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.

Campfire Scary Stories: My History with Friday the 13th

Quick - name the movie that has had the most profound effect on your life.

If most people were asked this question, they would probably wrack their brains for some intellectually stimulating, deep, culturally enriching film that fits into...well, the stuff that makes Roger Ebert masturbate. Like, oh, I don't know, The Social Network, or something. If someone were to ask ME that question, however, I could only have one answer. I'd give very brief consideration to Reservoir Dogs or River's Edge, two movies that I watched countless times during middle school and thus have a sentimental, almost parasitic bond to your host since they accompany some very lonely years. But as for sheer impact...I've gotta go with Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood.

Yeah, not the first one. Or the second, or the fourth, which fans typically think are better (and I've come to agree with that sentiment since, by the way). Nope, the movie that has altered the lifescope of Jon Lickness more than any other is the SIXTH sequel in a slasher movie series about a demented, mentally challenged backwoods killer who wears a hockey mask and dispatches of copulating teenagers in ever-inventive, ever-bloody ways. So what the f*** does that say about me?

That I'm awesome, that's what.

Kidding aside, Halloween day of 2011 is a scant five days away. The holiday has always had a strong importance to yours truly, since I live on a street that is just unreal for atmosphere on October 31st. We get more than 500 trick or treaters at our door every year. It's just like TV, and it's incredible. And while every Halloween is special, it just isn't quite AS special without one additional thing in the background as I pass out candy to the countless Marios, Disney princesses and other assorted crap (example: I saw one kid last year dressed as a CELL PHONE) parading around. Namely, a Jason movie.

Word of warning: don't expect any sort of analysis with what you're about to read. I've already reviewed EVERY movie in the Friday the 13th franchise. More than once, in fact. If you want the best versions of those reviews, just go to the February and March of 2010 sections of the blog (and if you're reading this on the FAN or on Facebook, said blog is located at http://bloodgutstears.blogspot.com). There also shouldn't be anything in the way of overall series description, because, let's face it, if you don't know that Friday the 13th is about a bad motherf***er in a hockey mask and his holy quest to avenge his mother and/or be the best damn spokesperson for waiting until marriage there ever was, you've been living under a rock. This is going to be more personal.

Ladies and gentlemen, Friday the 13th the way I experienced it. Odds are nobody will find this interesting...but tough. You are all my therapists now. [/Freddy Krueger]

In retrospect, my brother introduced me to a lot of things that I have a passion for. Old-school hip hop, Denver Broncos football, and, by proxy, horror films. The first scary movie I ever saw was Gremlins, but, for some reason, I never really saw that flick as an out-and-out horror movie. Hell, I thought Stripe was cool, even as a snot-nosed five-year-old. But the first movie that I saw that actively scared me was a movie that my older brother taped off of local television sometime in 1991 - Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood. See? We're coming around full circle. I was eight at this time, and for a couple hours one Saturday afternoon sat enthralled watching this big, hulking guy in a blue suit and hockey mask knock off person after person until finally meeting his match - a young girl with telepathic powers. Since hockey mask guy terrified me to my very core, I was oh-so-firmly on telepathic girl's side all through that amazing third act, as she threw obstacle after obstacle at this monstrous brute only for him to keep coming!

Of course, it also had a scene where hockey mask guy whipped a girl head first into a tree that made me laugh my ass off, only adding to the movie's cool factor.

I had never seen anything like this...ever. It was a roller coaster ride that I had loved, no doubt, but one that I didn't want to experience again for a while.

Flash forward three years. By this point, I'd seen a few other horror movies (Texas Chain Saw Massacre and the original Corey Haim Watchers were favorites around this time), and now knew that the actual DAY Friday the 13th had negative, superstitious connotations to it. Well, sooner or later the day rolls around on the calendar, and as I'm perusing the TV listings...the USA network is having an honest-to-goodness MARATHON of movies all sharing the title of that awesome flick I'd seen a few years back in the basement with my brother. A whole marathon! It didn't get any more awesome than that.

Well, those of you in my age bracket (I was born in 1983) may remember that Friday the 13th movie marathons used to be a much bigger deal than they are now. For an indication of just HOW big a deal they were, the good folks at the USA network gave us a whole WEEKEND's worth of the films during that May 13-15 time frame of 1994 (yeah...I did some research on this). And over the course of 72 hours, I got all six of the movies that were broadcast on tape - all in glorious EP speed and all gloriously edited for content. And man, you have never seen a sadder sight in your life than 10-year-old Jon Lickness half-watching, half fast-forwarding his way through F13 movies. All alone in the basement, constantly looking at the stairs to make sure my parents wouldn't catch me watching these nasty flicks, watching the boring talking and sex scenes (remember...sex scenes were boring to a ten-year-old, and I guess technically we're talking "making out in bed" scenes since these were TV edits) and either leaving the room or outright fast-forwarding through the most gut-wrenching stuff. It wasn't the kills. Oh, no - it was the stalking and music stingers BEFORE the moments where Jason would gut someone. That stuff was the WORST.

For those who want to keep score, the six movies shown that weekend were Parts I, II, III, V, VII (got to see it again! Alright!) and VIII. That's an education you CAN'T get in Catholic school, bitches. For starters, I was quite shocked to learn that Jason wasn't always the bad guy. In fact, back then, I thought the back story and tragedy involved in the creation of Jason Voorhees was both terrifying and heartbreaking. But that was just one of many things that seemed so EPIC about this series. The first movie with the demented mother, the genesis of the hockey mask in the third, that wacky fifth movie that made no sense considering that I hadn't seen the fourth, the reincarnated terminator-like Jason in the latter movies...it all added up to one gargantuan, interconnected tale that would make J.R.R. Tolkien piss himself.

It was also due to these movies that I saw a very different representation of high school (and, in some of the movies, college years). As a kid, I had a fascination with high school. If there's one thing Saved By the Bell taught me, it's that young adulthood was just this amazing time where everyone got to hang out in hip diners and talk endlessly with a comically mismatched group of friends. Friday the 13th movies often showed this same high school archetype to me with the variance of characters (almost every movie in the series has a jock, a good girl, a nerd, etc.), only now some very bad things were happening to them. I felt for these people, I really did, and masterfully conveyed my empathy via the following bit of dialogue from myself to a friend at the time - "Yeah, I like Jason in these movies, but I like the people who kill Jason, too." Yup, my ability to provide EXPERT analysis goes back pretty far. ;)

Really, though, EVERYTHING about these movies was awesome to me at this time, and I couldn't get enough of them. Action movies had nothing on this stuff - every one of these films ended on such a cliffhanger! And not in the BOO-SCARE variety that horror films attempt to provide us with nowadays just before the credits. They'd leave us with these tantalizing hints that Jason was still alive - the ripples of water in the lake where he supposedly "drowned" in the early movies, the "eyes opening" thing at the end of Part VI, that same familiar "ch ch ch ch" music heard over the ending credits, and whatever it was, they would ALWAYS deliver on it in the next movie as I'd sit there and PRAY that Jason wouldn't be resurrected, yet secretly hoped that he WOULD to give me another round of "half-watch/half fast-forward through the bad stuff." I loved noticing the differences in Jason's look through each film, as well, and patted myself on the back for catching that the unmasked Jason in Part VII had wounds from the axe to the head in III, although I still had no clue what the hell the big, long, running gash on the side of his face was from. Perhaps something to do with that ever-so-mysterious Part IV: The Final Chapter that USA NEVER seemed to air? More on that later.

Shown above is the evolution of Jason Voorhees in films I-X, from dream figment demon child in the first film to half beast/half cyborg in the tenth.

These things were my Star Wars.

Unfortunately, if you're expecting some big epic conclusion to this story of my losery ten-year-old self's love affair with Friday the 13th, there isn't any. The truth is that I kind of grew out of the phase...well, actually, that's a total lie. The REAL truth is that I finally scared myself so damn much, and cost myself so much sleep that I swore the movies off and vowed to NEVER watch them again. And I didn't. For about four years.

FORTUNATELY (capitalized because...just look at the first word of the previous paragraph - parallelism, dammit), it was now 1998, meaning that I was now 15, had seen quite a few horror movies, built up an excellent gore and scare tolerance, and even done some reading up on the genre by this point. And just like if you were a kid in 1994 you knew what Friday the 13th on the USA network meant, if you were a teenager in 1998 and you were a horror fan, you knew what Saturday nights were all about.

Oh yeah - Joe Bob Briggs. Check this one out, aardvarking, "fu" being the substitute word for "kill," and approximately 78,000 other awesome phrases all brought to life live and in person by my beer drinking uncle every Saturday night on TNT. It was here where I REALLY got my education, as classic horror movie after classic horror movie played out before me all with a guy who was funnier than most stand-up comedians giving the totals and straight-up info on the films in question as if we were old chums.

During that mystical year of 1998, Halloween day fell on a Saturday. What I expected from Joe Bob was more of the same - maybe a couple of the Michael Myers flicks in place of his usual fare. What we actually got was the greatest thing that anyone has ever done in the history of man. A mammoth Friday the 13th all nighter, from 7:00 p.m. until dawn the following morning, all hosted by Mr. Briggs. I made quite the spectacle of this ordeal, inviting a couple friends over and setting my VCR to tape the whole thing (I had to switch tapes sometime around 12:30 a.m.). To say that I was excited was an understatement; I'd finally get some insider info on these movies...and best of all, I'd finally get to see Part IV!

The marathon didn't disappoint, as Joe Bob put in, in the humble opinion of this writer, his absolute best performance as a movie-show host. All the drive-in totals were spot-on, the comedy skits were a riot, and the rant about why Part IV wasn't included in the marathon...legendary. This is something that confounds me to this day - they show The Final Chapter on TV NOW whenever these sporadic mini-marathons pop up. Why was it SO taboo to broadcast it back in those days? Alas, my quest to see the final movie with "Human Jason" remained unfulfilled, but that night was absolutely perfect other than that.

And then, once again...nothing. For whatever reason, Jon Lickness fell off the Friday the 13th wagon, becoming a huge Quentin Tarantino fanboy and then becoming obsessed with the rival Nightmare on Elm Street franchise to the point where I once wrote a (horrible) fan script that would have featured Freddie Prinze Jr. as Freddy Krueger's honest-to-christ SON. Folks...I wish I was making that up. All throughout high school, other things occupied my time, and it wasn't until my first year of college (so we're talking 2002 here) that Jason Voorhees resurfaced in my life. The date was, of course, Friday the 13th, and out of nostalgia I took a gander at the TV listings to see if any movie channel would give in and show a few F13 movies. And one did. Only ONE, and I'll admit to being saddened by the fact that what had once been a HUGE deal on TV was now limited to a showing of Parts I-III on a late night block on Cinemax. Of course, Jason X (a.k.a. Jason in Space for the uninitiated) had just been released earlier that year, so I partially chalked it up to some sort of TV rebellion as a result of that flick's...uh, quality.

Nothing new in the viewings of the first three movies in the series came about, but it did result in one thing...it whet my appetite to FINALLY see the movie that had eluded me for all these years. I could have just ordered it on Amazon...but no, I had to do it the REAL way. The ONLY way. The BEST way to watch a Friday the 13th movie, and that's on an old, dusty, dirty, grainy, watched-a-thousand-times rental copy. So, after almost ten years of waiting to see it, I trekked out to one of the local video huts and located a copy of Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (note to you non-horror fans - that actually is the title, despite the fact that it's the fourth movie in the series and approximately 19 movies proceed it).

I knew a little about this movie, but not much. I knew that Jason had been human in the opening cycle of films, and technically died in this movie before being brought back to life as an undead zombie in Part VI, and I had read in a few places that it supposedly had the absolute BEST gore makeup and effects in the entire series. With a pounding heart, I popped that sucker in the ancient VCR and let it whir, and for 93 minutes I was 10 years old again. Not including the deleted footage from Part VII, it IS the bloodiest movie in the series...but that's not what makes this flick memorable. The kills in the movie are just BRUTAL, and look like they really friggin' HURT. It's "Human Jason" at his most pissed off, and strangely enough, we really don't even SEE him that much until the final act.

One thing I didn't count on was just how FUNNY and ENTERTAINING the film would be. It's helped immensely by a cast that seems to actively give a damn about it despite the expectedly inane script, with Corey Feldman (Mouse from The Goonies) as a young child who somehow winds up being the one to draw the "Jason slayer" honors away from big, buff, outdoorsy Rob Dier. And it's got Crispin Glover, one of my three favorite actors ever, playing the most goofy, oddball horny teen-ager in ANY Friday movie. Once you've seen his legendary dance scene in this movie, you will never forget it, for better or worse.

And Jason's death? While I'd seen more extreme things happen to him in later films, by that point he was superhuman and NEEDED bigger deaths. As a fitting end to the non-supernatural version of Jason's evil exploits, Corey Feldman stabbing Jason headfirst with a machete, only for him to fall onto the ground and slide down the blade ever-so-slowly...graphic, long, absolutely perfect.

And still one of my ten favorite movies of all time.

With my love for the Friday the 13th films now fully restored, I embarked out onto the interwebz and found a lot of other fans of this silly slasher movie series from the 1980s. Fans that I didn't even know the series HAD. And, man, does this series have fans! Dedicated ones, even. This coincided with the time when the main topic of discussion for Friday freaks (other than the upcoming Freddy vs. Jason movie, which was loads of fun) was the ever-present question of the BOX SET. See, Nightmare on Elm Street had a BOX SET - a nice, big, snazzy one with loads of special features and nifty packaging. All the Friday movies got was bare bones DVDs released singularly. We wanted a BOX SET, and we wanted it now!!

Two years after that, we got the BOX SET, and I got my best friend.

At the time, many horror fans hated this set (which promised "EIGHT FILMS, FIVE DISCS, NO MERCY!!" on the back). Upon its release, I wasn't especially pleased with it either - compared to the Nightmare set that we'd used as a template during the constant message board discussions, it was indeed pretty short shrift. The extras, while informative, were a little scarce. The first four movies, considered by many fans (including yours truly) to be the best movies in the series, only featured one commentary track between them. And two movies per disc?? How cheap were these guys??!

That didn't stop me from enjoying it, however, as every so often I'd dig the set out and give the movies a quick gander. I didn't even care that the New Line movies weren't a part of the set. The Paramount movies were (and still are, really) the series to me. The set was also a MUST during Halloween season - atmospherically, they just radiate falling leaves and harvesting even more than the series starring that guy in the William Shatner mask. You know the one.

Then, in 2007, my entire world was rocked, and the event that would quite literally make this box set my best friend transpired when my big brother - the one who had introduced me to this madness in the first place - passed away.

I really don't want to go into specific events of this or the inner details of my mind during this time, but in many ways, it made me regress. My present world didn't make sense anymore, and as a result, I reached increasingly into things from my past for comfort. While I'd grown from Friday scaredy-cat to fan to genuine aficianado over a period of almost 15 years, I was about to become legit obsessed.

The DVDs went into my player almost every night for the better part of six months, and I'd fall asleep with the films on repeat, looping over and over like some kind of never-ending blood-soaked soap opera. Oddly enough, the thing that most fans hated (and that I had, too, at one point) - the two movies per disc format - was now a Godsend, as I could sit through one movie half-asleep and switch to a new one without having to get up. I'd seen countless films during the several years prior that were technically scarier, and my tolerance had reached its peak - the Jason movies of my youth were fun to me now, and as a result, they became my therapist.

Without exaggeration, that box set saved my life.

Which is really what prompted this whole sad story in the first place. Over the past couple of years, Paramount has been re-releasing those first eight classic Friday the 13th movies in "Ultimate Edition" DVDs, chock-full of special features, interviews, documentaries...hell, the third movie is even out there in 3D! I realized that eventually they would release all of these discs in a new box set, and also realized that eventually I would buy said new box set, but in some way I wished this day wouldn't come.

But...well, it did. Just last week, as I snatched up a copy of the Ultimate Edition DVD set for a scant $32. THIRTY-TWO FREAKING DOLLARS. That's even less than I paid for the "two movies per disc" set. Eat me, Blu-Ray - because everyone else is paying $25 a pop for your goddamned HD picture, I'm getting Jason F'n Voorhees in his prime for thirty bucks.

So that's where we're at now in this long journey, and if you don't mind, allow me to play like Lance Storm and be serious for just a moment. It's always fashionable to say something along the lines of "I don't know WHY these movies fascinate me," and apparently I'm not too sexy for my shirt because I know EXACTLY why these movies fascinate me.

People have different definitions of what a horror story should be, and none of them are inherently wrong. Some want all sorts of unfair treatment and disproportionate punishments, and, in essence, maximum sadness and true-life horror. Some want as much red stuff as possible. Me? I want a good, simple campfire scary story where we also get the morality play of "be a good person or else bad things will happen to you." And that's what the Friday the 13th movies are all about. You have a past evil in the form of Jason's drowning setting the whole thing in motion, you have a cast of rowdy young people in the woods partaking in sex, drugs and all other manner of immoral behavior, and you have the unscrupulous characters getting picked off one by one by the unstoppable villain while a virtuous character is able to survive the unholy night.

The story of Jason - a handicapped child left to drown by inattentive counselors - is one of those things that is just so inherently tragic that it is almost impossible for someone to not feel SOME degree of sympathy for him. But he becomes a monster, irredeemable, and complete, absolute evil. And it was up to the one or two GOOD teens/college students to stop him. Even as a child, those were the kinds of scary stories that hooked me the most - simple, uncomplicated good versus evil. Less is more, after all. Obviously, the formula must work on many others, as well. How many sequels again?

And it's the reason why, to this day, I can still watch a lame movie about a guy in a hockey mask gutting people every time it's on television despite the fact that I have the DVDs sitting within ten feet of me.

Happy Halloween, and may your days be as long as the surviving final girl in one of Jason's movies...assuming you've been avoiding the pesky sex and drugs, that is.

Remember when vampires were EVIL? If you don't, check out Christopher F'n Lee in "Dracula: Prince of Darkness"!!

I've gone through many phases in my many years of horror fandom, and Hammer films are my most recent passion. Hammer studios, for its time period, was very cutting edge stuff; the Universal monster movies of the '30s and '40s left a lot of the bad stuff up to your imagination, but Hammer gave us full color, gore in droves, and plenty of big breasted lasses to stare at. So, I guess you could say that this British film company was the precursor to slasher cinema. The hallmark of Hammer, though, was its love for the classic literary monsters like Dracula and Frankenstein, and their never-ending movie series that featured said characters behaving in ways we weren't used to seeing them behave.

The Dracula films that Hammer produced definitely rank right up there with the best that the studio has to offer. A little over a year ago, I inducted the original film in the series Horror of Dracula into the now-defunct International Horror Registry. See, to get talk on Jon Lickness' blog site in the month of October, a few parameters must be set in place - it has to be genuinely scary, it has to be atmospheric, and it has to lend itself well to Halloween season viewing. That movie definitely fits all those criteria, and this flick isn't too far behind. While the second movie in the series (titled Brides of Dracula) had the plot thread of Peter Cushing as famed vampire hunter Abraham Van Helsing laying the smack down on a few of Drac's disciples, Dracula: Prince of Darkness is more or less a direct sequel to the first film, and in a few ways tops it.

The film opens with a few shots of the closing moments from the original film, as Cushing disintegrates Count Dracula (Christopher Lee, still to this day the definitive Dracula in my book) into dust. Nearly ten years later, a young woman's dead body is being carried away by a small group of villagers for a precautionary staking before burial, as she is believed to carry the curse of vampirism. That's the thing about these Hammer Dracula films; vampirism is treated as either a cult, with small bands of hardcore vamps plotting to control Europe, or something, or as some sort of curse that people are destined to have. It's a refreshing change of pace from the way it's usually portrayed on film, at any rate.

Well, before the staking can be performed, Father Sandor (Andrew Keir) rides up to stop what he dubs a heresy. Immediately proving himself to be the Peter Cushing of Dracula: Prince of Darkness, Sandor warns four English tourists (two husband-and-wife combos, made up of brothers Charles and Alan and their wives Helen and Diana) staying at a local inn not to go to Carlsbad castle. Since this is a horror movie, you know how warnings from eccentric old priests work, and the four set out for Carlsbad. Along the way, their stage coach driver becomes frightened when the castle is visible and promptly dumps them in the middle of the woods before a driverless carriage shows up to take them to the creepy old castle in the distance. All signs pointing up for our heroes, huh?

There's a whole tedious section here where the Kents skulk about the castle and strange things pile up (a table set for four people, and their golly-gee briefcases, which had been left on the carriage, located in the guest quarters). Soon enough, a mysterious man named Klove (Philip Latham) appears and serves them dinner in a way very much befitting the classic creepy butler character. He also admits that his former master (who is "dead now") was Count Dracula. The other thing that this scene is noteworthy for is that the female Kents finally remove their proper Victorian hats revealing that the actresses portraying them (brunette Helen, played by Barbara Shelly, and especially young blonde Diana played by Suzan Farmer) are perfect busty Hammer hot chicks.

In the middle of the night, Helen's husband Alan (Charles Tingwell) investigates a strange noise emanating from somewhere deep in the house and goes to investigate. Yes, this staple of bad horror film decision-making goes back pretty far. He's stabbed and killed by Klove, who then turns his body upside down and reveals that he has saved the ashes of Dracula from the original film. Then, in a move that had to be considered VERY shocking by 1966 standards, Klove slices the throat of the deceased Alan and watches the blood pour down onto the ashes, which resurrects the Count in a very Freddy Krueger-like sequence. He immediately makes quick work of Helen, giving her the ever-popular transforming bite before the screen fades to black.

Much as he is with pretty much all of the Hammer Dracula films, Christopher Lee plays your main villain and does an amazing job. He actually has ZERO spoken lines in this particular movie, and there's conflicting stories out there as to why this is. Lee himself claims that the scripted dialogue was horrible and refused to speak it, while writer Jimmy Sangster says that the character himself was badass enough that dialogue was unnecessary. My words, not his. At any rate, considering that we're in the middle of an era of romantic vampires who are (1) dreamy, and (2) sympathetic, it's always nice to go back and watch an unapologetically evil vampire the way that Lee portrays him in these films. A+++ for him.

Soon enough, the remaining couple Diana and Charles (Francis Matthews, who kinda-sorta looks like Jude Law) do some deep searching for their traveling companions that lasts all of one minute before Klove shows up in disguise to transport them away from the castle. Of course, Klove has tricked them, promptly taking them back to the castle where they run into reanimated Dracula and Helen (who just like all women in this series is MUCH hotter in vampire form) for the first of many tense sequences. In short, the duo escape, and eventually make their way back to the monastery where Father Sandor (remember him?) resides, setting up the final act of the film.

The director of this movie is Terrence Fisher, a pretty well-known luminary to fans of British horror in general. He also helmed the two films that precede this one in the Hammer Dracula chronology, as well as many other films in the Hammer canon. I touched on it in the review for Horror of Dracula, but the guy is just ungodly when it comes to creating atmosphere, making the European countrysides and dark castles that make up the settings of this movie seem vibrant and alive when they need to be and all-consuming and constricting when the time comes for things that go bump in the night. As a result, this is definitely a film series, as a whole, that lends itself especially well to Halloween season viewing; it's the "Legend of Sleepy Hollow" (the short story, not that interminable Tim Burton movie) of the movie world in terms of atmosphere.

Of course, for more well-versed Hammer fans, this movie is a treat by doing many of the same things that other films in the series do. Watching this series was very much akin to the '80s Friday the 13th experience; you knew what you were getting, and you knew it was gonna be good. Much of it has to do with Lee; in the mind of this reporter, he's the definitive big-screen Dracula, as I've always found Bela Lugosi's portrayals to be very overrated. This guy is seductive without being emo, and in the many scenes where he seems to have some kind of hypnotic power over the big-breasted women who populate the Hammer universe (see above for photographic proof), you buy it completely, because the guy's presence is just that strong. And he's a bad motherfucker in scenes where he's beating the crap out of the stodgy character actors who make up his enemies. It's a delicate balancing act, I tell ya.

Not to say that this movie is perfect. The two guys playing Charles and Alan Kent, while doing their damndest, come across more as pale imitations of the immortal Peter Cushing and Michael Gough tandem from Horror of Dracula. In addition, the storyline isn't quite as compelling overall; Horror is fascinating in the way it that it twists around the characters and roles from the novel, while Brides deals more directly with the "cult of vampirism," which makes the movie a little bit more interesting in and of itself. Dracula: Prince of Darkness is an exercise in simplicity; it's the most badass of the badass Draculas vs. Victorian times films once again, but as we see in the good moments of this film (and there are plenty - the resurrection scene, the battle in the castle crypt, and the finale where Dracula gets his being standouts), sometimes familiary isn't a bad thing.

*** 1/2 out of ****. In a movie series consisting of nine feature films and being the virtual [i]Friday the 13th[/i] of its time period, it's still the best sequel in the series and a prime slice of classical vampire action.

Horror Nerd Cinema Bonus: "The Thing"

First things first - I'm a huge fan of John Carpenter's seminal 1982 film "The Thing," still to this day the best horror remake of all time. It's a study in two things - (1) paranoia, and (2) the art of making an original film your own, as Carpenter took the VERY loose framework of the 1956 creature feature "The Thing From Another World" and transformed it into a tale of almost unimaginable internal and external threats. Yeah, the American research team in that flick may be up against a big, bad alien and everything...but it's the battles that they fight amongst themselves, playing a fascinating game of "who's the bad guy?" for much of the latter half of the film, that truly make the movie unforgettable, with Kurt Russell, Keith David and company giving the paranoia power with their great portrayals of the doomed characters. In short, it was awesome stuff in pretty much every way a horror film could be.

Having said that, the producers made an excellent decision to make this particular film a prequel rather than another remake. Yes, it's very similar to the 1982 film, but in one key way (which we'll be getting to later) it's very different. Is it perfect? No. Not by a long shot. But it's got good intentions (the producers realized early on that trying to do a straight-up remake of Carpenter's film was like "painting eyebrows on the Mona Lisa"), some solid performances, and good execution. I'll also give it this - see it in a packed house with a bunch of other dedicated horror fans and it's a damn fun time in theaters, not only for its numerous jump moments but for its connections to Carpenter's film that pop up every so often throughout the flick's 102 minute running time.

The movie opens with three Norwegian researchers traversing the Antarctic ice and eventually stopping when they find a strange frequency emitting from somewhere below the surface. As the signal becomes stronger, their vehicle suddenly crashes through the ice and unearths a gigantic otherworldly ship hiding underneath the ground - and nearby, frozen in the ice for many years, is a VERY unwelcome visitor...

Those who have seen the 1982 film know the basics - group of professionals on location in Antarctica have to deal with a malevolent alien being with the power to copy and hide in other living beings. That much is kept intact in this film, with a few characters immediately establishing themselves as our main draws. Our central character this time is Kate Lloyd (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), an American paleontologist brought to a Norwegian science station to assist with the unearthing of the alien body. For a movie of this nature, Winstead does a more than passable job playing the lead protagonist, smart when she needs to be in the middle chapters and not transforming into too overt of an ass-kicker by the finale. Really, what it comes down to is that I bought John McClane's daughter as a paleontologist. What more do you need to know?

Anyway, the operation to gather scientific information on the alien body is being led by Dr. Sander Halverson (Ulrich Thomsen), who fulfills pretty much every horror movie scientist cliche imaginable as he constantly makes dumb decisions about how the research must be continued despite the countless bodies cropping up around the proceedings. Yeah, it's a flaw, but Thomsen is so slimy and believable in the role that it can be forgiven. His assistant is Adam Goodman (Eric Christian Olsen), an American who draws the assignment of inviting Kate to the expedition. Rounding out the main batch of characters are the two helicopter pilots - Sam Carter (Joel Edgerton), a Vietnam vet with a penchant for Cleveland Cavaliers basketball, and Derek Jameson (Adewale Akinnouye-Agbaje), the man who gets the honor of witnessing the alien burst out of its ice prison after being brought to the camp. Since these are the characters that I remembered by name after leaving the theater, this is where I'm stopping, but rest assured, there's a good half dozen additional technicians and miscriants lying in wait to serve as alien shapeshifter fodder.

Plotwise, here's all you need to know about "The Thing": Act One - scientists find alien and take it back to station, Act Two - All hell breaks loose as the alien kills a few of the scientists off and makes its replication powers be known, Act Three - Paranoia sets in and final confrontation. I'd like to make it seem more complicated than that, but really, what more is there to say? Fortunately, this is one aspect of this particular movie that works quite well; while it follows the same blueprint that the 1982 movie set, it actually creates its own style.

To me, this is where the film really shines. It's less about the games that the characters play with each other and the guessing game that goes on between the all-male cast (or mostly male, in the case of this one, as there is actually one additional female in the station apart from Winstead), because the movie smartly realizes that it can't top the Carpenter movie in this aspect. Instead, it carves out an identity fairly early on as a straight-up monster movie. Yeah, there is a section right before the s*** hits the fan at the 3/4 mark where we get a sabotaged blood test and some newfound makeshift ways of playing "who's got the alien bug?", but for the most part it's a fairly straightforward game of cat-and-mouse between the ever-crafty replicating alien and the arguing survivors, with the otherworldly life form taking on much more forms in this movie than it did in Carpenter's.

Does it work better than the 1982 film? No. Matthijs van Heijningen Jr., the director of this film, is no John Carpenter. But it is different, and while different doesn't necessarily always mean good, the decision to not outright copy Carpenter's film was much appreciated by yours truly. Is it a scary monster movie, which is what the movie makes an honest attempt at being? In small doses, yes. Not only because I saw this one in one of the most state-of-the-art theaters I've ever set foot in, but also because it plays a few clever games of misdirection with its reveals; midway through the film, there is a sequence where a scientist who has incurred injuries in a fight with the creature is being helicoptered away. I'll leave it at that - suffice to say, the flick more than fooled me with this one.

More than anything, it was just good to see a modern take on a classic horror film that seemed to have tons of genuine reverence for the source material. Marc Abraham and Eric Newman, the AFOREMENTIONED producers who championed the prequel idea, weren't talking out of their ass; the script has plenty of respect for the rules that Carpenter laid out for his alien villain, the characters are set up in a fashion very similar to the original film (with scientists, pilots, and technical crew making up our cast of victims), the out-of-nowhere moments where the alien makes its presence known, the smooth transition into the events of that transpire at the American camp...hell, even that legendary Carpenter two-note score is kept intact. Compared to Rob Zombie's Sequel That Shall Not Be Named, where ANOTHER Carpenter score wasn't even used ONCE until the closing credits, this movie comes across as a tribute. Granted, you won't find anything new in the 2011 reiteration/prequel of "The Thing," but what's there is certainly a fun, engaging way to spend a couple hours in a theater. And it WILL whet your appetite to watch the immortal original. I know, because it's on in the background as we speak.

*** out of ****. A little predictable and familiar at times, but solid monster action, good performances from Winstead and Thomsen and plenty of love for Carpenter's classic are all pleasant surprises that make "The Thing" a solid outing at the multiplex for fellow horror nerds everywhere.