PHANTASM Can Predict The Future

Phantasm is a mystical, mysterious enigma of a movie. I’m not talking about its plot elements or subject matter, I’m talking about the movie itself. It scares you, makes you laugh, grosses you out—it even predicts the future. Of course, a movie this ambitious and clairvoyant can’t be weighed down by things like coherency or continuity, which is why Phantasm, from beginning to end, is a collection of insanity so random that I had to rewind it three different times to see if I accidently missed something. I didn't. Join me as we attempt to unlock the mysteries of Phantasm scene-by-scene in this double-length movie reveiw.

Phantasm opens with Tommy having sex with some chick in a graveyard, which is right up there with the DMV line and while trapped in an oversized garbage compactor as the least romantic places to have sex. The girl, by the way, had the teeth of Tim Curry and the sexuality of a sasquatch, and if that combination doesn’t create some movement down below, it probably won’t help to know that she knifes Tommy in the gut after sex (after he has the most lethargic orgasm in film history, by the way. It's the exact same look I have on my face while I’m grocery shopping, folding my laundry, or doing anything else that doesn’t involve orgasms).

Cut to Tommy’s funeral. Bad-boy-from-the-wrong-side-of-the-tracks-who-only-plays-by-his-own-rules Jody and ice cream man (not kidding) Reggie mourn the loss of their friend and their hairline, respectively, while Jody’s little brother Mike shows his respect for the cemetery where Tommy is buried by riding his motorcycle through it. While he’s doing so, he sees a cloaked, growling midget run through the cemetery. You know how in some horror movies you just see rustling branches or hear a strange noise? Not Phantasm. This kid actually sees these things in all their glory for at least five seconds before they slowly walk behind gravestones. I just assumed that Mike lived in a town that’s populated by both people and cloaked, hooded, snarling midgets, because this doesn’t seem to bother him one bit. After the funeral, though, Mike receives a shock as Phantasm’s franchise villain, THE TALL MAN, single-handedly picks up Tommy’s coffin and flings it in the back of a hearse. In reaction, Mike hilariously mouths "What the fuck." The director must’ve loved this scene as much as I did because he used the exact same scene again ten minutes later and again towards the end.


Oh. Yeah, look, could you like, go hide behind a tombstone or something? I'm trying to ride my bike through this cemetary. Thanks, bro.

Later, Reggie and Jody reminisce about their friend during a groovy guitar jam session. Afterwards, the camera slowly zooms in on the goal-post looking thing Reggie uses to tune his guitar, and gives us an unusually long close-up of it, as if to say, "make sure you see this, because this simple tuning of the guitar is a little more significant that you think and will be of importance in the future*.

*It wasn’t.

Continuing his mourning, Jody retreats to a bar, where the only people in it are conveniently him and some woman. Now I’ll be the first to admit that Jody looks awfully dreamy in those acid-wash jeans, but I had no idea how much of a lady killer this guy was until I saw him in action. From the time he sat down next to this girl to the time they left together it took, and I rewound and counted, less then ten seconds. When they left I noticed that it was the same girl Tommy was shagging in the beginning, but no matter how many times I yelled, "Watch out, Jody!" he didn’t respond, so I guess he didn’t mind. I didn’t either, because it lead to one of the funniest scenes in horror movie history:

Mike is spying on his older brother from the woods and smiles when the girl takes off her shirt. Since he’s standing behind about ten feet of woods and is a hundred yards away, I just assumed he was smiling because he thought of that scene in Blazing Saddles when everyone's farting at that exact same moment. Anyway, he hears a noise behind him, and as Mike hightails it out of there and sprints past his brother, Jody looks up, panties in mouth, and in a close-up shot says, I swear to God,

"What the heck?!"

Now take a few seconds to soak that in. Have you ever said, or known anyone who’s ever said, "what the heck?" Is this really the sentence that would jump out of your mouth if you were in the middle of a cemetery with panties in your mouth and your little brother ran by out of nowhere? I was glad to see that a movie that had already given us two tit shots, half a dozen "fucks," and a future death-by-embalming was language-conscious. This wasn't the first time Phantasm's insanity rocked my mind, and it wouldn't be the last. I barely had time to recover from "what the heck?!" before:

PHANTASM PREDICTED THE FUTURE (PART ONE):
While trying to convince Jody that the midgets from the graveyard are trying to kill him, Jody says, "Are you sure? Maybe it was just that retarded kid Timmy from up the street." Until then I thought I was the god of pop-culture references. However, my delusions of granduer were vanquished as soon as I heard Jody make a South Park reference 20 years before South Park even came out.

By now Mike expects that strange things are afoot at the town’s mortuary, so he’s watching The Tall Man with an eagle eye. One day in town, Mike notices The Tall Man go into convulsions as he passes by the unusually heavy and lingering amount of cold mist coming out of Reggie’s ice cream truck. He seems to be bothered by the cold! After a five-minute close-up of The Tall Man shakin’ and twitchin’ kind of like he was smokin,’ we get a close-up of Mike’s ruffled brow, deep in thought, as if he’s thinking, "This guy seems to have an adverse reaction to cold. Maybe this knowledge will come in useful later if we ever need to stop him.*

* It doesn’t.

So Mike decides to investigate the funeral home, where he doesn’t really see anything out of the ordinary. Oh…except for this:



Pictured above is another cornerstone of the Phantasm lore: the silver sphere. It’s the most laid-back weapon in horror movie history--what’s notable about this thing how much it procrastinates before it actually gets around to killing you: first it uses blades to stick to your head. Then it kind of disrespects you by making you wait as this drill slowly rotates towards your skull. Then, and oh yeah I think this would probably be the worst part, it embalms you. By the way, I have no idea who the guy in the above picture is. He just showed up in the movie literally ten seconds earlier.

Wrapping things up, Jody, Mike, and Reggie invade the mortuary, where:

PHANTASM PREDICTS THE FUTURE, PART 2:
As Tall Man is chasing Mike, he says, "You play a good game boy, but now the game is over!" Earlier in the movie I saw the Tall Man lift a fucking coffin on his own (three times), so it didn’t really surprise me to hear him compliment Mike’s Gameboy skills, even though Gameboy wouldn’t come out for another fifteen years. This entire article was written while I was kneeling, by the way, and chanting praises to my new god. Which goes by the name of Phantasm.

Anyway, check this out: Reggie is knifed in the stomach and killed. I know he’s dead because he’s shown dying. And because he has a knife in his stomach. So Jody and Mike escape and get the idea that the only way to kill The Tall Man is to throw him down an old mine shaft. As Mike lures him in, Jody pushes a boulder on top of the mineshaft from a hill above, and is shown raising his arms in victory as Mike smiles. And this Mike smiled, too, because I thought the insanity was over, until one second later, when:

The movie instantly cuts to Mike crying as him and Reggie (what the fuck?!) mourn Jody’s death (Oh holy what the fuck?!). No, I didn’t leave anything out. We learn that a week or so has passed and Jody died in a car wreck. The movie ends with Reggie and Mike hitting the open road in Reggie’s ice cream truck. And that’s Phantasm.

The punchline to this entire review: you know how DVDs have deleted scenes? I went back and watched them, and all Phantasm’s mysteries were answered in the deleted scenes! All the subplots actually were resolved, the characters who randomly showed up at the end were introduced earlier, there was even an entire alternate ending where the tall man was killed with a fire extinguisher, playing off his distaste for cold. So why in the hell did the editors of Phantasm cut out the most important scenes in the movie? Perhaps it will always be one of those things we just weren’t meant to understand, like how come Whodini suddenly starts calling out football plays in the middle of "The Freaks Come Out At Night." Congratulations Phantasm. You’re a fucking mess. Four Jason Heads.

So that was the Shocktober Spectacular. Hope you liked it. To re-visit my favorite review click here. We’ll be back to normal format on Thursday. Hope to see you then.

Thanks for reading!