Throughout it all, director Don Coscarelli, an auteur in the purest sense of the word, has maintained his own vision and a remarkable stable of talent through all four films. And for all its flaws - the omnipresent feeling of " What the hell is going on here?!" chief among them - the series has survived and thrived like no other, taking body hits in the form of studio meddling (Universal backed the first sequel), minuscule budgets, and the occasional lapses in continuity. Call it existential-surrealist horror, and you're halfway there. Part of the glorious fun of this ongoing series is that they bear the full weight of their own (un)reality. Michael Baldwin), who entered the fray after his brother Jody was killed by The Tall Man in the original film. Alongside Reg is his friend Mike (played in Phantasm II by James Le Gros, and in all the other outings by A. Pitted against this otherwordly funeral director are Reggie Bannister's character Reggie, a shotgun and guitar-wielding mensch with a receding hairline and a turbo-charged libido (nearly as fast as the jet black HemiCuda he drives). As a rule, the victims aren't the brightest lot. Unlike the villains of the chatty slashers that have overrun the past several genre booms, Scrimm's Tall Man has no use for wisecracks and witticisms - he's content to snap necks and command a veritable army of evil dwarves and deadly, flying silver spheres that latch onto victim's foreheads and suck their (alleged) brains out. As the series' singular villain, the cadaverous Angus Scrimm (who, in a previous life as gentleman/scholar Lawrence Rory Guy, won a Grammy for his liner notes to an Erich Wolfgang Korngold LP) stalks through all four of the series' entries as the Tall Man, maintaining a grim and steely visage throughout. The original Phantasm is a truly bizarre mix of outlandish horror, cheapo gore, and psychological mindgames that purposefully blur the line between waking and dreaming. Phantasm, once cast as a pre- Halloween horror snafu (although oddly loved as much for its readily apparent flaws as for its creepy virtues), has evolved into a genuine underground cult film phenomenon, with its own fan conventions, midnight screenings, and rabid Web sites, all while staying resolutely below the mainstream genre radar inhabited for most of the previous two decades by such films as Wes Craven's A Nightmare on Elm Street and the works of John Carpenter. What my battered Maltin (circa 1995) fails to note is that there were two more sequels in the series, amounting to one of the strangest and most engaging genre franchises to grace the screen in decades. In Maltin's eyes, of course, it is - though 1988's Phantasm II was head and shoulders above the original in terms of budget, effects work, and overall slick feel. I love that final sentence, presupposing (as it seems to) that the sequel just has to be godawful. Followed by sequel." That's Leonard Maltin's synopsis of Don Coscarelli's 1979 cult horror/sci-fi hybrid Phantasm, excerpted from my dog-eared copy of Maltin's Movie & Video Guide. "Two dull brothers take on a flying object that punctures skulls, as well as a creepy cemetery worker whose ties are so thin he should be playing 'Louie, Louie' at a 1964 prom.
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