don coscarelli – Horror Ghouls

Phantasm III (1994)

Posted on October 3, 2025October 4, 2025 by HorrorGhouls

– 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)

Phantasm II (1988)

Posted on October 2, 2025October 4, 2025 by HorrorGhouls

BooooOOOOY and GiiiiIIIIRL !

Almost a decade flew away among the cocaine leftover dust during the 1980s before a sequel was made. In the meantime, Don Coscarelli made the sword & sorcerer flick The Beastmaster (1982) and had no desire to make another horror movie. That was until some producer at Universal Studios finally saw Phantasm, lit a fat cigar, poured a glass of whiskey, gave Coscarelli a call, and said: That cliffhanger, bro! I’ll give you a budget of 3 million dollars so you can make a sequel. There was only one demand and that was to either replace A. Michael Baldwin or Reggie Bannister. Coscarelli couldn’t in his wildest imagination picture someone else as Reggie as… Reggie. Who could. It would be like replacing Bruce Campbell as Ash Williams, and I bet Coscarelli saw that right on. Don’t touch the ponytail. So the sacrifice went to Baldwin, a decision that made him very bitter for decades to such an extent that he just pretended that the movie didn’t exist. Or maybe he was just mad because he missed the opportunity to make out with Paula Irvine. His replacement went to James Le Gros, who was chosen over Brad Pitt. I’ll admit it was very distracting at first, since he looks eons apart from Baldwin. But hey, that’s just showbiz.

This is the first film Reggie Bannister appeared in since the first Phantasm. In the meantime, he worked at a… funeral home. Of course. He hasn’t changed much during the nine years. He slips into the role and his chill mannerism as if it was yesterday, or I’d just assume that he’s one of those unique actors who can just play themselves. The same goes for Angus Scrimm, who really embraced playing the character of The Tall Man as much he loved the “phans“ of the franchise.

Phantasm II starts right off after the first ended. Mike’s brother Jody is dead after dying in a car crash. Mike is convinced that was because of The Tall Man. Reggie tries to comfort him while the fireplace is lit in the background, saying it was just a car crash and The Tall Man is not real. After losing both his parents and now his big brother, Reggie suggests that they should hit the road and get a fresh start. The Tall Man is suddenly behind Mike and captures him in his bedroom, after his iconic line BooooOOOOY! As the evil Jawa-looking dwarfs, called Lurkers, pop out of everywhere, Reggie turns up the gas stoves, saves Mike at the last second and jumps out a window before we have one of the most epic house explosions in a horror movie.

Then we skip seven years later where Mike has spent his time in a psych ward. He finally gets released after lying to the doctor by saying that everything was in his head. Sarah Connor frowns. Mike then celebrates his new freedom by visiting Disneyland. Just kidding – he goes straight to Morningside Cemetery to find three empty coffins. Reggie pops up, and he’s disappointed that Mike still hasn’t realized that it was all in his head. Yeah, someone is in some deep denial here, or, whatever. Mike also has some telepathy connections with a blonde girl, Liz (Paula Irvine), who also is on a mission to take down The Tall Man. Because her grandpa is on the deathbed and, to quote the boogeyman’s own words, You think that when you die, you go to Heaven. You come to us!, she doesn’t want The Tall Man to claim him. Of course not. That must have been the greatest grandpa.

Mike begs Reggie to help him. But the priorities have changed since last time as he’s gotten married and has a daughter. He drives Mike home to meet his family, only to get met with the sight of his house being blown to pieces. By who? Take a guess. RIP to Reg’s family that we never got to meet. Well, there’s no reason now to not join forces, hit the gas, loot some weapons, and hunt down the prime evil himself.

Along the way, they pick up a young woman, Alchemy (Samantha Phillips). And…she’s a weird bird and Reggie is drooling all over her. Hey, Reg, you’re a good guy, but your wife and daughter just died. Some cope with grief differently, I guess. They have a bizarre sex scene where Reggie does all in his power to not touch her naked breasts. That’s because Reggie’s real-life wife was on the set that day. Ooof. It took six hours to shoot that short scene. Must have been torture. Samantha Phillips didn’t understand the script at all (can’t blame her) and why the hell her character just wanted to have sex with a random bald guy. Coscarelli, the genius that he is, said: You have a fetish for bald heads. Oki-doki then. There’s, of course, something more to her than just being an excuse to shoehorn a sex scene.

We get introduced to Reggie’s iconic signature weapon, the Quadruple-barrel shotgun, as he segways himself to become the wholesome action hero of the franchise. Here, he only uses the shotgun once before he just throws it away. We get more blasting in the next film though.

Phantasm II offers a more action vibe with some road-movie elements in purest Supernatural-style. The plot is more straight-forward, and, of course, more gory. Reggie did all his stunts himself, except in the epic chainsaw fight scene. The bigger budget shows, as we also have bigger scale set-pieces and more technical abilities. The atmosphere is way more ghoulish where we have the most sinister-looking mausoleum that was built for the film where one can smell the eeriness. The spheres have gotten some mods, like a laser beam and a little blade to chop off ears. I bet Robotnik is a bit jealous.

The effects are done by veterans like Greg Nicatero and Robert Kurtzman, where we have a grotesque Tall Man minion-puppet that sure would have caused some serious back pain. A sphere flies through someone’s body and almost through the mouth. Awesome stuff. James Le Gros as Mike took its time to get used to. He does an alright job. Nothing too special. Reggie and Angus Scrimm steals the show. This Liz character, however, seemed pretty pointless, and so did the psychic power elements, which are completely gone in the next films. But again, that’s Phantasm for you. Don’t look much for logic, just enjoy the ride.

Phantasm II is regarded as the best one in the series, like a handful of other second films in a horror franchise. But one particular individual that didn’t like it and gave it a one star, was the one and only, Roger Ebert, who had this interesting take:

―The target audience for “Phantasm II” obviously is teenagers, especially those with abbreviated attention spans, who require a thrill a minute. But why would images of death and decay seem entertaining to them? For the same reason, I imagine, that the horror genre has always been attractive to adolescents. They feel immortal, immune to the processes of aging and death, and so to them these scenes of coffins and corpses represent a psychological weapon against adults. Kids will never die. Only adults will die. ―

It’s fair to assume that Ebert had some serious thanatophobia (fear of death). Nothing wrong with that. We all have our phobias. But maybe that explains why he notoriously hated horror movies so much and despised watching them since it was a part of his job. RIP.

Writer and director: Don Coscarelli
Country & year: USA, 1988
Actors: James Le Gros, Reggie Bannister, Angus Scrimm, Paula Irvine, Samantha Phillips, Kenneth Tigar, Ruth C. Engel, Mark Major, Rubin Kushner
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0095863/

Prequel:
– Phantasm (1979)

Sequel:
– Phantasm III (1994)

Phantasm (1979)

Posted on October 1, 2025October 4, 2025 by HorrorGhouls

– I had a compunction to try to do something in the horror genre and I started thinking about how our culture handles death; it’s different than in other societies. We have this central figure of a mortician. He dresses in dark clothing, he lurks behind doors, they do procedures on the bodies we don’t know about. The whole embalming thing, if you ever do any research on it, is pretty freaky. It all culminates in this grand funerary service production. It’s strange stuff. It just seemed like it would be a great area in which to make a film. ― Don Coscarelli

And speaking of strange stuff; something really, really strange is going on at the local Morningside Cemetery in a sleepy Oregon suburb. The 13-year-old boy, Mike (A. Michael Baldwin) can tell about a mysterious, elderly, tall, Ebenezer Scrooge’ish mortician, simply called The Tall Man (Angus Scrimm), who steals coffins, puts them in his hearse with his bare hands (!), and drives away. WTF. And yes, there’s a lot of WTF’s here, the whole franchise is a big fat WTF. After spying on him with binoculars, Mike hops on his scooter and follows him to a mansion. And if the place looks familiar, it’s the legendary Dunsmuir House. But that’s only the nice facade of something much more, well, sinister.

His big brother Jody (Bill Thornbury) doesn’t believe what Mike’s saying. That’s until Mike manages to cut of a finger of The Tall Man after his hand gets trapped between a door. Yellow blood spurts. Mike puts the finger in a small box, and as he opens it to show his brother, the finger is alive and crawls like a larva. Oki doki, I believe you! So… where do we go from here? Calling the cops? Yeah, right. The finger turns into a cheap-looking fly with toothpicks as teeth that ends up being shoved down the garbage disposal.

Anyway, Jody is now more than convinced and so is his bandmate and the local ice cream man, Reggie (Reggie Bannister), who makes it really clear as he’s saying while pointing his index finger in the air:

Okay. I see it, I see it all now. What we gotta do is we gotta snag that tall dude and stomp the shit out of him, and we’ll find out what the hell is going on up there. Yeah! We lay that sucker out flat and drive a stake right through his goddamn heart!

If it was just that simple, ’cause that mother’s strong, Mike says. Well, he’ll eventually realize that you should never underestimate a bald ice cream vendor guy with a ponytail. Shantae would agree with that.

And then we, of course, have the iconic crystal balls/spheres, an element that follows and gets some cool upgrades throughout the films. They’re the sentinel drones of The Tall Man, which simply flies straight to the victims and trespassers’ foreheads, drills into their skull and sucks all the blood from their brain. Gnarly. The head of Larry Fessenden would give a sphere a whole field day.

So, what exactly is a Phantasm? It’s The delusion of a distorted mind. A phantom. A spirit. A ghost. It’s what you yourself make it out to be. It can be all from grandpa Seth, Bigfoot, to the haunted skeletons in your closet. In other words, the franchise never gives us a clear answer or a satisfying conclusion, not even close. Only leaving more questions, just like a fever dream would. “I had this weird dream last night,“ ya know.

Don Coscarelli (also known for the alternative Elvis Presley’s coming-of-old-age biopic Bubba Ho-Tep) was only 23 years old when he wrote, directed, produced and edited his passion project Phantasm over the course of one year during chaotic weekends. The calling to make a horror movie came as a lightbolt over Coscarelli’s head when people jumped in their seats over a scene in his previous Halloween-themed comedy-drama film, Kenny & Company (1976). Scaring people is fun, eh? OoOoh yeah! The original plan was to make an adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes, but the license had already been sold to Disney.

The original cut for Phantasm was three hours, and Coscarelli had zero plans for a sequel, nor to make another horror film. Which makes me assume that there would perhaps be a better conclusion somewhere in that runtime, lost in the editing, than the more cryptic puzzles we got in the sequels. Who knows.

The budget and its very limited resources are sometimes clearly visible at some points, especially the scene with the fly, which gives a prime example that not everything looks better in 4K. The film’s strengths are the rock-solid cinematography (also done by Coscarelli) and has a unique dark melancholic atmosphere where you almost get the sense that The Tall Man has sucked all the light from the surroundings. Everything feels dead and quiet and just off, as if the few characters we see here is trapped in some obscure purgatory, frozen in time. What’s real, what’s not. Is it all just a dream, or is it just the wind? And what in hell is that unearthly humming sound? Could it actually be the sound of hell itself? The theme track by Fred Myrow really stands out, which could be described as a more somber remix of John Carpenter’s Halloween.

The child actor at the time, A. Michael Baldwin does a good job here, as he, more or less, carries the whole film on his shoulders. The brother-dynamic between Mike and Jody is wholesome enough as they eventually team up to blast The Tall Man where he came from, wherever that is. Reggie also chimes in, who we get to see a lot more of in the sequels.

And that’s Phantasm for you – cryptic slowburn with eerie dreamlike surrealism, sprinkled with eccentric sci-fi elements and a handful of WTFs. Good night and don’t let The Tall Man bite.

Writer and director: Don Coscarelli
Country & year: USA, 1979
Actors: A. Michael Baldwin, Bill Thornbury, Reggie Bannister, Angus Scrimm, Kathy Lester, Terrie Kalbus, Kenneth V. Jones, Susan Harper, Lynn Eastman-Rossi, David Arntzen
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0079714/

Sequels:
– Phantasm II (1988)
– Phantasm III (1994)

Bubba Ho-Tep (2002)

Posted on May 5, 2021September 5, 2025 by HorrorGhouls

You know the legends… Now learn the truth.

Elvis Presley (Bruce Campbell) is alive, but far past his glory days, to put it mildly. He has become a bedridden old geezer, who rots away in a small nursery home somewhere in Texas, filled with bitterness, grief, lost identity, and can’t say one sentence without spewing sarcasm. To make it worse he has a cancerous growth on his willie. And how much worse can it get from here? No one thinks he’s the real Elvis. Because, hear this: Once upon a time Elvis had to retire from showbiz and pass the mic to the Elvis impersonator Sebastian Haff (Bruce Campbell again) when his hip went bye-bye. When Sebastian Haff died of an overdose, Elvis never got the chance to reclaim his identity. So here we are. Life is unfair.

The one and only who believes he’s The Elvis is none other than a senile, weird old man who claims to be John F. Kennedy (Ossie Davis). And he’s.. well, uhm… black. Ok. And guess what; an ancient Egyptian Soul-sucking Mummy starts to terrorize the oldies at night who ends up dead at a high rate at the nursing home. JFK is strongly convinced that a mummy called Bubba Ho-Tep is behind all of this. Of course it is. And since Elvis hasn’t got much better to do than shuffle around with a walking chair, he teams up with JFK and puts on his iconic stage-outfit one last time to kick some mummy ass.

Bubba Ho-Tep is written, produced and directed by Don Coscarelli, based on a short story by Joe R. Lansdale which mixes drama, thriller, horror comedy, fantasy and an overdose absurdism. The premise itself is so bizarre, and far-stretched to oblivion that it’s hard to actually see any directors at all able to translate this to a coherent feature that walks a fine line between the absurdness and seriousness in a sober way. But Don Coscarelli certainly did it, and also wrote the script and produced Bubba Ho-Tep as a passion project which quickly became a modern cult-classic. The result, with a budget of one million dollars, is pretty solid, to say the least, with Bruce Campbell and Ossie Davis as the most unlikely duo ever put on film, in its bizarre plot that doesn’t look like anything else. But for those who expects blood n’ gore, you will be disappointed as Bubba Ho-Tep relies far more on atmosphere (an eerie one I would say) surreal character study, and dialogue-driven scenes with some really rough language your mom probably wouldn’t appreciate.

A horror comedy where Bruce Campbell portrays an old Elvis is enough of itself to get anyone’s attention. But we shouldn’t underestimate Ossie Davis (1917-2015), who was an unknown name for my part. A serious actor who’s inducted to the American Theatre Hall of Fame is one of the last actors you’d expect to see in a film like this. Even his manager at the time meant he was too good for a film like this, and recommended him to skip the role, but the power of a good script convinced him otherwise. We could easily get an over-the-top goofy JFK, but Ossie plays him in a very serious and calm down-to-earth demeanor, how hard, unlikely and utterly bizarre that sounds like. The chemistry between Bruce and Ozzie really shines and they seemed to have a blast on set. Bruce Campbell does one of his greatest performance ever. He completely disappears into the role of Elvis and clearly shows that he’s a lot more than a certain Ash with a chainsaw. I also have to mention the soundtrack by Brian Tyler which is just plain and simply beautiful.

Director: Don Coscarelli
Country & year: USA, 2002
Actors: Bruce Campbell, Ossie Davis, Ella Joyce, Heidi Marnhout, Bob Ivy, Edith Jefferson, Larry Pennell, Reggie Bannister, Daniel Roebuck, Daniel Schweiger, Harrison Young, Linda Flammer, Cean Okada
IMDb: www.imdb.com/title/tt0281686/