Review: Don Coscarelli’s Phantasm on Anchor Bay Entertainment DVD

Phantasm remains a hallucinogenic horror classic, and this seems to be the definitive DVD treatment.

PhantasmThe production of Phantasm was scattered over a two-year period, shooting on weekends and with writer-director Don Coscarelli making notes in the editing room for what he and his crew would shoot next. The original script transformed into a fractured narrative, which accounts for the dreamlike quality of the finished product. It feels more like the atmosphere-driven Italian horror films of the 1970s, which disregarded plot and narrative in favor of nightmarish imagery, mood, and anarchic gore sequences.

Yet what makes Phantasm special is the way it captures a boy’s life in 1978. The hero, 13-year-old Mike (Michael Baldwin), has just lost his parents and his older brother, Jody (Bill Thornbury), a musician living on the road, has come home to take care of him. Mike has an unnatural interest in Jody, following him around and worried that Jody is going to leave him. The film, then, can be viewed as a haunting fable of an adolescent grappling with his fear of death.

As Mike rides his motor scooter through the Morningside Cemetery in the small Oregon town the teen calls home, he discovers a bogeyman, The Tall Man (Angus Scrimm), in the guise of a funeral director singlehandedly lifting a casket into the back of a hearse. The graveyard is a paranormal minefield where unseen forces hurl Mike from his bike, and tiny hooded figures scamper around trees. Soon the kid becomes convinced that The Tall Man is a creature that destroyed his parents, and that he and his older brother are next.

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As Mike struggles to get Jody to believe him, he continues his attempt to gather evidence, and the phantasmagoria grows increasingly weird. He’s pursued down a mortuary’s grand halls by flying metal spheres that drill into their victim’s foreheads and, when he slices off one of The Tall Man’s fingers, it bleeds bright nail-polish yellow. Taking home the bogeyman’s disembodied body part, Mike tries to show it to his brother, at which point it transforms into a buzzing killer insect. Phantasm careens along in this outlandish fashion, and its big scares work because they seemingly continue to emerge from a writer’s feverish subconscious, one racked with dread and confusion.

Filmed on an incredibly low budget, Phantasm feels like a dug-up artifact from the late ’70s, when long hair and hitchhiking were going the way of the dodo. Some of the supporting cast is uneven, but the core group of actors (who returned for many of the sequels) seem as familiar and recognizable as young Elliot from Steven Spielberg’s E.T. There’s a certain kind of blue-collar, rural-suburban lifestyle represented here, where the kids are allowed to drink a beer and pleasure is found working under the hood of a muscle car. An extended scene shows Jody and his pal, Reggie (Reggie Bannister), a balding ice cream vendor with a ponytail, sitting on the porch, playing guitar, and if you grew up in this milieu you might feel as if you know these guys. They seem vivid and idiosyncratic, goofy and real. They’re nothing like the plastic WB teen actors that populate so many of today’s horror remakes.

Maybe they could get away with more back then. There’s a memorable sequence in the film where a frustrated Jody locks Mike up in his bedroom, and the kid makes his own bomb by taping a shotgun shell to a hammer and swinging it against the door, blasting it open. It’s definitely a “don’t try this at home” moment, and in real life the kid might have blown his hand off, but in the film it shows off his resourcefulness. Kids shouldn’t play with firecrackers or fire, but they do because there’s a real allure to it, kind of like drinking that beer when you’re not supposed to. Mike gets to do all of those things.

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That explains the film’s enduring appeal: Younger viewers continue to recognize something of themselves, or who they’d like to be, in young Mike. One might think many of those younger viewers would be repulsed by the violence, but anyone who thinks that hasn’t really delved into the bleak and horrific world of the Grimm brothers, where Rapunzel’s prince had his eyes gouged out with thorns. Phantasm delves deep into the macabre along with Mike, and it’s a pleasure to see him eventually get Jody and Reggie on his side, breaking into the mortuary to discover just why The Tall Man is robbing graves, and where all those freaky little people came from.

The solution they stumble across feels like the “eureka” of an acid trip, and provides a weird logic that seems culled more from Frank Herbert’s Dune series than Edgar Allan Poe. And even then, Reggie wonders if what Mike has experienced was all a dream. There’s never any solid explanation for it all, any more than Alice understood what led her into Wonderland. Phantasm is better experienced than explained, and to paraphrase Jung: “A dream is an end undoing, and to analyze the dream is to undo the undoing.”

Image/Sound

Anchor Bay has cleaned up Phantasm considerably, and there are no signs of the scratches, flecks of dirt, and considerable wear and tear that were more noticeable in previous DVD incarnations. The sound design, which lurches between eerie tones and sudden bursts of what can best be described as shrieking nightmare noise, is carefully modulated to maximum spooky effect.

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Extras

The audio commentary by Don Coscarelli and actors Michael Baldwin, Angus Scrimm, and Bill Thornbury is enjoyable, with Coscarelli sharing winning anecdotes on low-budget filmmaking and how he came up with some of the surrealistic images. He thought up the disembodied finger in the box after poking his index finger through a Styrofoam cup. For a movie so off-the-wall, Coscarelli is even-handed, amiable, and unpretentious about his film, and his actors clearly have fun recalling their lives circa 1978. The 30-minute documentary Phantasmagoria features many of the same tales in interview footage, but the explanations of behind-the-scenes footage like the flying spheres effect are fun. The numerous deleted scenes show Coscarelli was learning on the job, working on Phantasm for almost two years and figuring out the movie as he went along. He eliminated scenes with the kid and his friends goofing off at Reggie’s ice-cream parlor, as well as an alternate death scene for The Tall Man splattering into yellow goo after being doused with a fire extinguisher. Twenty minutes of behind-the-scenes footage with commentary feels like watching a home movie, and it’s a trip down memory lane during a 1978 interview with Coscarelli and Scrimm for a Miami public access show, with the director sporting a wild frizzy hairdo and Scrimm seizing every opportunity to mug shamelessly in his Tall Man persona. All in all, the extras are like hanging out with the director and his friends. The series has endured because they handled the scary scenes and the bizarre dreamlike tone with thought and care, the characters are enjoyable to be around, and the actors seem to have been basically playing themselves.

Overall

Phantasm remains a hallucinogenic horror classic, and this seems to be the definitive DVD treatment.

Score: 
 Cast: Michael Baldwin, Bill Thornbury, Reggie Bannister, Kathy Lester, Angus Scrimm  Director: Don Coscarelli  Screenwriter: Don Coscarelli  Distributor: Anchor Bay Entertainment  Running Time: 88 min  Rating: R  Year: 1979  Release Date: April 10, 2007  Buy: Video

Jeremiah Kipp

Jeremiah Kipp is a New York City based writer, producer and director with over ten years experience creating narrative and commercial films.

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