Review #276: Phantasm (1979)

This review was originally written in October 2023.

Gabe's Horror Movie October Review #30 - Phantasm (1979)

Phantasm is a film about a boy (Mike) and his older brother (Jody) investigating a creepy mortician at the local funeral home who is suspected of stealing bodies before they're buried. Their investigation leads to the discovery of numerous supernatural horrors, including shrunken slaves made from the reanimated corpses of the dead, flying metal spheres that drill into people's heads, and the fact that the mortician is apparently an alien that can regenerate limbs and is stealing corpses for cheap labor back on his home planet. Also, it turns out it was all a dream. (Or was it?)

While I feel like I probably saw this movie once when I was a child, I remembered almost nothing about it. That might be because the first thirty minutes is incredibly boring (Mike spends most of it tailing people and breaking into various places all because he saw the mortician lift something heavy, pardon me while I brace myself for such a spectacular plot hook), but the final third of this movie is BONKERS. One of the few things I remember from seeing this in my childhood is when Mike finds the portal back to the mortician's home planet, and he momentarily gets sucked through- I remember being really creeped out by the other world's desolate, hot, windy environment and I'm pretty sure I assumed it was supposed to be some kind of hell (with the mortician being a demon in disguise). Finding out after all these years that it's actually just showing another planet (with the explanation for shrinking the reanimated bodies being because the home planet has increased gravity) ruined any mystique this film had, because I just don't find an alien planet nearly as interesting or scary as a literal hell dimension.

I was also shocked to find out that this series had an entry as recently as 2016- it's had five entries total, with Mike and Jody both returning with the same actors in four out of the five (Phantasm 2 had a different actor for Mike, and Jody was absent entirely) and their ice cream truck-driving friend Reggie returning in all five (as well as the evil mortician alien guy). If I liked Phantasm more than I did, I probably would get started watching the rest of them, but since this month is coming to a close I think I'll save that for another October.

I don't really have much else to say about this movie; it was kind of lackluster, but I'm sure it came out at a time where there wasn't so much well-made horror cinema at one's fingertips, so even if I didn't like it I have to acknowledge it was an influential movie when it came out.

I guess watch this film if you want to see where the series began, but I think there's plenty of better movies to watch instead.

Overall Rating: 5/10 Improvised Shotguns

Late-Stage Twist: The film starts with a scene in a graveyard of a woman in a lavender dress having sex with, and then killing, a character whose body would later be reanimated as a shrunken slave. This same "lady in lavender" would go on to seduce Jody in a graveyard before Mike interrupts them, and when she appears again near the end of the film, she stabs Reggie and then transforms into the mortician (showing he was the lady in lavender all along). Apparently this was decided late in the production, with neither the actress (Kathy Lester) nor the actor (Angus Scrimm) being informed before shooting. Michael Baldwin, the actor who plays Mike, used to joke "Scrimm still has the lavender dress."