way into my head and stay there - however well or not they may be executed. They are indeed, the essence of all the darkest, unfathomable episodes that invade our deepest sleep. Also, the film's tendency to bounce us in and out of reality - if indeed there is a reality present at all - without warning, keeps us permanently on unstable ground. Dreams are very prominent and indeed prevalent in PHANTASM. So much so, that by the end there seems no dividing line between that which was real and which was not. In this sense, the film explored the territory that NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET would later make it's own but somehow achieves a dream-like quality that even Craven's classic would not surpass. Only Dario Argento's similarly bizarre INFERNO comes to mind as a rival to PHANTASM for the closest we might get to a dream realised on film.PHANTASM is a unique, mind bending vision of quaint, small town America, infused with hellish fantasies of death, loss and isolation, unleashed from the subconscious mind - perhaps even in the end, from that of it's young, insecure and lonely adolescent protagonist. Poe said "Is all that we see or seem, but a dream within a dream?" PHANTASM presents a case. I urge those who are not impressed, to watch it again with these notions in mind.