Recently, I spoke to a real Horror aficionado, a die hard fan, one who makes my admiration of the genre seem quite pedestrian. He told me his favorite movie is THE THING (1982), but that PHANTASM from 1979 is high up on his list. Now, I have never had a love for Carpenter's THE THING, though I can certainly appreciate its technical achievements and cool musical score. But jeez, my memories of watching PHANTASM in the late Nineties have never faded, where Jeff and I watched it and disliked it so much that we never went on to its many sequels. I have always remembered it as being both idiotic and confusing, both when I saw it as a child on television, and as a young adult.
But this guy absolutely *loves* Horror, so I asked the guy, "Can you help me to appreciate PHANTASM? Because I never have been able to." And he said, "Well, it's not for everybody. But hey, why don't you try PHANTASM 2, which was made a couple of years later. Maybe that will be more your style."
I mentioned it to Jeff, who has been watching a couple of movies each week with me, several of them in our favorite genre, and when we went to the library together, he produced a copy of the 1979 original and said, "What do you think?" Well, I told him how I remembered thinking it was a dogturd the last time I saw it, but he reminded me that we watched SILENT NIGHT, DEADLY NIGHT last month and that it pretty much kicked ass. So, I shrugged and said I supposed I'd watch it with him if I had to. I suggested we play a drinking game where every time Angus Scrimm said "Boooooooy," we'd take a gulp, hoping that would make it more enjoyable.*
Well, he also got a couple other movies, and I much preferred watching those to PHANTASM, but eventually, he proclaimed the time had come. And I gotta say, I tried to find good things in the movie, such as the framing of a couple shots, a couple of angles of Scrimm staring or smiling, and the lovely--if repetitive--score by Fred Myrow . . . but it was few and far between. There is the scene where the shiny ball kills the Tall Man's employee rather than its intended victim, and the gore and excessive amount of blood are pretty great.
But that's a single moment, in a ninety minute borefest.
It may be that, twenty-five years later than the last time I saw it, I liked PHANTASM even less than before. And I have become far more tolerant of mediocrity lately than I used to be since, a lot of times, simply making a movie during the Golden Age of Slashers will be enough for me to give it at least two stars out of nostalgia.
Huh.
I recalled, both previous viewings, being horrified (in completely the wrong way) by how train-derailingly not scary the fuggin' jawas were, and in that respect, I was not disappointed. But man, everything else . . .
. . . everything else ranged from mediocre to festering garbage. It's all so slapdash and meandering, like when I was a kid and I'd get my friends together and start the camcorder up and we'd just make up whatever scene we were going to shoot on the fly, with no thought of where it might be going in later scenes.
The story is nonsensical, from beginning to wow, that ending, where is it all a dream? Was it a boy's imagination coping with tragedy, which would almost be an effective ending if it were handled well, but then the Tall Man shows up and grabs the booooooooy and we roll the credits.
Hey, maybe something that I love you think is total dogshit (Big Anklevich tells me this at least once a month), but I pretty much had my evening ruined by watching PHANTASM again. But Jeff helped out by saying, "Look on the bright side: you don't have to watch it again for another twenty-five years . . . and by then, you'll probably be dead."
Thanks for that.
*It didn't. I believe the first use of "Booooooy" came at an hour and ten minutes in, and by then, Jeff's drink had gone flat, and was now room temperature--which, in Jeff's defense/condemnation, is approximately forty degrees Fahrenheit.
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