the tall man – Horror Ghouls

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/

– 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/

Tag: the tall man

Phantasm II (1988)

Phantasm (1979)