"This Film Should Be Played Loud"

Following a dalliance with major-studio funding and distribution courtesy of Universal for Phantasm II, Coscarelli returned to independent financing and a smaller canvas for his second sequel which arrived six years later. With Phantasm III, horror’s weirdest franchise becomes even more of a whacked out funhouse. 

The first time I saw Lord of the Dead it felt like the franchise was on the wane (I probably mistook the step-down in budget as a lack of interest) but watching it again with more affection for Coscarelli’s world and a clearer sense of his ambitions, I found it to go down much easier. Sure, the appearance of a sassy kid with a Home Alone-like knack for booby traps might make you think Coscarelli was entering his late-John Hughes period, but the fact the kid goes further than Kevin McCallister’s PG rating would allow by actually killing off a bunch of invaders, the cutesiness is pretty well balanced out. Coscarelli also makes the point of calling back to final moments of the first Phantasm – an orphaned child sat in front of a fireplace – by somewhat repeating it. The fact this new kid comes complete with denim jacket and checkered shirt (a Reggie trademark) rams the point home even harder. History is repeating itself.

Even though this loses some of the furious pace of Phantasm II, it makes up for it with a larger emphasis on mood and strange ideas. Without a major studio to satisfy, Coscarelli was free to go back to the more dreamy and cerebral language of the first film and lean harder on the abstract. The images of the Tall Man here are some of the best of the series. I’m talking about that opening shot of him surrounded by candles or the low-shot of him beneath a ceiling swarming with killer spheres. That stuff is downright ICONIC and beautifully otherworldly. It’s great to have Mike Baldwin back as Mike too and the refit in the continuity makes so many moments land harder emotionally. When Baldwin and Angus Scrimm come face to face, you can feel the history between them that wasn’t there with James LeGros in the previous movie. The road-movie structure of Phantasm II continues here but is more serrated. We branch off with Reggie as he tries to navigate the desolate highways and deserted towns in the Tall Man’s wake and meets a bunch of colourful new characters. Gloria Lynne Henry’s Rocky is an inspired addition to this universe and is surely this instalment’s MVP. 

The thing I adore about the Phantasm movies is how each subsequent instalment takes the series in a slightly new direction. Coscarelli never simply repeats himself. Whether that means shifting the focus of his protagonists (from Mike and Jody in the first film to Reggie in the first two sequels then back to Mike) or turning the mythology on its head, it always feels fresh and new. Coscarelli’s decreasing budgets only made him more inventive. Instead of going bigger and sillier each time, he had to be more pragmatic and selective. Therefore, the franchise is always progressing and evolving. It is at once slowly closing in on itself by using psyche as a primary canvas, while also becoming more epic and unnerving because of the escalating apocalypse happening increasingly off-screen. In fact, Phantasm might be the only horror franchise that actually reveals more about its villains without diluting any of the threat or mystique. That’s the benefit of building a horror series on such a unique and weird framework. When one of the silver spheres opens up in Phantasm III and reveals a tiny pulsating brain inside, you aren’t disappointed. When Coscarelli brings back Jody and transforms him into an ambiguous golden sphere, you don’t feel like the series is jumping the shark. In a world defined by madness, the eternal strange and the unexplained, things not making sense is exactly how you want it to be. That’s why I love these movies; they teach you to accept the weird.

Watched Arrow blu-ray

Released nine years after the original film with big-time studio backing and resources courtesy of Universal, it’s no surprise that Phantasm II is much bigger in scope than the first film. Essentially a road movie that unfolds over an undisclosed period of time (weeks? months? years?), Coscarelli puts the budget to good use and smartly takes the iconography of his world and wreaks havoc with it. He expands the small-town horror of the first movie and stretches it far and wide, creating a far-reaching world of funerals, mausoleums, ravaged graves and night-time highways. This is the start of his own “American Gothic” saga that would continue across the rest of the series.

The great thing about Phantasm II is how it broadens the mythology to an almost giddy degree. When the three deadly spheres appear, in a range of colours and sizes with increasingly lethal contraptions inside, you can almost see your own big grin reflected in the chrome back at yourself. He teases the appearance of the Tall Man with actors who have similar silhouettes to Scrimm and further promotes Reggie – everybody’s favourite ice-cream man – to the lead. The bigger budget means the special effects are far more elaborate and there’s an absolute gauntlet of thrilling practical effects courtesy of Mark Shostram and the future founders of KNB. The film is cooler than the first too and even boasts a tooling up of excessive hardware montage to rival any in the Evil Dead series. Naturally, the humour is cranked up which makes it feel like a proper 80s sequel in that it pushes more toward ghoulish comedy than outright horror but it never fails to feel of a piece with the Phantasm brand. Coscarelli owns this malleable world through and through and his navigation of all the tones and moods is always rock solid.

The film’s only real shortcoming is the re-casting of Mike, with James LeGros replacing Michael Baldwin, which adds a frustrating blip in the series’ overall continuity (see also Tuesday Knight replacing Patricia Arquette in Nightmare on Elm Street 4. But that’s a minor quibble. There are so many individual moments of genre-bliss here. Take the way the Tall Man reacts to an exploding house, for instance. How he just turns out of curiosity, no fear, no emotion, is exactly how an otherworldly being like him would react to a pathetically humanistic problem like an explosion. Or how a set of teeth gets smashed to dust by a mallet and then poured into a jiffy bag marked with the name “Sam Raimi”. There’s so many of these details, too many to name. Just great. 

Phantasm II is a minor miracle of a movie if only because it captures a moment in time in which one of the weirdest horror franchises in genre history was briefly given backing and shelter by one of Hollywood’s biggest studios. For a brief instant, the truly weird was part of the mainstream. It’s even better because Coscarelli was given apparent creative freedom to expand his original vision with the necessary budget and resources. Very nearly the perfect sequel.

Watched on Arrow blu-ray

“The funeral is about to begin” 

Over the past few years Phantasm has slowly climbed the ranks of my favourite horror movies to become a legit contender for the top spot. What sets it apart from so many other horror movies of the 70s and 80s is the sheer amount of imagination and invention Coscarelli managed to conjure with his minuscule resources. Phantasm is inherently strange and weird, with an entire universe and imagery wholly unique to itself. It also feels like a dream, occasionally a nightmare, with its skewed editing patterns, narrative dead-ends and short-cuts only adding to the overall sense of delirium. 

The graveyard setting’s gothic tinge combined with the fantasy/sci-fi comic-book stylisation – the futurist gloss of the mausoleum interiors are a delight – all work together to tap into something both primal and fantastic that lies at the core of any great heightened fiction. There’s so much subtlety in the world building too – notice how the town is strangely depopulated – that works alongside the broader brush strokes. Basically, it’s a film that utterly works on every level, both major and minor, text and subtext. The shot of the Tall Man in the street with the steam from Reggie’s truck swirling around him is one of the best singular images I’ve ever seen in a horror movie. Just magic.

Watched on Arrow blu-ray