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.