– What tha FUCK was THAT??
– That’s… kinda hard to explain.
Just like the previous one, Phantasm III, also known as Lord of the Dead BooooOOOOYS, picks up right after the previous ended. So no, it wasn’t all a dream, after all. Or maybe a dream within a dream…who the hell knows. Reggie gets out of The Tall Man’s hearse while it’s moving, all messy and bloody before the car suddenly explodes. Liz dies instantly while Mike (A. Michael Baldwin) survives but gets knocked unconsciously. Reggie and Mike get surrounded by the evil Jawas and The Tall Man, who holds the severed head of Liz. Reggie unlocks a timer grenade to just end it all. I don’t want him in pieces (Mike), The Tall Man says. Well, as it looks like now, that’s the only way he’s gonna get him. The Tall Man backs off before he tells Reggie to take good care of Mike while he waits.
Mike gets taken to the hospital where he falls into a coma. It doesn’t look too good, as he’s walking towards the light in a bright blue hallway among other dead silhouettes. And I’m sure I spotted Tangina and Kane for a second. But one particular sticks out. It’s… Jodi, Mike’s dead big brother, again played by Bill Thornbury. And he looks bored of his mind. After a quick reunion, Jodi tells Mike to stay away from the light and go back. The Tall man shows up and orders him with his strict boooOOOY line delivery to turn back since he wants him alive. Mike wakes up only to get attacked by a ghoulish nurse. Mike shoves a metal pipe through her neck. Reggie comes in and gets her yellow blood spurted all over his face. A sphere forces itself out of her scalp and flies in front of Mike. An eye comes out of the Sphere (yes, they have eyes now) to take a good look at Mike before it flies out of the window. WTF. Just another day in Phantasm land.
Mike and Reg drive away to find an abandoned house to take shelter for the night. Jodi pops up again and transforms himself into a sphere. Why? Who knows. Reg is fed up with the bullshit and just wants to shoot it right away. Can’t you hear it? It’s Jodi. He’s in the ball, talking to me, says a robotic and not-so convincing A. Michael Baldwin. This is certainly not the same Baldwin we saw in the first film. His replacement from Phantasm II must have broken him. And now that Mike finally stands on his feet again, The Tall Man walks in to claim him. It’s time now, boy! Jody, or JodySphere, gets transformed by a rusty useless ball by The Tall Man, before he and Mike disappear into a dimension far, far away. Reggie takes JodySphere with him, drives through abandoned ghost towns, once again in Supernatural-style, with his 1971 Cuda to track down The Tall Man and save Mike.
A. Michael Baldwin’s return as Mike gets rather cut short as the plot takes a complete detour with a bloated but entertaining sideplot where Reggie joins forces with the boy Tim (Kevin Connors), the tough nunchaku chick Rocky (Gloria Lynne Henry) and gets some bumps in the road by a small gang of scavengers. The aspects with Tim is pretty fun though, as he lives alone in his house after his parents got killed by, yeah you guess it, The Tall Man, and rigged the whole place with death traps and small escape doorways. The idea with Tim could have worked as a movie by itself or a spin-off. There’s an awkward non-romance moment with Reg and Rocky at a motel where he gets tricked into having some kink time in handcuffs, only to dupe him so she can have a good night’s sleep. Then we have the obligatory mausoleum scenes where spheres show up and make a bloody mess. The spheres have gotten more upgrades, like eyes used as surveillance cameras, and they also have Homer Simpson-sized brains that are small enough to fit.
After the previous film underperformed, Don Coscarelli was back on the independent playground. Whether that was for the best or worse, is another question. Bringing back A. Michael Baldwin and Bill Thornbury was an obvious choice now that Coscarelli was free to do what the hell he wanted. Just too bad that the chemistry between the two brothers is like two wet socks. Things are far from what they once were in 1979, and not just with Baldwin. I bet that Coscarelli got cold feet, tossed the brothers in the backburner, rewrote the script and placed Reggie in the front seat with brand new colorful characters.
As a direct-to-video, Phantasm III looks pretty polished with some fun action, wild car chases, explosions, gore, zany sci-fi moments, nods to Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead and, overall, what makes a great Phantasm film. It doesn’t have much of the spooky atmosphere as the first two, but is still an entertaining ride with lots of 1990s charm. The leftovers of the bigger WTFs get saved for the last 15 minutes or so, where we only get more cryptic questions than answers just to open the doors for a quick cliffhanger. And honestly, the franchise could as well just have ended here, because the next two installments we got are just … bollocks. If you thought that these films weren’t confusing enough, you’ve seen nothing yet.
Just to quote The Tall Man himself: It’s Never Over!
Don Coscaralli followed up with Phantasm IV: Oblivion four years later. The only significant thing we get is a quick backstory to The Tall Man, which isn’t that interesting. Some regard this as the best in the series, for some reason, and others as the worst (that was until we got the fifth film). My main issue is that this is just a dull movie that tries to go back to its roots with a slowburn pace that goes nowhere. Poor Reggie gets a flat tire (if I remember right) and has a long dull fight scene with a zombie cop. And Mike? He’s… somewhere.
There’s no set-pieces here, just the empty desert environment of Death Valley, where Mike just drives through the dark ether, sleeps in the car and walks aimlessly in the sunny desert as if he is just having an existential midlife crisis. And maybe that’s the case. What the hell do I know. The leftover scenes from the first film, that were used for time traveling, could be a great idea if we got some more than just dead meat and fillertime to close the whole blurry mess with It was just the wind.
Then, after 17 years, we finally got Phantasm: Ravager. And, oh man… The “plot“ here is that Reggie is withering away in a nursing home with dementia where he dips in and out of dreamland where we follow him in different random scenarios to look for Mike… even though Mike visits Reggie regularly while he’s lying in his bed and looking confused. And drawing the parallels between the real Reggie Bannister’s unfortunate health condition makes this even more sad. Melancholia isn’t an unknown thick layer for the Phantasm universe, but this is just depressing, in a bad way. Another day in Phantasm land or not, I wanna go home now.
We have lots of terrible green screens in the most classy SyFy Channel-style, where you’re almost expecting David Hasselhoff to pop out and sing Hooked on a Feeling any minute. This is the worst kind of fan fiction slop one can shart out. Ravager was originally meant to be a series of short films with no other ambitions than dump it on YouTube. And it clearly shows and explains everything. The film was directed by David Hartman, and I’m a little shocked that Don Coscarelli actually was involved with the writing process here. Angus Scrimm died some months after the film was released, at the age of 89. RIP.
Sorry for closing the Phantasm reviews with such a sour note, but it is what it is. Watch the first three. They’re great. That being said, keep the balls in the air and peace out.
Writer and director: Don Coscarelli
Country & year: USA, 1994
Also known as: Phantasm III: Lord of the Dead
Actors: Reggie Bannister, A. Michael Baldwin, Angus Scrimm, Bill Thornbury, Gloria Lynne Henry, Kevin Connors, Cindy Ambuehl, John Davis Chandler, Brooks Gardner, Irene Roseen
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0110823/
Prequels:
– Phantasm (1979)
– Phantasm II (1988)
