The endgame (so far) comes in "Phantasm IV: Oblivion"

Alright, let's finish this bitch off. And not a moment too soon. Hopefully it hasn't been made clear, but while I've mightily enjoyed this series, sweet Mary, writing about them is exasperating. When I first sat down to watch these Phantasm movies, I envisioned...something entirely different from what wound up taking place. Some standard stalk-and-slash action, a badass villain, and different victim characters in every movie. Kind of like an all-dudes version of Friday the 13th. And, well, if you've been reading these reviews, that has wound up not being the case.

Before we get going, I have to disclose something - I'm not happy at all with how my reviews of these movies have turned out. They've been something like 95% recap, 5% all other shit. The series is just SO freakin' weird that it's difficult to describe it in handy-dandy condensed form without confusing the holy hell out of readers, but it's a sorry excuse. So, from the Horror Nerd to all of you, much apologies for the piss-poor performance on these flicks, and I shall do my best to streamline the whole experience with this go-round.

Phase one of that plan: Some introductory comments on THE FILM ITSELF. Phantasm IV: Oblivion was unleashed upon the world of direct-to-video patrons in 1998. Once again, Don Coscarelli returns to man the directing and writing duties, and since he is the guy who has concocted perhaps the most baffling long-running series I've ever taken in, does about as well of a job as anybody in the history of the world in making a series about killer spheres, hooded dwarves, and mystical otherworldly Undertakers (but not Mark Calloway) seem cool and relevant. What's more, Bill Thornbury and A. Whitney Brown are once again back as Jody and Mike, the brothers who serve as the lynchpins of the action, as well as Reggie Bannister, who in my book is a far cooler "baptism by fire/unlikely hero" character than Ash Williams could ever hope to be. Maybe a good inflammatory comment like that will make this review a bit less sucky.

Whoo boy...are you ready, kids? Ready for the final (to date, and MORE ON THAT LATER) movie in this confounding series? Christ, I don't even know if I am.

But first...LET'S ALL GO TO THE LOBBY!
Now that we got that out of the way, welcome to the crazy world of Phantasm IV. It starts off with what's actually a pretty cool bit of recap/narration by Bannister that makes me all wishy-washy for the two months' worth of nostalgia I have for these movies. Like the previous three flicks, it then resolves the cliffhanger ending from the last installment, which had Reggie pinned to the wall by the Tall Man's sentinel weapons and Mike tearing away from the Bolton mortuary/lab. For whatever reason, the Tall Man decides to let Reggie live and pursues Mike.

The one really nice thing about this movie is that it's much, much easier to follow than the others. Don't get me wrong - it's still off the charts insane, but while the other flicks were all about rapid-fire events and action, this one is more restrained, and only has two plot threads to follow instead of the 17,000 that I'm used to.

First, we get Movie A - the Mike show, and man, is it something else. Apparently Mike ran away from the mortuary so as not to be turned into one of the Tall Man's drones, or something, and eventually winds up in Death friggin' Valley. While there, he seems to be preparing for his death, as he periodically writes these cryptic notes to his buddy Reggie, but his primary goal seems to be unlocking the mystery of the cosmos that is the Tall Man's back story.

Yup, we finally get some semblance of an idea of who this guy was before the whole heinous body-stealing world conquest plot started. There is a fascinating little scene involving the guy working in the battlefields of the Civil War, obviously a doctor of some sort before the big reveal. As far as we can tell, he was an undertaker named Jebediah Morningside who became obsessed with finding the line between life and death (possibly due to witnessing so much of the latter in the war). And golly gee, he actually succeeded, inventing the very first dimensional poles sometime in the 19th century and crossing the gate, eventually being reborn as the evil Tall Man. I never told you it was a definitive answer.

The rest of Mike's story in this film isn't worth recapping quite as much. All you really need to know is that he follows his brother Jody around through a bunch of dimensional gates, unlocks past segments almost as if you would unlock content in a PS3 game by accomplishing little tasks, and eventually gains the power of telekinesis, which he immediately uses to kill a scorpion. I wish I was making that up.

Then, there's Movie B - the typical Phantasm "cool Reggie in pursuit of pussy and the Tall Man" story. This time around, there isn't much action from ol' Reg, which is really a shame, since Bannister has really grown on me as this series has gone on. He went from being a nonentity in my mind in the first movie to a cool alternative to Bruce Campbell in the second to legit badass (and somewhat lecherous) antihero in the third, and I was particularly fond of him here. This time around, all he is doing is tracking down his buddy Mike. Along the way, he defeats a demonic cop (YES!) and engages in a Phantasm classic sequence for the ages.

OK, here's the deal - for those of you who have been keeping score, all of the sequels have featured a young hot chick for Reggie to attempt to mack on, and this one is no different, as he rescues a hot young blonde named Jennifer (Heidi Marnhout) from certain doom after her car flips over. After driving to an abandoned hotel and falling asleep for the night, Reggie is awoken from a nightmare only to discover that Jennifer's...uh...chest is heaving. Ever the sexual harassment proponent, he opens up her shirt, and, well, take a look.

Yeah. Sentinel boobs. You can always count on Phantasm movies to have SOMETHING in them that will stick out in your memory forever, and this one is no exception. Anyway, he destroys the sentinels and demon-Jennifer and continues on his merry way, eventually catching up to Mike in the desert for the AFOREMENTIONED "crossing of the poles/Jebediah Morningside" revelation.

What else do you need to know? Well, not much. This flick doesn't have much of a big, rousing ending action sequence like the other films do, and as it turns out really wasn't supposed to. There's only a couple other things worth mentioning: (1) Mike gets the honors of offing the Tall Man once again, this one with some sort of strange interdimensional bomb (don't ask), and (2) we get ENDING TWIST #4, as a new Tall Man immediately comes through the gate and completes the wackamaroo transformation that he had been putting Mike through, removing the sphere from his skull and leaving him for dead as Reggie dives through the gate in HOT PURSUIT (/Roscoe P. Coltrane). Our closing scene is an outtake from the first film of child Mike getting into Reggie's ice cream truck, and the two of them driving off into the distance. And it's a scene that could bring a tear to a glass eye.

I'm not sure I know why, exactly, but I enjoyed this movie. The relaxed pace was a welcome change after the all-out frenetic campy weirdness of the first three films, and simultaneously despite and because of that tone-down, the movie gives us some classic moments. The stuff with the Tall Man's past is really awesome, and it's great seeing Angus Scrimm play something other than the slow-stalking, slow-talking killer for a change during his scenes as Jebediah. In addition to that, both Movie A and Movie B have some decent scares, and the killer breasts? Immortal.

Of course, there's also a wholly boring story associated with the possible future of the franchise. Way back in the mid-'90s, Roger Avary (the co-writer of Pulp Fiction) wrote a screenplay for the final movie in the Phantasm saga, which would pick up from the events of Phantasm III and take place in a dire, post-apocalyptic landscape. As cult movies often do, the project ran into financing difficulties, prompting Don Coscarelli to create this movie as a way to bide time and keep interest until enough money could be raised for the endgame film, and Avary even has a cameo as one of the civil war soldiers in the movie. And no, there hasn't been any headway in raising the finances for said movie, which would be titled Phantasm's End, although Coscarelli hopes to make it sometime in the future. Hope you enjoyed the information I was able to impart due to the five minutes' worth of Wikipedia research I afforded Phantasm IV.

Thus, for that reason, while I ordinarily hate open endings to horror series, I'll give Phantasm IV a slight pass since it's not OFFICIALLY over yet and award it *** out of ****.

Now, a few words on the series as a whole. This series is the very definition of "cult" - it's out there, it's definitely not digestable to the masses, but it's off-kilter wackiness and cool hero characters easily lends itself to a small but very diehard group of fans, which this series no doubt has. After taking in every movie in the series, I wouldn't consider myself a hardcore fan, but the films should get regular play during my daylight hours sleep schedule while so many of my other DVDs sit in the shelf for all of time after one watch. They're oddball, they're loads of fun, and as a whole experience, I can't recommend them enough.

More than that, however, I'm sure all of you out there reading this who consider yourselves horror fans have people in your lives - be they family, co-workers, significant others, etc. - who give you funny looks for some of the things you watch. You know, the usual "how can you watch this crap" look. According to some people (not looking at you at all, Roger Ebert), we are only supposed to watch cerebral, artistic works of social and cultural importance that make us reflect on who we are as a society and human beings. And just TYPING that last sentence almost made me hurl.

Are these films high art? No, not by a long shot. But movies can be good in different ways, and yes, the Phantasm films are good. Not in the way that they should have walked away with bagfuls of Oscars, but the best movies are the ones that are able to make you feel something. Shocked, confused, invigorated...these are the effects that these films had on me while watching them, and I'm a slightly curmudgeonly 28-year-old man. God only knows what I would have thought if had I seen this in my impressionable childhood. So shut it, Roger, or else Reggie, his awesome ride, and his cavalcade of weapons will be pointed at YOU.

Far out, indeed.

Round-three of four-barrel shotgun shootin' hemicuda-ridin' action in "Phantasm III"

I've absorbed many, many horror series in my day, but these Phantasm flicks might take the cake when it comes to sheer weirdness and the amount of content that it throws at you per minute. See, most horror flicks have about 30 minutes' worth of stuff that fans of the genre actually care about, while much of the rest is little more than filler between murder scenes. These films have more convoluted twists and turns than the WCW/ECW Alliance invasion storyline and the Spider-Man clone saga COMBINED. Hell, even the ending scares serve as major plot points that are expounded upon in the later films, which I've just found out from watching Phantasm III: Lord of the Dead.

First things first, this flick appeared on video store shelves (theaters? are you kidding me?) in 1994, six years after the previous installment and a full fifteen years after the original film hit theaters and became a miniature cult phenomenon. What's more, it even brings back Bill Thornbury as Jody Pearson and A. Whitney Brown as his little brother Mike, the latter of whom having been played by James LeGros in Phantasm II. The reason for this, as far as I can tell, is that Universal studios allowed writer-director Don Coscarelli (who returns to perform the same duties once again with this one) to bring back either Brown or Reggie Bannister, but not both of them. Deciding that it would be easier to find a new 20-something handsome leading man than another mid-'50s curmudgeonly ex-hippie, he decided to go with Bannister. Wise move, if you ask me. Well, no restrictions this time, so Bill and A. Whitney return and the trumpets sound from the heavens.

In keeping with the spirit of this franchise, Phantasm III is very much a direct sequel to the other films, and if you haven't read them, you're encouraged to check out the reviews of the other films before you partake in this one. That way, my incisive wit and biting commentary might make a little more sense.

Time to get this round of hooded-dwarf-heat-seeking-sphere-weapon madness started. We start with the ending of Phantasm II, where Alchemy (Samantha Phillips) rips her scalp off to reveal her gooey, pulsasting brain, causing their escaping hearse to crash and the Tall Man (Angus Scrimm) to come back for Mike and his kinda-sorta psychic girlfriend Liz. Less than a minute into the action after the requisite recap, it's revealed that Liz dies in this attack, getting her face eaten off by one of the Lurkers before Reggie (Reggie Bannister) rescues the now-
conspicuously A. Whitney Brown-looking Mike from the Tall Man. It's also revealed that the ORIGINAL Tall Man did indeed die at the conclusion of Phantasm II, and that another one immediately emerged from the interdimensional portal to take his place.

Any idea what's going on? Nope, none.

Anyway, Mike is taken to the hospital, where he sees his older brother JODY (Bill Thornbury, and YAY!) in a hallucination tell him to "stay away from the light." After ignoring the instructions and continuing on, the Tall Man appears blocking his path, causing Mike to wake up only to be attacked by an old, cackly demonic nurse. Almost immediately, Reggie arrives to visit Mike (and this is mighty convenient since Mike has supposedly been in a coma for TWO YEARS), and witnesses the final tussle with demon-nurse before breaking his buddy out of the hospital.

After they arrive home, Jody himself appears before them to warn them that the Tall Man is coming, and proving that he is truly the most intelligent character in this series, Captain Awesome Angus Scrimm rounds the corner via his cool dimension gate to collect Mike, whom he seems to DESPERATELY want to claim for some reason or another. I should also point out that Jody gets transformed into one of the Tall Man's sphere ball weapons in this scene, half-solving one of the many questions I have about this series by saying that these little balls are made up of victims that the Tall Man claims. Anyway, our villain easily fights off Reggie, Mike, and Jody-Ball, and draws Mike away into the gate with him.

So it's off for another round of search and destroy with the Tall Man and the added stake-raising of having Mike as a hostage. At least this series keeps throwing some new wrinkles into the formula. Hell, it throws about 5,000 new ones at us per picture. At any rate, Jody-ball informs Reggie that he needs to travel to Holtsville, which is (of course) thoroughly Tall Man-ized when he arrives. This place does, however, lead him to the most humorously over-powered character ever committed to film.

Okay, I'm giddy about this one, let me set it up. Immediately after getting to Holtsville, Reggie is attacked by three goons (one hot girl and two dopey dudes), put in the trunk of his bitchin' Hemicuda, and driven to an (apparently) abandoned house. Said (apparently) abandoned house is actually inhabited by Tim (Kevin Connors), a young boy who has a Macaulay Culkin-esque ability to devise traps in his home and easily kills the three would-be looters. One of them with a razor-bladed frisbee, no less. After making work of them, he rescues Reggie from the trunk of his car.

Yup - the kid in the above picture = Jesus.

Turns out that Tim's family has also been killed by the Tall Man, and he has been surviving on his own for quite a while. Moving along, they traverse to the local mortuary, where they are attacked by two completely random African-American women, one of whom gets quickly killed by a sphere, which Reggie calls a "Sentinel" and thus gives me something to call it by proxy.

See? Now I'm happy. I'll admit - this movie doesn't move quite as fast as the previous two films, and it had actually been a little on the boring side up until now. Throw a nice sphere (oh wait - Sentinel) murder scene my way, and I'm easily sated. Even better, Tim proves himself to be even MORE awesome by appearing out of nowhere (earlier, Reggie had tried to leave him with a woman looking after orphans of the Tall Man's mass genocides, only for him to hide in the trunk of his car and stow away) and shooting the sentinel out of the air.

By process of elimination, Rocky (Gloria Lynn Henry), the remaining survivalist, teams up with Reggie and Tim. On their way to a town called Bolton, they see a massive convoy of hearses and decide to follow them instead. Seems like a good plan to me. Anyway, while camping out, Jody appears to Reggie in a dream and guides him to the Tall Man's lair where they rescue him before waking up - only it must have been slightly more than a dream since Jody himself appears before Reggie in the real world and opens another gate, which Mike himself pops out of. The Tall
Man tries to follow, but Reggie closes the gate, cutting the Tall Man's hands off. After our heroes manage to fight off the spider-like creatures that the hands transform into AND the zombified corpses of the three looters from earlier...and it's just as amazing as it sounds, believe me.

Our four main characters make our way to Bolton mortuary to crash for the night because "it's the last place he would look," which sounds like as genius of a plan as any. There, they run across a large cryonics facility, reminding Mike that the Tall Man dislikes cold (and his 56K cache memory even brings up a little video for us from the first film to demonstrate this).

OK...it's taken 2.5 movies to get to this point, and after almost four hours of four-barrel-shotgun shooting, hemicuda-riding, jet-flying, wheelin' deelin son of a gun action (WHOO)...Don Coscarelli is finally going to tell us what the hell is going on and give us some answers. Get ready.

Mike consults with the Jody-sphere, and asks him the holy question - "Tell me about him. I need to know why." You and me both, buddy. Well, Jody explains that the Tall Man (or his kind, meaning that there is more than one of the guy) are gathering up an army to conquer many different dimensions, stating quite explicitly that the guy comes from some other plane (which had been apparent). The lurkers and the sentinels are both made from the victims, and it's explained that the Tall Man removes the brains of these people, leaving only a tin part of the cerebral cortex in the body for the lurkers to function on instinct and impulse, while the "Smart" part of the brain is encased in the sentinels to serve as killers. So, by harvesting the dead, the Tall Man (or Tall Men) are hoping to eventually conquer Earth, making this series Plan 9 From Outer Space meets The Terminator.

Everybody got that?

Well, admittedly, I'd pieced 2 and 2 together on much of the above anyway, but after all of this time spent watching the Phantasm movies, it was very nice to get some sort of closure to just what the hell all of the various creatures and Tall Man-controlled beings are. Since I'm a person who sat through nine seasons of The X-Files only for Chris Carter to fuck me over and leave everything up in the air at the end, and having read the reports about what went down on Lost, I've gotta give it to Don Coscarelli that he didn't take the easy way out and just "leave it up to our imagination" or some claptrap like that. Bravo, dude.

Since we're well into the third trimester of the flick by this point and all of our heroes and villains are in the same place, it's time for the Phantasm III ending action sequence. The Tall Man has sensed the heroes' presence at the mortuary and descends upon it, and the bodies of the three looters turn up once again and attack Reggie, Tim and Rocky (who brandishes NUNCHUCKS throughout this film, which is awesome in and of itself). The Tall Man himself comes for Mike, in
a really nifty scene where he's surrounded by hundreds of his killer sentinels.

The Tall Man captures Mike and begins operating on him, but the three remaining leads surprise him, stabbing him in the chest with a pole dipped in liquid nitrogen and locking him in a freezer, which causes him to implode and a sentinel to pop out of his head, revealing that the series' Tall Men are also sentinel killers of a sort. From here, we get the usual Phantasm-style ending chase sequence involving the remaining looters and the sentinel balls. Reggie and Tim eventually
destroy the Tall Man's sentinel by dumping it into a vat of liquid nirogen, and all appears right with the world...

...except that the Tall Man's operation went further than expected, as Mike discovers that his blood is now yellow, and that a golden sphere is lodged inside his skull. He appears at the end of the film with silver eyes wandering outside the mortuary, and Jody appears to drag him through a dimensional gate, telling Reggie that they'll "be in touch." Sure thing, bro. Rocky quickly wanders off, telling Reggie and Tim that she's "sick of dealing with the undead," leaving Reggie
and Tim to search the mortuary alone to find out what happened to Mike.

And, unbeknownst to our heroes, there are dozens of sentinels hovering above them, and after Tim finds the poles to close a dimensional gate in the freezer, the sentinel balls completely cover Reggie and pin him to a wall. Tim returns to the room, and quickly enough, another Tall Man appears from the gate, a lurker grabs Tim and pulls him through a window, and we get Phantasm ambiguous ending #3. The end.

Initial reaction: Phantasm III isn't quite as good as the first two films. The Wikipedia page for the movie states that it is the most "controversial" movie in the series, but that's a statement that baffles me, since I didn't really find it any more or less weird than the other two movies in the series. Other than the scene where everything is made clear, however, this flick seems a bit more on the safe side than the other films. The first movie was out-and-out bizarro-land for 90 minutes, while the second was controlled frenzy and almost nonstop action. This one has a few stretches of elongated boredom, and in this series, it sticks out like a sore thumb. So thumbs down to the movie in that regard.

Having said that, the actors once again do a fine job, and it's very nice especially seeing Brown back in the role of Mike. On the character front, however, the supporting cast this time isn't quite as good as it was in the last-go-round, which gave us a couple hot chicks to look at in Alchemy and Liz. Tim is just a little bit...TOO awesome of a kid for my taste, having the ability to take down multiple sentinels, zombies, and other assorted crap with way too much ease for a
10-year-old. Yeah, Brown was a kid in the first movie, but he wasn't a freakin' Green Beret sharpshooter. There were a few occasions where I rolled my eyes at some of Tim's accomplishments in this movie, and eventually, the character just kinda becomes disposable. Which Coscarelli apparently realized, since he's the one who draws the "prop death in the ending twist" card this time.

But I will give the movie this - while it has flaws in the character and plot department compared to what the first two flicks gave us, it still has me more than ready to watch the final (to date) entry in the series. And here's hoping THAT one doesn't disappoint in a premature ejaculation kind of way.

** 1/2 out of ****. Definitely worth a look for completionistism sake, but not as out-and-out memorable as the first two movies.

I have no clue what's going on - but who cares? "Phantasm II" kicks muy ass anyway.

Longtime readers of the blog know that a few weeks back, I reviewed the cult classic 1979 film Phantasm. Here's the short, short version: the movie rocked, and completely lived up to all the expectations that had been firmly implanted in my horror nerd brain for the better part of the 15 years that I'd wanted to see it. Well, lo and behold, this IS the horror genre, which means that we've also got a whole lotta sequels to slog through for completionist's sake. So we've come back to this: the return of the Horror Franchise Reviews. Here's hoping this one doesn't suck as much as nearly all of those did.

Just because I'm a nice guy, here's a link to my review of the original Phantasm. If you haven't seen that film and are reading this review, take my word for it and spend ten minutes reading what's in that link. These are some weird movies, and you'll need all the information you can get.

One last thing before we get started: this movie was released nine years after the first film, but still features the original director and writer in Don Coscarelli. It's always a good sign when a series has a steady creative voice. So huzzah to Phantasm II for that. Of course, it's also got the return of King Awesome Angus Scrimm as the villainous Tall Man. Double huzzah.

The movie opens directly after the first movie ends, with groovy, skullet-wearing Reggie (once again played by Bannister) playing some guitar and preparing to take Mike away from the town where all of this madness has just gone down. The Tall Man (again played by Scrimm) appears in Mike's mirror, smashes through it, and grabs him. Hearing the commotion, Reggie confronts the dwarves with hoods who serve as this movie's secondary villains, rescues Mike from their clutches, and blows up the house with a gas explosion. All things told, shits and giggles and a solid opening to Phantasm II.

We immediately warp ahead seven years. Mike (James LeGros filling in for A. Whitney Brown, which is strange since I understand Brown would return in the two later sequels) is now in a psychiatric facility, having been deemed criz-azy after explaining to the authorities that his family life was just destroyed by a stabbing-sphere wielding psychotic supernatural graveyard caretaker. Those Philistines. Anyway, Mike lies to his lead psychiatrist, gets out of the facility with humorous ease (seriously, it's literally a scene of "Yup, I was crazy and the whole thing was in my mind!" "OK then! You're free to go!"), and promptly goes back to his hometown cemetery and begins digging up graves, finding all of them empty. His old buddy Roger finds him there and begins driving him back home when Mike gets a vision that there is going to be a gas explosion. Golly gee, a few seconds later, Roger's whole house goes up in flames, killing his family in the process.

MEANWHILE...there's a whole separate plot thread (almost literally a thread, since it takes up little more than just a few lines of narration) in these opening passages involving Liz (Paula Irvine), a comely young blonde woman who has some sort of psychic bond with Mike. Apparently this has been going on for quite a while, too, since she has a scrapbook involving Mike's kiddie adventures, and since Mike's internal monologue during the scene where he talks himself out of psychiatric care mentions her several times. Anyway, what seems important about this character thus far is that her Grandfather is about to die, and when this happens, the Tall Man is coming for her.

See? Not even fifteen minutes into Phantasm II and I'm already thoroughly confused. Here's the thing you should probably know about the Phantasm series - none of it makes a lick of sense, and it throws about fifteen different things at you per minute, but holy fuck does it hold your attention. Not because what you're watching is so amazing or life-changing, but because you're afraid to miss about seven plot points if you turn away.

After losing his family and seeing Mike flip out immediately before the explosion happened, Reggie enlists with Mike in his quest to find and hunt down the Tall Man. That's another thing about the Phantasm series - it's got male protagonists, a rarity in and of itself in horror films. They may not be Dirty Harry-cool, but they're dudes. Said brave heroes stock up on weapons a la Terminator 2 and set out across the country attempting to pick up the Tall Man's trail, which winds up not being too difficult, since he leaves every town he visits a shell of its former self and minus the headstones in the cemetery. In one of these towns, our heroic pair make their way through a battle-damaged mausoleum, encountering an apparition of a naked young woman (YAY!) and a hallucination of Liz herself bound and gagged before a Freddy Krueger-ized version of the Tall Man's face erupts from faux-Liz's back and tells them "Come East if you dare!"

Back to Movie B, as Liz's Grandfather has just passed away, meaning we're about to come FULL CIRCLE on plot point #787 of this flick. Liz (and exactly five other people, including her grandmother) attend the funeral, where a whole bunch of junk that proves surprisingly hard to recap occurs. Bottom line: Liz (who strangely gets more attractive the more you look at her) finds an exhumed coffin in the Tall Man-ized church and is then attacked by the big guy in the flesh. While all of this is going on, the presiding Priest of the funeral Father Meyers (Kenneth Tigar) calls the dead grandfather a "sacrilege" and stabs the corpse multiple times, and he must have known what he was talking about, as a short time later the grandfather re-animates and takes off with Liz's grandmother. The Tall Man then psychically tells Liz to return to her family's house at night in order to rescue her grandmother.

Yeah, I don't get it, either.

Whoo, boy - official DVD timer says that we're not even a third of the way done with this movie? Jesus. This thing is going to be an endurance round of epic proportions - and I'm even LIKING the movie thus far. But MAN, does it ever throw a lot of junk your way. If the first movie was out there, this one is weirder than ten Belial Bradleys combined.

Alright, boys, Round Two of the strangeness is about to begin. After a long night of driving, Mike awakens to find that Reggie has picked up a hitch-hiker - a hot young chick named Alchemy (Samantha Phillips), who just so happens to resemble the nude apparition they saw back in the ghost town. Our new terrific trio (groan...I know) then head "East!!" just like Freddy-Tall Man said they should toward the town of Perigord, Oregon. Upon getting there, it's deserted just like all the other Tall Man-plagued towns, and they agree to stop at Alchemy's (who goes by "Chemy" for short) old family-owned bed and breakfast and crash for the night.

Liz goes to the mortuary and encounters the Tall Man, his mortician assistants (one of whom kinda looks like Christian Bale, and even though he doesn't speak exhibits about 1000% more charisma than Bale does in any film I've seen the guy in), and eventually Father Meyers, who winds up being killed by the Tall Man's awesome flying sphere weapons. One of the mysterious threads from this series is kinda-sorta explained when she runs across her grandmother, now turned into one of the Jawa-looking hooded dwarves known as "Lurkers." So apparently the Tall Man takes dead bodies and turns them into the armies of these little guys that populate the Phantasm movies. Fifty cool points, this movie series has answered one of its questions.

Running out of the mortuary, Liz falls into an open grave, which just so happens to be occupied by Mike, whom she immediately makes out with based on nothing more than their psychic dalliances. Yup, all of our protagonists are in the same town. Know what this means for yours truly? I might not bore the ever living hell out my readers (all six of them) for too much longer, because Movie A and Movie B have now merged. So here's to praying that this flick becomes a straightforward action-horror film from this point on.

Naw, I'm not that lucky.

Back at the Bed and Breakfast, our four remaining Good Guy characters agree to get some sleep and break into separate rooms made up of the two couples. Our man Reggie gets to mack it to Alchemy during this scene, so good for him. Soon enough, the Tall Man tricks our heroes and kidnaps Liz, and our two oh-so-cool male heroes drive off after his action hearse in hot pursuit (after Reggie gives Alchemy the macho "I'll find you someday if I'm able!" line). In a scene that puts anything in Dukes of Hazzard to shame, the Tall Man proves his driving mettle by running Mike and Reggie off the road. Almost an hour into the movie and we've got our first unintentionally hilarious scene. All in all, not too shabby for a movie with a $3 million budget and a script that bites off way more than that $3 million can chew.

We're now entering trimester three of Phantasm II, so time for this flick to speed up. Christian Bale-henchman takes the bound-and-gagged Liz to his crematorium, and to make a long story short, she manages to escape and kill him before he can push her into the furnace. Mike and Reggie arrive at the mortuary, and what follows is actually a very well-staged and well-sustained action sequence where the three characters have a final showdown with the Tall Man, his smart heat-seeking spheres, and his remaining henchman. At the conclusion of this chain of events, the Tall Man is killed via a heaping helping of tainted embalming fluid being pumped into his body, which causes him to melt in example #2 of this movie's fairly decent onset special effects (example #1 being the devil-Freddy-Tall Man thing that popped out of Liz's back in the hallucination I mentioned seemingly 87 paragraphs ago).

Alright, we are now entering one of the holiest of the holy scenes that Jon Lickness has ever witnessed - the ending of Phantasm II. Without hyperbole, it may be the greatest ending scene...ever. Get ready.

After Reggie sets fire to the mortuary, they are greeted at the back entrance by Alchemy driving a hearse. Reggie gets in the front with Alchemy while Mike and Liz pile in the back, and all signs are pointing toward the Wayne's World mega-happy ending. However, in a GIANT SWERVE, Alchemy tears a section of her scalp away exposing her brain, revealing herself to be...not human. If she was working with the Tall Man all along, why didn't she just kill them in the Bed and Breakfast? But I digress. She slams on the brakes, Reggie goes sailing out the window (but not before he screams like a woman in unintentionally hilarious scene/moment #2 - again, not too shabby for a film with this kind of budget), and the hearse drives away. In a move that mirrors the ending of the first film, the Tall Man bursts through the back of the hearse, grabbing Mike and Liz and pulling them through the door.

Roll end credits.

You know, when I first popped this DVD in, I expected a pretty half-hearted effort, and was genuinely surprised by what I got. While the budget is pretty modest in comparison with almost all mainstream releases, the $3 million afforded to this movie is pretty decent for a horror-suspense film; after the original film became a miniature cult smash, Universal gave Coscarelli a bit more faith for this sequel. While it's clearly done on the cheap, the director is definitely inventive enough with his money and creative enough with his themes that this movie is just all kinds of badass. The two male heroes just radiate coolness all around, which helps the film out immensely. Basically, everyone involved - from Angus Scrimm to the remainder of the cast to the film-makers to the effects crew - really puts it all out there, and it shows.

Secondly, it should have been more than apparent reading the meat portion of the review, but man, is this movie ever weird. It may be a bit more streamlined than the first film, but it's still off the charts in terms of its pure silliness. More than three hours into the Phantasm saga...I still have almost no clue as to what the frig is going on with this thing. And I mean that in the best way. It's done in a way that is almost MADDENING...I really, really want to know who the Tall Man really is, what his ultimate plan is with the hordes of stolen corpses and Lurkers, and what the source of his mystical powers are. And that whole strange "gate" thing that leads to his "home" dimension? What is THAT all about? Phantasm and Phantasm II have been two movies that pose tons of questions, and provide just enough of an answer so as to leave you wanting more.

Conclusion time - two movies in, and the Phantasm series is shaping up to be one of the classics. It's absolutely chock full of classic characters, with Scrimm's Tall Man ranking right up there with the great ones in the pantheon of horror movie villains and Mike and Reggie making cool foils. Plotwise, it keeps you entertained and WANTING to be there for the moments when certain aspects of the story will be made clear. While it might suffer just a BIT from familiary with the material, this is a sequel that raises the stakes and feels like a BIGGER film, which should be the goal of any sequel.

*** 1/2 out of ****, and Joe Bob says check this one out.