Hey, Hey, welcome to Weird House Cinema. Rewind. My name is Joe McCormick, and the ball is back because today we are bringing you an older episode of Weird House Cinema. It's the one we did on Fantasm. This originally published September thirtieth, twenty twenty two. Let's get right in.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, welcome to Weird House Cinema. This is Rob Lamb.
And this is Joe McCormick. And as we enter the Halloween season on Weird House Cinema, one of our favorite times of the year. Why would I even say one of clearly our favorite time of the year. We are going to be doing a series of horror movies on Weird House this month, and we're kicking it off today with Fantasm. I first saw this movie V projected onto a wall when I was in college. I had absolutely
no knowledge whatsoever about it going in. I just knew they're showing a horror movie projecting it on a wall. I gotta go see it. And I think it was about the time we got to Reggie Banister in his ice cream Man outfit that I started to really wonder what I had gotten myself into. By the end, I was totally amazed. I was, in fact agog and I could not tell you if what I had just watched was a good movie or a bad movie, but either way, I was transfixed.
Yes, it is a film that tranfixes one. It's a film that hypnotizes you. And yeah, I think I you know, I have our time remembering when I saw this one for the first time, because I think I saw Phantasm two first. I think I saw it on Joe Bob Briggs Monster Vision on TNT back in the day. I think they would show this film quite a lot and that. But at that point I was hooked. And then I started picking up these other Fantasm films, renting them and
so forth. But yeah, this is nineteen seventy nine's Fantasm we're going to be discussing. This is definitely a film with a dream like quality to it. It's really it's one we've kind of had in the back pocket for a while because it is a quintessential psychotronic film. It just all the boxes check off on this one.
I would say that it is more than just a dreamlike quality. So you might compare it to the films of Luccio Fulci, or is that you know, this Italian filmmaker who made strange, kind of beautiful but gross horror films that often many scenes feel like a dream because you're like, wait, why are we here? How did we get here? Why is the person doing that? There's a kind of dream logic connecting everything. Phantasm does have that, but I would say it goes a step farther in that.
Unlike full Chise films, Phantasm is literally a recursive series of dreams as best I can tell, I mean, who who knows? Like there are at least four times in the movie where a character appears to wake up from a dream. It is not clear when the dream started or when the dream ended. What's a dream and what's reality?
Yeah? Yeah, I think that's a good way of putting it. Now. I want to also note from the get go here that this is a film with a both a devoted following and multiple sequels that build on its lore to varying degrees. We're mostly just going to be focusing on
the first film on nineteen seventy nine is Fantasm. I'm going to bring up the sequel a little bit, But for the most part, I haven't seen the other Phantasm films in a long while, and I haven't seen the final entry in the series twenty sixteens Phantasm Ravager at all. So yeah, we're mostly going to be discussing Fantasm from seventy nine on its own terms.
I have not seen any of the sequels. If this were years ago, I might try to mount an attempt to watch them all, kind of like I did when I was like, oh, this is the year I watch all the hell Raiser movies. That was a good use of my time. But I don't know if I'm going to make it now. I don't know if I will get past P two.
Yeah. P two is a good stopping play, so I'll discuss P two in a little bit. I think that they're both very different films, and they're both very very fun, and they're in different ways. But coming back to seventy nine's Fantasm, let's hit the elevator pitch on this one. I'd like to paraphrase the words of one Shack by saying, you can summarize this one as flying balls, dwarves just weird.
Phantasm does not shy away from the otherworldly imagery, probably the most iconic of which is the first thing you mentioned, the flying ball. In a way, what Jason's hockey mask is to the Friday the Thirteenth series, I believe the ball is to the Phantasm series in that it is not really the human villain, but it is like the symbol of the villain's power, right.
And also it is something just in terms of like elements of the film that cannot just be passively copied by another film. Like if you have a character, a killer, especially in another movie, put on a hockey mask, well you just cross the line. You're in Jason's territory now, and not necessarily mean that from a legal standpoint, but from just a creative standpoint, like you are now clearly in the shadow of Jason. You may have already been in the shadow, but now you've stepped entirely within the
umbral shade there. Likewise, with this film, yeah, flying silver balls of Death. You can't just have a flying silver ball of death in your film or your story or what have you without clearly saying yes, I come in the wake of Phantasm.
Before you even understand the context of the ball, we should describe what the ball is. It's a metal ball. It flies through the air, flies at your face, It attaches itself to your forehead via a couple of little hooks I guess, then get in your head, and then it drills into your head and then drains your body entirely of blood in a jet that shoots out the back of the ball.
Yeah. And they're so great because and I love just thinking about what makes them great, because they're and again largely keeping things relegated to the original film here, they seem to be machines. They are pieces of technology. They're very good at what they do, but they can be evaded,
they can be to certain degrees outsmarted. And then there's also something about the way they function that feels not only alien in origin, but also maybe alien in function, Like it makes me think of parasitic infections where the parasite goes awry because it's not supposed to be in a human body and it's not supposed to wind up
in the brain. Like you almost feel like this is a machine that was made to interface with a different biological form, and what we're seeing here is it executing its purpose on a box that it wasn't designed for.
That's a very good comparison. Yes, this flying metal ball is sort of like the toxoplasma Gandhi of the Red planet that the aliens in this movie come from. In fact, I was reading a bit of trivia about this movie, and apparently the idea for Phantasm traces back to a dream that the director Don Coscarelli had when he was
a teenager. He dreamed that he was running down these endless corridors, marble corridors that never stopped, and he just kept running and running because he was being chased by a chrome sphere, a floating chrome ball that wanted to penetrate his skull with a needle. And that's a pretty scary image. I am surprised how well that worked on screen.
Yeah, it did, It absolutely does. All right, Well, let's go ahead and hear the trailer for Fanfasm Fantasm.
Is it a nightmare? Phantasm? Is it an illusion? Phantasm?
Whatever it is.
If this one doesn't scare you, you're already dead fantasm.
All right. I love this trailer, great trailer. I love the line if this one doesn't scare you, you're already dead, because it makes it sound like they should have another message at the end of the movie that says like, are you alive, then we're pleased to hear you enjoyed Phantasm.
So we've already compared Phantasm to some Italian horror movies, especially ful cheese movies, because of its dream equality and colorful, lucid imagery. But another point of comparison I would like to raise is that Phantasm kind of reminds me of the films of very low budget independent amateur filmmakers, or maybe not necessarily amateur, but low budget independent filmmakers even going back to the fifties, like Ed Wood and Roger Corman.
Of course, you know you're gonna have different levels of ability to realize one's vision in there, but it has that same scrappiness that it feels like an improvised production of young people who didn't necessarily always know what they were doing or have all the permits they needed, or have the money to realize everything in the glossiest possible way.
And yet it does kind of come together with an infectious enthusiasm and a kind of irresistible energy, even though it kind of lacks a sense of worldliness or experience.
Yeah, absolutely, it does have that scrappiness to it. So let's get into the individuals behind this scrappiness, because yes, this is a Don Cossarelli picture. Don Costarelli was born in nineteen fifty four. He is the director, the writer,
the cinematographer, and the film editor on this movie. He was I believe twenty three years old when filming started and twenty five years old when it was released, and this was his third picture, following nineteen seventy five's Jim the World's Greatest in nineteen seventy six is Kinney and Company.
Phantasm makes so much more sense once you shared this fact with me that Coscarelli was twenty three when he started making it. It has such early twenties energy, again coming back to that lack of wisdom and worldliness, but at the same time a thing that makes up for it, which is an absolutely like it is a leaky vessel of the essence of fun. It's just like kind of you feel the excitement about making a movie within this.
Movie, Yeah, yeah, absolutely, it's there's I think there's a lot to this film that does line up perfectly with this idea of the twenty three year old filmmaker of a early twenties dreamer who's also exploring exploring some familiar topics. A lot of horror films deal with sex and death, too. Many horror films probably deal with the dichotomy of sex and death, but this one does so in a I thought,
a very fascinating way. Like you get the feeling of of of the youth standing, you know, outside of childhood but not within the adult world, confronted by the mystery of death, of sex, and and just trying to figure out what these are and like what and to what extent they are threats to him, to what extent they are his destiny. We see all of that wound up in the character of Mike. Yeah, it's it's really fascinating to look back on it and really gaze long and deep into the phantasm here.
So you mentioned that Coscarelli had made a couple of movies before Phantasm that were not horror movies, though there is a there's a story that I think comes from the audio commentary track that he recorded for the movie, but anyway, wherever it comes from, the story is that he got the idea to make a horror film because when he was sitting in an audience that was watching his earlier movie Kenny in Company, which I've never seen.
I don't know what the deal with it is. Apparently there's a jump scare moment in it, like a character puts on a scary mask and jumps out, and he watched the way the audience reacted to this jump scare moment, and he is just he was so into it the way that they like they literally jumped from their seats and screamed, and he was like, I gotta make a whole movie of this. I'm doing horror now.
Yeah. I do like that he came into this after having made two non horror films that I think both I haven't seen either of them either, but I think they both revolve largely around young people in the lives of young people, and then he moves on into horror.
A lot of people yet jump right into the horror, and so I think that's another reason that Phantasm works so well, is that it's not just obsessed with like, let's get some gore up there on the screen, like, there is also this attention to the central youth character in the film and what he's thinking and how he's processing everything.
Another way that Coscarelli's vision feels as distinctly young to me is the way the movie tries to pack in a lot of elements that are not necessarily They don't necessarily like fit smoothly, but he's just trying to get
a lot of stuff in there. And I think part of that is also explained by another trivia fact I read about the movie, which is that he apparently at one point talked about how he remembered when he was a kid, he would see ads and trailers for horror movies that would seem really exciting, but then when you would go watch the actual movie, it would just be people sitting around talking for most of the movie. There
were actually very few scares in them. The scares were already in the trailer, and he wanted to make a movie that had a scary moment at least every five minutes, that is just packed with little scares and weird things. And it kind of reminds me of the story of Roger Korman telling Charles B. Griffith, Okay, when you ride to Tack of the Crab Monsters, the important thing is it has to have action or horror on every page.
Yeah, phantasm doesn't really hold anything back, and it keeps you on your toes that way it is, and I think also builds into that dreamline quality. If things are making sense and seeming normal, how long are they going to do that? What can happen? And eventually you feel like anything can happen at any moment. Now, this film, like we said, the scrappiness of it, it was made for.
I think it's been estimated for around three hundred thousand, though I think the estimation there is kind of rough because I don't think they were really keeping super accurate records. Ended up grossing millions, though with a success with audiences and some critics. I was looking back, I noticed that Ebert was not a big fan of Phantasm and liked Phantasm too even less. But Michael Weldon of the Psychotronic Film Guides, he loved it. It's one of his favorites.
He celebrated it as quote a unique and fascinating horror hit with more satisfying surprises than you could find in a dozen other recent offerings. And that was written in I think eighty three, So this film really established Cossarelli within the horror realm. He followed this up with nineteen eighty three's beast Master, which I think is also a pretty solid film in my opinion anyway, and certainly one that has achieved cult status.
He got some stars for that one, right, Who's in it?
Rip Torn, Rip Horn is in it? The beast Master. They got the beast Master for it, which is id all since it's about the beast Master. What Mark Singer? Yeah, yeah, so yeah. We talked about beast Master two on a past episode of Weird House, So if you want more beast Master action, go back to that one. But again, I think eighty three's beast Mastered pretty solid.
In Coscarelli's defense, he did not direct beast Master two. That was somebody else, right now.
Colgarelli did come back to direct and write Phantasm two in nineteen eighty eight, Phantasm three, Lord of the Dead in nineteen ninety four, and Phantasm four Oblivion in nineteen ninety eight. His non Fantasm directional credits also include Survival Quest in eighty eight, Bubba Hotep in two thousand and two. He did a Master's of Horror episode titled Incident On and Off a Mountain Road From two thousand and five, both that and Bubba Hotep are based on Joe Lansdale stories.
He did John Dies at the End in twenty twelve, and he also directed the Doo music video The Last in Line in nineteen eighty four.
A Doo music video. I got to look that up after this.
Yeah, I'm not familiar with their music videos.
So I read a few more Internet trivia anecdotes about Don Coscarelli in the making of this movie, one of which, again contributing to the general idea of budgetary scrappiness. Apparently they really juiced every last drop they could get out of their camera and equipment rentals. So one of the
stories is that they would shoot on the weekends. I think that took them like over a year to shoot this movie because they were pretty much just shooting on weekends and they would rent their camera equipment on Fridays and return it on Mondays. So they're technically only paying for one business day of rental, but then they would
use it allkend. Another thing is some of the stories about the production make it sound like they were not practicing what industry safety standards for, say stunts and kind of dangerous the achievement of dangerous shots. So there are stories of the director like personally doing camera work for like filming some of the car chase sequences in not the best way. Like one thing they did is, you know, usually when you see characters inside a car and a
movie talking, the car's not actually moving. They'll have you know, them sitting in a stationary car, and then they will somehow simulate the movement of the outside world around the car. If it's at night, they might just like move lights around, or they might have a rear projection or something like that. That's often how they do it. In this movie, they just they just actually had characters driving the cars and they were acting at the same time. That's not usually
a great idea. But another story is that there's a scene in the movie where there's like a car chase where one of the characters, Jody, is shooting a gun at another car that's chasing them. And I think they actually did film this with moving cars, with the director sort of like sitting on the trunk of a moving car filming, you know, the actor playing Jody popping up out of the window and shooting at the car behind.
Them with a shotgun.
Right, I think it had lengths, But even that can be dangerous that.
Yeah.
I love realistic effects too, but a movie production, you know, no movie is worth somebody actually getting hurt or killed. You know, practice safety on sets people.
Now, this was very much a Costarelli family labor of love here because the producer on this was Dat Cossarelli, who was also dad investment counselor at the time, who helped his son fund the film and later served as EP on Don's other films. And then Mom was also involved. Kate Cossarelli, who lived nineteen twenty seven through nineteen ninety nine. She did makeup, production, design, wardrobe. She she also this
is super interesting. She was already a novelist apparently, if I'm understanding this correctly, She wrote books like Leading Lady, Fame and Fortune, but she herself wrote the novelization of Fantasm based on her son's screenplay, which I think is that's that's adorable.
I love that she had to knife fight Alan Dene Foster for the rights, so.
I don't know how that went down, but it's yeah, it's apparently I was looking around for any signs of apparently a very sought after book for diehard Phantasm fans, but I did run across a few quotes here and there of her talking about at adapting it and you know, picking up on little details in the film and working those out. So uh yeah, it seemed like a labor of love for her. All right, Let's get into the cast.
We mentioned Mike. Mike is the youth. Mike is the central character and Phantasm, and Mike was played by A. Michael Baldwin born in nineteen sixty three, apparently son of animator Gerald Baldwin, who will work on a number of older animated shows. So A Michael Baldwin was a child actor who appeared as early as nineteen seventy six in episodes of Starsky and Hutch and Eight Is Enough. Later on, he starred as Doug and Kenny and Company from seventy six.
That's Done's one of Don's previous films, and his post Phantasm acting career is is pretty fantasm heavy, and I believe he went on to teach acting. None of this matters though, because he's I think he's absolutely perfect in Phantasm. He's just believably awkward and childlike, but still, you know, clearly, you know, beyond the limits of childhood. He's but he's also even though he's awkward, he's still charismatic enough to serve as the hero of the film, and you know,
to be this action based character when it's right. So yeah, I absolutely love a Michael Baldwin's performance here, and and I can understand why fans were disappointed that his role was recast in Phantasm too.
I'm going to ask a question about Mike, but this also applies to Jody and especially Reggie. How old is anybody in this movie supposed to be?
Yeah, it's a little little foggy, right, because Mike, for instance, I you know, I think it would be reasonable to think of him as like a as being a high school graduate. We have, but we have no idea like where he is in terms of high school. I assume he's done. Like we don't see we don't I don't think we really see much in the way of friends. There are a few people here and there. There's no I don't think mentioned of school. I don't remember anything
about like his plans for the future. But in a way that's kind of perfect, like that it's perfect for this this kind of character who is adrift in the very early stages of adulthood, that has no concept of like what the future means for him, and is already a feeling himself attached or partially detached from the protective aura of childhood.
That's interesting. You read him as a high school graduate, I don't know. So he drives a car that you can't tell if he's supposed to be doing that legally, and he knows how to fix cars and things like that, and there are other things that would suggest he's older, but sometimes also he actually his character is supposed to be twelve.
Yes, definitely, But how much of that is he like just kind of an immature, you know, young adult, but it is very vague, And I think that's one of the things that works about it, Like he's he's a child, but he's he's a youth, but he's he's not he's certainly I don't think we would say that he's fully in the area of adulthood yet, because on one level, I don't think he has a job or anything. And his room, as we'll discuss in a bit, is still
very much feels like a fortress of childhood. It feels like a place where you were safe, where you should be safe from from sex and death and other complexities of the grown up world.
I love Mike's room, especially because he's got I don't know how they achieve this. He's got like a wall sized poster of the surface of the moon with the Earth in the background. Is that supposed to be just a single poster that you buy somewhere. I don't know how they achieve now, but it's it's Florida ceiling.
It's gigantic, it's absolutely dope. And then he has this this seventies crocheted blanket. It's like yellow and green, and oh, I love those things. I think I've napped with that very blanket before. You're wrong.
It's not yellow and green. It is white, brown and gold.
Ooh, that's very good.
Seventies colors.
All right, So that's Mike. But Mike has a brother. Jody's Mike's brother, right, yeah, yeah, all right, I'm pretty sure on that. But you know, you know how it goes, Okay, So Jody is played by Bill Thornbury born nineteen fifty two, actor and musician. Prior to Phantasm, he appeared in nineteen seventy five Summer School Teachers and an episode of The Oxford Files. Afterward, he appeared in the TV series Secret of Midland Heights, the Lost Empire, and also in Phantasms
three through five. He also wrote the song in Phantasm sitting Here at Midnight. This is a perfectly fine performance.
No notes always is this when we talk about sitting here at midnight? Or should we save that for the scene in the movie.
Oh, we should save that because it involves characters and actors we haven't introduced yet. Okay, all right, but really one of the true stars of this film and Phantasm films in general, is the character Reggie, played by the actor Reggie Banister born nineteen forty five. Horror action icon and musical legend Reggie Banister. Reggie is great in this and all subsequent Phantasm films. He's the perfect mix of the improbable and the believable. He's cool, but he's like
every day cool. He's relatable but can sell the extreme situations and threats happening all around him.
A story is such a weird and wonderful presence. I could not imagine this movie without him, but every scene where he shows up, it adds an additional level of humor. Just like because of I don't mean to be insulting in this way, but like the way he looks and the way he's dressed and everything is almost always funny in this movie. It's that they give him this ice cream man outfit that we'll have to discuss later, but he also brings a very strange kind of winking attitude
to things. For the longest time after I saw this movie, I did not realize this actor was a different guy from Dean Norris. I used to think that Dean Norris was in Phantasm and he was playing Reggie.
Yeah, they had similar looks. He kind of looks like Dean Norris with a ponytail and sideburns. Yeah. I feel like the character of Reggie here is kind of again coming back to this youthful energy. It is like a child or a young person's eye of an adult who has it all together, you know, where they're like, oh, look at look at uncle Reggie. Man, he's got it. Not he's He's got this cool job as the ice cream Man, and he still has time to jam on front porches. I want to be like Reggie when I
grow up and work. Of course, when you grow up, you realize, like, oh, man, Reggie's life was kind of a mess at the time he was going through some stuff. You know, a good guy, but you know, he did not have it all together.
But he seemed so cool.
Yeah, and he is within the context of this movie. Yeah, Reggie's cool. Yeah, and part of it is Yet you don't know anything else about him, really, I mean, you know a little stuff, but yeah, you don't. You don't have all these other details. In subsequent films, they have to make him more like tragic and you know, revenge focused and so forth. But this, in this one, he's just a He's just a dude going about his life and then some stuff starts going down around him and he gets involved.
Is Reggie supposed to be twenty or fifty?
I don't know. It's it's unknown. It's as unknown as the as it would be to the youth who is looking up to him, I guess. But I don't think he's supposed to be too old, right.
No, he's just generally adult. But like within the range of adults, that's it's it's up for grabs.
Yeah. So the real Reggie Banister was Slash is a Vietnam that turned actor who started out in these early Cosarelli films. I think he was in all of his films except for Beast Master and the Masters of Horror episode that I mentioned earlier, like at least had some sort of small role. He branched out into some other works such as La Law, Silent Night, Deadly Night four, Wish Master, and many other horror titles over the years. I think a lot of it is like he had this.
He cemented his status as an icon in the Phantasm films, and that got him a lot of work. He's apparently, you know, does a lot of conventions or has over the years. He also put out an album in two thousand and eight titled Naked Truth by the Reggie Banister Band, and yeah, Reggie Rocks. There needs to be an official action figure of him, because we have action figures of less noble characters.
Oh well, I wasn't going to say less noble about this, but I've got a great action figure of Tom Atkins from Night of the Creeps. If we've got that, we should get a good Reggie Banister action figure.
Get Reggie on the Horn. I'm sure you can work out the licensing on this all right. Since we're talking about a Phantasm film, we are of course also talking about the Tall Man played by Angus scrim who lived nineteen twenty six through twenty sixteen.
I love the vibe of Angus Scrim as the tall Man because it is once again not It doesn't just totally go down smooth. It doesn't feel like, yes, this guy, you know, he's not Doug Bradley's pin head or something. He just feels like born to play this character. There's a kind of occasional awkwardness to him, an awkwardness in the way like his posture or the way he'll like reach out for a character in a you know, jump
scare or something. But that awkwardness fits like it almost makes the movie better.
Yeah. I think part of it to the awkwardness is that he the real Angus Scrim was six ' four and they made him seem even taller, you know, by various very practical effects, but one of them was by putting him in a smaller suit. So he looks a little awkward just in the way he's wearing his clothing, and it makes him feel like he's not six ' four but like seven to four or something. So Angus Scrim was his acting name, but his real name was Lawrence Rory Guy. He adopted the Angus Scrim name for
this film. He'd previously been in some other works, including Cossarelli's Jim the World's Greatest, and went on to star in all subsequent Phantasm films, as well as appearing and I think often smaller roles in films like The Lost Empire Chopping Mall. He has a very brief cameo in that. I think he's just present. I think he's like a new reporter at a news conference about the new mall robots.
I don't remember that at all.
Even if you know it's coming, you can miss it. It's such a small role. He is also in Subspecies Mindwarp, Munchie, I Sell the Dead and John dies at the end. He was also the opening narrator on Wes Craven's wish Master, So if you check out the first ten to fifteen minutes of wish Master, which is all you need, you'll get a little audio from him. He was also a five time Grammy nominated and one time Grammy winner for
writing liner notes on classical albums Huh yeah. He began his career as a writer and a journalist, though his degree was apparently in drama.
Yeah, and apparently the stage name Angus Skrim goes back to his college days when he was getting a drama degree. I read that he was doing plays off campus when he technically was not allowed to do that by the theater department that he was studying at. So he tried to keep his off campus theater work secret by using a different name, using a stage name, so in case he got mentioned in a review or something, they wouldn't be able to trace it to him.
Yeah, it's a great Moniker. I love it, And yeah, I mean Angus scrim was ultimately like, this dude is a horror icon. Like he's as much a part of these phantasm films as Flying silver Balls and Killer Dwarfs.
So you mentioned he's in Munchie. Is that a Groblins movie.
Yes, I don't think it's one I've seen, but there were at least a couple of Munchet movie. I think Munchie and then Munchies or Munchi's too. Don't take me to the bank on that one, but yeah, those are Gromblins movies. Okay. A couple of other humans involved in this. We have the Lady in Lavender, who is the tall Man's female form slash sex incarnation. She's played by Kathy Lester.
Lester is an actor and a musician, but her main roles are this nineteen ninety four's Phantasm three Lord of the Dead, and I think she also came back in the twenty sixteen Phantasm movie Ravager, and then Sally is a character that pops up in this play by Lynn Eastman Rossy. She was only active for nineteen ninety four, but during that time she appeared in a number of notable, at least notable to US films, the Savage Sasquatch film Night of the Demon from nineteen eighty.
Night of the Demon I remember, I think we watched that one for Trailer Talk years ago.
Yeah, definitely. There are two types of sasquatch movies, as we've discussed, there's the noble Squatch and the savage Squatch. And this is a savage Squatch film. This is where Bigfoot is killing people.
I think I've been torn on whether Night of the Demon is worth covering on this show, because it's got some really funny fun stuff in it, but I think it's also got some really gross bummer stuff too, as a lot of Sasquatch movies do.
Lynn Eastman Rossi was also in Project X this is the Matthew Broderick eight movie from nineteen eighty seven, and she was also in nineteen ninety two's Unlawful Entry featuring Kurt Russell, Ray Liota, and Sonny Carl Davis aka Rabbit.
Oh we took a minute to figure this. Yeah, I know what you're talking about.
Trancers, Yes, okay, yeah, transfers to Rabbit. Notable performance. All right. Getting into the effects here, I mainly wanted to commun the effects are mostly really good in this and hold up with one notable exception, but all the stuff with like the flying silver balls and so forth, I think still look really good. But I want to call out the fact that Gene Corso, who lived nineteen thirty two through nineteen ninety six, has sound effects credit on this,
shared with Lorraine Mitchell. But yeah, the sound effects and phantasm are really great and I think certainly helps sell that weird aura of the film, especially the weird r of the flying death spheres. As a sound editor, Corso worked on such films as Queen of Blood, Star Wars, The China Syndrome, Mutant, Predator, Deep Star six, and The Rift. And then Loraine Mitchell, who also worked on this, worked on some of these films as well, along with Conan the Destroyer and Rambo three.
I think in general audiences really underestimate how much difference a good audio element makes in a horror movie. Good good sound effects, atmospheric sound design, and good music. Would this movie be remembered anything like the way it is if it did not have the quality of sound effects and music that it does.
Yeah, I think that's a great question, and I'm not sure it would have, because, yeah, the sound effects are great, but yeah, music is wonderful as well, iconic really. The music is credited to fred Mero, who lived nineteen thirty nine through nineteen ninety nine, and Malcolm Segrave, who lived nineteen twenty eight through two thousand and one. Sea Gray's only film credits are for the Phantasm theme, but Myro
has more of a history as a well. First of all, a third generation musical professional, his father Joseph Meiro wrote you make Me Feel So Young that song, Yeah, and Myro also worked on Phantasm two and Phantasm three, but his other school include nineteen seventy three's Soilent Green and Scarecrow.
You Got the Gears turned in on some mild thematic connections between Phantasm and Soilent Green. Both involve a discovery of a secret science fiction manufacturing process where one of the ingredients is people.
That's an interesting you know, it's interesting. You can think of these various films. You can think of Season of the Witch, Halloween three films about at least slightly about industrial malfeasance, some sort of like evil industrial plot to mass produce something that is destructive to humanity. Yeah, but anyway, the Phantasm score absolutely great. I have no reservations about saying that the theme is catchy and creepy, perfectly matching
the dreamlike quality of the film. And even outside of the main Fantasm theme song, there are all these wonderful hypnotic soundscapes as well. So you have synth and guitar in there, but we also have gongs and chimes and cymbals and bells creating this wonderful hallucinatory effect.
I agree, love all that stuff. There is one thing I noticed. I didn't compare them side to side to see exactly how similar they are, but I did hear some strong overlap between I think it was the main synth theme from Phantasm and one of the tunes that is used in John Carpenter's The Fog, though of course I'm not alleging musical plagiarism or anything. You know, there are only so many notes, so you're gonna get some similar eerie tunes. But I heard that kinship.
Of course, The Fog didn't come out till nineteen eighty.
Wait, what my god, you're right. I had the order inverted in my head, so if there is any inspiration, it would have gone the other way.
Yeah, but like I said, there are only so many notes you can play. All right, well, let's jump into Phantasm.
Well, mercifully breaking our streak of movies that begin by looking at the stars in space, this film does not begin in space. Instead, it's just phantasm in red letters on a black background, and then we cut to an establishing shot of a mansion. It's a oh, I did not look up architectural styles. Do you know what style of house this is? It's like a big white mansion with columns out front, three columns and sort of a wrap around veranda.
I believe. Yeah, old American, I think is the architectural styling here.
And then we're just straight on from this to an absolutely hilariously awkward sex scene in a cemetery featuring a dude who looks like Lemmy from Motorhead and a lady with blonde hair and purple eye makeup, and.
This would be our lady in Lavender.
We find out, yes, she's a recurring character. In fact, we find out she is just a sort of a glamour a mirage, and in fact she is Anga Skrim, but just in a different form. And we see that because Okay, they're having sex in the cemetery. And then suddenly the lady pulls out a dagger and she stabs Lemmy. She stabs the dude, and then through the magic of film editing, she transforms into an old man and it is Angus Grimm. We will see him many more times
in the film. The soundtrack in the scene is symbols and whooshing wind noises, so it's this weird mix of like kind of cool atmosphere. But the staging of the sex scene is so funny.
Yeah, it's absurd. I mean, obviously, depictions of human sex and film should always be considered it with a grain of salt, but this one feels like it was constructed via youthful hearsay about what the grown up world of sexuality actually consists off. You know, it's one of these where it's like full clothing, strange positioning. If you were to try and figure out the details of human sexuality based on this scene, you would be left with just a lot of questions about how everything lines up.
Yeah, I don't want to get I'm not gonna get gross. I don't want to get too specific about the mechanics of horror movie sex. But it is greatly confusing at what angles these two people's bodies are supposed to be positioned.
Yeah, it just it makes you It feels like something like Ralph Wigham would explain, you know. And then the baby looked at me. Yeah, I have no idea. Yeah, it's absurd, but it also, again, I think it falls in line with that youthful energy of the film. You know. It's like, like, what is sex? What is death? Mike doesn't know, and part of this film is Mike's dream quest to try and figure that out.
But okay, Lady in Lavender is actually anger scrim she kills Lemmy and then it's morning in the cemetery and we're back at the mansion. But it's daylight and we hear we meet two of our main characters. By the way, we see a science says it's morning Side Morningside Cemetery, and we meet our main characters, Jody and Reggie. Jody is tall, handsome, big mane of messy hair. Reggie is he's shorter, He's wearing cool sun glasses. And I was gonna say, so he's like bald in front with a
horseshoe of hair and then a ponytail. So I was going to say it's like business in front, party and back, but really it's more like closed for business in front, party.
And back and close for business mostly on the top as well. It's a substantial bald pattern there, but still very very cool. Look. He's got some nice sideburns there that come to a nice little goring point.
I mean, there's no denying Reggie's cool.
Yeah.
So they meet up and they say, hey, Tommy's gone hell of a way to end a trio. So Tommy, I think, meaning the guy from the opening scene who got stabbed was their friend. They believe he committed suicide. I don't know why they think that, but that's what they have been led to believe. Do you Rob, did you detect that they were supposed to all be in a band together.
Yeah. I kind of got that vibe, but I don't remember if there was a specific line that actually nted that concept. I mean, clearly Jody looked like a dude that was in a band. It's just a question of was he in the band with these two.
Jody looks like he would fit right in in a one piece disco jumpsuit doing a musical number and like a variety show.
Yeah.
Anyway, we go into a nice creepy atmospheric scene where Jody walks around alone in the halls of the funeral home, and the halls are lined with white marble covered in a weird pattern of blue veins. I love the atmosphere of the inside of the funeral home.
Yeah, I mean it's in many ways, it's an obvious set, and yet the uniformity I think gives it a nice otherworldly vibe. And you know this, it feels sterile and like a place between and at the same time it does feel authentically like a mausoleum, like a mini mausoleums also have that vibe, except I don't think it's quite as the ones I've been in anyway, it doesn't feel quite as monotonous, it's not quite as uniform. You do have some little details that are that differentiate one area
from another. It might be flowers in front of these remains, et cetera. But yeah, this whole vibe here. It feels just enough like a mausoleum that it doesn't feel like they're on a spaceship, but it also kind of feels like they're on a spaceship.
I have questions about how this mausoleum is supposed to work, because I think we see later that, like many mausoleums, it has these vaults. They're built into the walls, they have like a name on them, and then what appears to be some kind of covering or door. But later we see that you can just open them up like a file cabinet, and there is a like a file cabinet drawer, and then there's a coffin inside which you could presumably just open up and see the body.
Yeah. Yeah, I'm not sure. I've never opened one up, but this, if you take this movie at face value, it's telling you that, yeah, these are just like more drawers you can just roll on open and look at the body.
I am not an expert in the funerary arts and sciences, but I think there would be problems with that design anyway. So Jody's walking around and here's these strange sounds that in the subtitles for the version of the movie I watched it called the sounds warbling. I would call it squawking or growling, maybe snarling.
And of course in a bit we'll find out what is making that sound.
Right, and we see that. Let's see Jody visits the grave of his parents, we find out they've passed away, and then we meet Mike, Jody's little brother, who is just tearing through the grass of the cemetery on a dirt bike. It's like he's riding a chainsaw. Trivia fact I found is that the motorbike used here is called a Hodaka road toad. But he's literally just driving like between the grave markers.
Yeah, some kind of psychomania vibes to this motorcycle ride here.
And he also hears the weird chittering and snarling sounds. And we see a few glimpses of what appear to be little figures in art cloaks dashing behind gravestones. Ooh, the dwarves, and I think we're supposed to understand that Mike is sort of a little engineer, like he has an affinity for machines. We see him later repairing Jody's muscle car at multiple points, and like there's a part where he's working on the engine while Jody is just standing there talking to a friend like, Yeah, I'm gonna
ditch this kid and get out of town anyway. Jody, inside the funeral home goes investigating the weird sounds, but he doesn't quite figure it out. Instead, there's a great jump scare where we first hear Angus scrim talk. He comes up behind him and slaps down on his shoulders says, the funeral is about to begin.
Yes, now I.
Started noticing a pattern. I don't know if you picked up on the same thing, Rob, Like in the funeral scene, there's a very symmetrical shot where we see the church service filmed from straight down the back of the aisle where it's like a perfectly balanced frame. There are people sitting in the pews on both side and the columns lining on both sides, so it's totally symmetrical. We already saw shots like that when Jody was walking through the mausoleum.
You know, he'd be framed in the doorway with all these decorations that are exactly symmetrical on both sides. The movie seems to be fond of shots like this where the subject is in the middle and then it's just mirror images on both sides of the screen.
Yeah. Yeah, And I think especially with this scene, but also with the mausoleum scenes as well, there is this impression of narrowing, you know, as if narrowing towards the death point, which I think lines up nicely with the theme of the movie and the idea that you know, we're propelled through it, that Mike is propelled through this world and you know it keeps the pacing contributes to
that as well. Also, I want to point out, I don't know if you noticed this, but in this particular, I see this is a like an actual church, an actual location, and they didn't build any of this or or decorated a lot. But there's a weird painting above the altar in this scene that again I assume it's just a legit in church painting, but it has kind of zombie Jesus vibes to it, like Jesus has his arms up like Frankenstein.
A bit oh interesting. I didn't notice that. I was just thinking, what church let phantasm shoot inside?
I mean maybe they. I don't know how it went down. Maybe they didn't tell him what the film was about, or maybe they explained the theme and the church was like, yeah, works for us, as long as you get the Jesus painting in there. We're very proud of this. Okay.
Anyway, So Reggie and Jody are there for the funeral of their friend, their I guess, their bandmate maybe. And Mike, the younger guy, is trying to peep on the funeral with binoculars. I didn't understand this at all, Like, why isn't he just there instead, he's like in the bushes with binoculars watching them carry the coffin.
Mike is a consonant voyeur. He is just he's just constantly spying on sex and death, as is the you know, the very definition of the of the voyeuristic imput Like his brother's meeting some lady. Well, Mike's in the bushes. He's going to see what's happening here. Somebody's moving a casket around. Mike's in the bushes. He's got the binoculars out. He wants to see how these worlds work, these worlds that he is not yet entered into but seems destined to be a part of.
But because he's spying on the funeral, he's still watching after all of the mourners leave, and he gets to see something very odd happen the tall Man and Gus scrim after everybody's gone. Instead of, you know, like letting the workers bury the casket, he picks up the casket, takes it back to the hearse and puts it inside. And he's carrying the entire thing by himself.
Not only is he most probably evil, he's also cheap. He's not hiring anybody else to carry these for him. He's just picking it up himself. We also get a sense of this when we see Jody's body in the casket. Jody looks a little gooolish. It's like the tall Man is not doing a good job, and Jody, I'm not sorry,
not Jody. What's his name, tom good friend? Tommy. Yes, Tommy looks gholish, does not look like he's been embalmed like a to the degree that you would want your loved one embalmed, that would say, but he looks like a movie corps. So yes, mission accomplished.
Right, Okay, so we got the setup. Mike has seen something very weird at the Morningside Cemetery, and after that weird reveal, Mike walks around alone with excellent theme music playing some great seventies horror movie atmosphere. You know, a lot of great horror movies from from this time get so much mileage, like they stick in your mind, not just because of the scary scenes, but because of the eerie scenes where a character is merely sort of walking
through the landscape and the music is playing. I think about the early scenes of going down the sidewalks in Halloween, or the way Mike is just walking around, maybe going to visit the Reverend mother guy Helen Mohayam in this movie.
Yes, yeah, this is where we get to our wonderful Benajessa Itt scene.
Straight Dune ripoff, and I love it. Clearly Don was a fan of Dune. In fact, it's explicit later when Jody goes to a bar. Did you notice this in the bar is called Dune's Bar.
Yeah. Yeah, he was obviously a big fan of the book. The Lynch adaptation wouldn't come out to eighty four, So yeah, definitely a written sci fi fan. In fact, we see there's another scene where we see a sci fi paperback on Mike's desk or bedside table, and I looked it up. I forget what it is offhand, but it is a particular sci fi novel that was included. I guess to let you know that Mike's into sci fi, that maybe he's a little more creative than other people in the community around him.
The book was I Am Legion by Rogers Alasni Oh is it?
Oh good?
My name is Legion? Maybe I don't know.
I've never read it, okay, but that sounds right. Yeah. I looked it up and then forgot promptly forgot it. But it has had very cool little late seventies paperback sci fi cover art.
I love it so clearly. This scene is just taken from from Doune the book. But what would you say is literally supposed to be happening here? Is this lady supposed to be a fortune teller. She's like dressed in all black, wearing dark sunglasses inside and in a room full of candles, and she speaks through her granddaughter.
Yeah, yeah, and it's you know, it's already got a creepy vibe though you probably, if you've not seen the film, you're thinking, well, it's not like then they make him put his hand in a box and experience phantom pain and then tell him that fear is the mind killer. Well, actually all of that happens. That's exactly what happens in the scene.
They don't say mind killer. She says, fear is the killer. Yes, doesn't quite have the same ring.
No, And then I think the box vanishes, right, It like straight up vanishes in front of our eyes, the viewer's eyes on the table.
Yes, suggesting that not only in the pain is the pain in the box an illusion created telepathically by the reverend mother here, but that the box itself is there wasn't even a box.
Now what does all this mean within the context of the film. I don't know it.
Well, Mike is told not to fear, he said, The granddaughter says, fear is the killer. Don't fear. That's what grandmother wants you to learn. It was all in your mind. And then Mike says, oh, yeah.
I guess it will come. We will come back around to this later. This film does do a pretty good job of if it establishes something, it will come back around to it.
Okay, I think it's time to talk about sitting here at midnight. So at Jody and Mike's house, Jody is sitting there on the front porch playing a playing a stratocaster plugged into a Fender amp, and then Reggie pulls up. Reggie now is in his workoutfit. He is wearing an ice cream suit. I don't know. He's wearing like a white shirt and white pants with a black bow tie. And he's driving a truck that says Reggie's ice Cream. And it's got a guitar tucked into one of the
I don't know, the cooler boxes, I guess. And so Reggie gets out of the car, comes up and plays guitar alongside Jody. They play a song called Sitting Here at Midnight, where the lyrics are I'm just sitting here at midnight, and I'll be sitting here till noon. You see, my lady left me lonely, Yes she did. My baby left me blue. And then they both go oh and then play a riff. It's and I will give him credit.
Both actors are actually playing guitars here nice just like moving their hands while the soundtrack plays.
Ill also say that a lesser movie would have only played part of the song, or would have cut away and done some sort of a montage or something. But now we get the full short performance of this song right here on the porch, and I dig it. Also, you mentioned that the ice cream truck says Reggie's ice cream somehow that I missed out on that when i've every time I watched it. That's an interesting detail, Like, not only is Reggie the ice cream man, he's apparently a business owner.
Yes, he owns his own business. He's really plugged in at the local chamber of commerce.
Now we do get a nice weird moment there at the end of the performance with a tuning fork.
Though, yes we do well. First of all, after they play, I think Jody goes not bad, and then Reggie says we're hot is Love, you know, which makes me think Hot as Love was the name of their band.
Oh man, that's a good that would have totally fit.
But so Reggie pulls out a tuning fork, I guess to tune his guitar, but instead we just really zone in on the fork and we listen to it it humming out a tune until Reggie mutes it by putting his two fingers on the end of the fork. Times.
We will come back to this detail as well.
Some more stuff happened. We see random like a random blonde lady walk into the funeral home and then open a door and light shines on her and she screams. There are a few things in the movie that are just like random things happen and I can't really connect them to anything else, So you know, something like that happens. But hey, let's go to the bar with Jody. He's gonna go to Dune's Cantina, have a beer and try to make some friends.
And Mike is here for this. Mike is watching the whole time.
Yes, Mike of course follows Jody everywhere, so he's outside peeping through the window of the bar as Jody's like chatting up a lady, chatting up a blond lady who they're hitting it off, and he doesn't know who she is, but we do because we saw that horribly awkward opening scene. It's the lady who stabbed Tommy and turned into Angus scrim So Jody don't go home with Angus Grim, but it looks like he's gonna. She leads him off to the cemetery. I guess the goal is to kill him.
Mike is still following them, peeping on everything, and then suddenly everything is interrupted because snarling, warbling noises start up again, and some little creature that looks like a Jawa, like a short figuring brown robes, charges out at him from the darkness, and Mike runs away, screaming. This interrupts everything.
Everybody runs off, and Jody runs after Mike. There are some really goofy sex jokes in the sea, and I don't feel like describing, but anyway, so Jody ends up running off after Mike.
Yeah, it seems a little bit bit cringy in some respects, but yeah, this is our first glimpse of the dwarves actually scampering about and causing mischief, one of the key aspects of the Phantasm films.
Now, is this a good place to talk about the connection between the dwarves in this movie and the jawas in Star Wars, because we got to admit there in the brown robes with the pointy hoods, they look extremely similar.
Yeah, there is a strong comparison to be made. Very similar vibes and of course different ultimately different energy is involved. Like Jawas and Star Wars, they are just technological scavengers looking to pick up the pieces and make a few deals here and there. They're not evil. They're very neutral creatures and as we've seen in later installments of Star Wars, and you can have quite good relations with the Jawas. They're they're they're non indecent folk. Uh. These creatures the
dwarves of phantasm. These are little monsters.
That are snarling, little zombies.
Yeah, they are up to no good. They will attack you, they will do god knows what.
Now.
I think a lot of people have assumed that these creatures were inspired by the design of the Jawas, But in Don Coscarelli's defense, they had apparently they had this idea and started shooting the movie before Star Wars came out, So I think it looks like this is just a coincidence.
Yeah, and and we do, unlike the Jawas, which in which we never see the Jawa's face, we will get to see the face of one of these dwarfs later on. And I should also point out that by the time they make Phantasm two, in which they had a much bigger budget. By the way, one of the things they use that budget on is always showing the dwarves faces.
So the dwarves look extra evil and nasty in that film because their faces are never really Oh they may their faces may be obscured in some scenes, but there are whole lot of scenes where you get to see their little snarling faces.
So anyway, coming back to the plot, here's what some
weird stuff happens. So Jody runs off after Mike because Mike was scared and screaming chased by a necro dwarf, and Mike tries to explain to Jody what happened, and Jody says it was probably just a gopher in heat, okay, And then and then Jody sends Mike home with his car, and then Mike wakes and then Mike like wakes up and he's in his bed with the groovy blanket with the brown, white and gold stripes, but the tall man is standing over his bed and his bed is in
the middle of a cemetery. And then zombies like scream and grab him. So I guess this is a dream and then he wakes up. But like, if this was a dream, how far back does that go? Like how much of it was a dream? We don't know when the dream sequence started.
Yeah, or when does it end? Is it still going? Is the tall man about to do a jump? Scare right behind you right now, Joe, It might happen. But those questions aside, this is a fabulous scene. This is one that I think has used in the trailer as well, just the symmetrical shooting of it, the way it's all framed up, the darkness, and it also just like it
sums up a lot of the attitude of phantasm. Like here is Mike the youth in bed, clearly troubled, and like Death, the personification of Death is like literally at the head of his bed, leering over him, and then these things jump out and start, you know, presumably about to just tear him in half.
Then one of the funniest things is it goes from He's waking up from a dream sequence and then it goes straight to another scene that feels so dream like. He's it's it looks kind of gauzy, and Mike is wandering down the sidewalk like sucking on a lollipop and checking the change tray and payphones for change, and then he looks across the street and there's the tall Man
just walking past like a clothing store. And then there's Reggie's ice cream truck in the foreground, and Reggie is opening up the freezer and pulling ice cream out, and there is fog emanating from the freezer. And then the tall Man stops right behind Reggie and stands in the freezer fog and turns and looks at Mike and does this monstrous sniff. He's like, you know, breathing in uh in some kind of weird agony or something. And what the heck is going on here? Did this really happen?
Is this a dream? What is the tall man doing when he's sniffing the freezer fog? I don't know.
Yeah, it's definitely another great scene that has dreamlike qualities, and I think has that strong youth vibe of like here here the youth is seeing the true creepy nature of reality. It's lost to all the other adults, like here's Reggie, Reggie to notice this going on at all. Reggie's just doing his thing, doing his job. I also love how the scene it seems to imply, or it's always struck me this way, as being a moment where the tall Man is looking right at us the viewer.
He's looking right back at Mike. So it's like the abyss staring back. It's game recognizing game here, it's like Mike and the tall Man have a connection. And we'll see another version of this later on in the picture.
Yes we will. But I just want to flag again that I have completely lost track of what's the dream and what's reality by this point in the movie.
This is This is probably a good point to mention. In Phantasm Too. Again, Universal comes in gives them a bunch of funding to finally make a sequel to Phantasm, and apparently they made some demands, as you might expect when a big studio comes in and gives you a whole bunch of money. They said, well, we need some romantic interests for our characters, especially for Mike. You can't bring back Baldwin and Reggie Banister. You get to bring back one and the other one you have to recast.
So in Fantasm Too they recast Mike, which, given the choice, was the correct choice to make. Like you don't recast Reggie. You got it. You can't recast Reggie.
Must have Reggie Banister.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But one of the other apparently, apparently one of the other studio demands was no dream sequences. Nobody's dreaming in this film. It's I guess they thought it was too confusing, and they're like, everything needs to be linear, nobody has any dreams, which is a weird demand to make on a sequel to this film, a film that, like you said, on one hand, like that's the whole quality of it. It's like, we don't know when it's a dream and when it's not. Even the title of the film is phantasm.
It is supposed to be like an illusion, something you're not sure about. But you also understand where the studio is like, look, this is too much. We needed to be nice and linear. No dreams, that's a tragedy. I'm gonna have to I wonder if I'll get mad when I watch P two. Oh. P two is still a lot of fun. It's very much an action film. It's kind of like Aliens to this film's Alien, but without
the consistency of quality. Like Phantasm two is a dumber film, but also a film that clearly had more money to throw at killer ball effects and dwarf effects, and also, yeah, Reggie is transformed into a pure action hero and so it's a lot of fun as well. But it's very different and definitely there's something to be said for it. It's moving away from the dream imagery for the most part.
So the next thing is we're going to spend some time with Mike and Jody in their house. I love their house. There's a part where Mike is like underneath Jody's muscle car doing repairs on it again because apparently, you know, he's got full mechanic training even though he is only twelve or nineteen and he's and he is attacked by the necro dwarves while he is under the car, but then in trying to defend himself, he ends up
bonking Jody on the toe with a hammer. But anyway, this is when we finally get a really good look at their house and all of the the length of the carpet fibers will amaze you.
Yeah, there's the see the scene where I think this is later on, but there's a scene with the stairs in the house. We have these like floating stairs and they're all carpeted, and man, you just want to you just want to take your shoes off and walk on those.
Things, except they also look like they would have protruding hidden nails.
Well, it is in nineteen seventies, so it's like everything's everything in the house looks comfy and yet possibly dangerous.
Anyway, Mike chills out for a bit in his glorious bedroom with the shot of the moon on the wall and like a John Lennon poster, I think one of those maps of the world that cuts Asia in half instead of dividing in the Pacific Ocean. And we see him tuck a gigantic bowie knife into a sheet strapped to his calf, and the knife is as thick as his leg, so when he pulls his pants leg down over it, it looks really funny. He also packs a crucifix,
but this is your classic suiting up scene. It's like when Van Helsing is packing his steaks in his holy water into the kit. But it's time to head off to the Morningside Cemetery at night for some reason, I guess to figure out what's going on with the tall man and the jawas so Mike Head's over he breaks through a window to sneak in, and he's walking around
in the dark with a lighter. He ends up hiding in a coffin in a classic horror movie trope, somebody's got to hide in a coffin because somebody's looking for them, while a very blank faced man in a white hat creeps around looking for him. Rob, did you understand that this man in the white hat is supposed to be of the same species as Angus scrim.
I think he's more well, you know, it's it's hard this one. This is a point where it's difficult to sort of think about this film completely on its own terms, because knowing what we know about later installments, I feel like it's clear that this guy's just an underling. But if I were just watching this film for the first time, yeah, I might think this must be this being must be of the same species or origin as the tall man, because they're both they like, I don't think they exchange
any words. They have this kind of like wordless correspondence energy. But the scene here is really cool though, you know, with him hiding in the casket, I feel like it has genuine tension to it, and it's this cool bit where he's used the lighter that he was showing off earlier to keep the casket from closing completely because I don't know, maybe it would self lock and then he would be stuck in there and buried or found later.
I wonder if there's there are unused scenes that describe who the man in the white hat is, like maybe he's a human wren Field to the tall man. Because did you read the same thing I did Rob about how the original cut of Phantasm was over three hours long?
Oh wow, Well, I guess. I mean that's not out of character with a lot of films where the initial cut is just really bloated. But if that's the case with this film, I mean, good job on them cutting it down and it being this consistently entertaining. There's not a dull moment in the film.
It's like an hour and twenty something. So if that's true, that would mean that would have meant we lost half the movie.
I think they pull some stuff out later in some of the sequels, and like pretty decades later in some of the sequels, they were able to pull out whole sequences that they didn't use.
Yeah.
Well, anyway, Mike is attacked by the man in the white hat, but at the same time he is being pursued by the ball. This is when we first really meet the ball. There is a shiny metal sphere that flies through the air at Mike and it's coming at him to drive into his face while the man in the white hat is holding him. But Mike bites the guy on the arm and then ducks down and then the ball hits the guy in the white hat instead.
And I remember when I first saw this, the entire room was just in shock watching what the ball did. It's a roll that beautiful ball footage moment where the drill goes in between the eyes and then it just squirts out a jet of blood from the back of the ball.
Yeah, Like it's not trying to keep the blood, it's just take the blood out of the thing that it is embedded in. It's just absolutely glorious sequence. One of the coolest, weirdest horror movie deaths you'll ever find in a horror movie.
To take it out of the context of horror movie violence, this device, if it existed, would be a wonderful fruit juicer. It looks, you know, flying to the side of a watermelon and then just drain all the watermelon juice straight out.
Yeah. I mean you'd have to stand behind it and I guess catch it all in your mouth or something.
Yeah, you'd need a receptacle.
Yeah, But that's again that's another quality of the sphere that I like because it doesn't feel like it was designed to function in this world or in these circumstances. You know, just attaching to things and sucking all the liquid out of them and just blasting the liquid over what's whatever's behind it. I love it. It's so weird.
But there are a lot of effects in this movie that are great low tech, low cost effects. And the ball effects. I think this is a great example because there are scenes where this metal sphere is actually flying through the air toward the camera. Don't necessarily see any wires or anything. So how did they do this? I think what they did is they just had somebody stand behind the camera and pitch the ball, or they might
have used a pitching machine. In any case, the ball was being a thrown or ejected down the hall past the camera, and then they just used the shot in reverse. So the ball is just flying toward the camera from out of nowhere.
It looks good. It looks good. However they did it like these are sequences that that hold up absolutely you know that these these totally buy this flying silver sphere from another world.
Well, anyway, there's a big chase scene. The tall Man chases Mike. At one point Mike manages to.
Before the chase. Before the chase, Joe, you have one of my favorite moments. This is the showdown between Mike and the tall Man. This is the moment, another game recognized game moment. They both they freeze. They kind of Mike kind of like cautiously walks up, the tall Man's cautiously walking up, and then in their kind of mirror images of each other, but kind of you know, like one to one side, one to the other, and then boom, Mike runs for it and the tall Man chases after him.
And the tall Man he's got a lot of he's got a lot of go, he's got some energy. He may look like he's somewhere between the ages of fifty and eighty. Again, his age is also suitably vague, And of course he's probably he's not of this world anyway, so it doesn't matter, but yeah, he can move.
This leads to the finger sequence which is a whole like series of scenes which are so so. Mike manages to escape from the tall Man and cut off some of his fingers. It squirts out yellow blood and his fingers are like still moving around on the floor. Mike takes one of the fingers, takes it home, keeps it in a box, falls asleep on the floating shag carpet stairs with a shotgun in his hand. That's not safe. Then Jody finds him asleep on the stairs. Mike explains
it to Jody. He's like, here's what happened. I'm going to show you a finger in a box. And then he shows him the finger, and then Jody's like, okay, I am convinced. I appreciated that that he didn't persist in denying it once he saw the finger and the yellow blood in the box. And then the finger turns into a beatle demon which attacks Jody and Mike, and then they try to kill it in the garbage disposal in the sink, and then Reggie arrives to witness this,
so now Reggie's in on the whole demon conspiracy. And then after this, Jody starts giving Mike a gun safety lesson and then Jody heads off to the funeral home to investigate things for himself.
Yeah, and I love the love how we go from this scene where Jody's giving Mike the gun safety lesson and then Jody Bray goes into the basement of the mausoleum at night is immediately attacked by dwarf And there's a scene where a dwarf is on Jody's back and Jody is trying to shoot the dwarf off of his back with a handgun by essentially aiming the gun at his own head. Like it's just so dangerous. It's like, really, you were just given pointers on gun safety and now you're doing this.
That scene is so funny. Yeah, but anyway, Jody. Yeah, so Jody has this fight with one of the necro dwarfs in the funeral home and then he flees, and then this leads into a car chase where Jody and Mike are driving around shooting at a hearse I think that's being driven by one of the creatures, and then they crash. They get the other car to crash, and they go up to the creature and they pull back
its hood and you're wondering, what's its face? Going to be like and they realize, oh no, this was our friend. Tommy is the Lemmy guy, but he's covered in yellow slime.
Oh, and this is great. The reveal that the dwarves are the bodies of the dead that have been like compressed down into into little necro dwarves like this. I remember when I when I when I watched one of these films for the first time and realized this, and I was like, oh, my goodness, that's that's genius. That's so beautiful.
So they summoned Reggie's ice cream truck, which is now doubling his body removal truck. So they're putting it in the in the freezer and Reggie, by this scene, I think he was dressed like this earlier, but he looks so funny because he's wearing a black vest over his ice cream outfit, so he looks like a combination of a milkman and a riverboat casino dealer.
Yeah.
So Reggie, Jody, and Mike go back to their house and they have a strategy session. Jody's going why why, why why are they taking people's bodies and crushing them down to half size. And then Reggie suggests, well, we got to catch the tall man and drive a steak through his heart. I don't know why they think that would work. And then Mike, Mike is incredulous. He's like, how do you think we could drive a stake through
his heart? That mother's strong. Many times in this movie people use the word mother as a general noun to refer to a person or a thing.
Yeah, it work. Gives a looking so nicely with Mike here though, because because it's like Mike's talking tough, He's talking like like like he thinks an adult should be talking in the situation. I love it.
Okay, Well, we're heading into the final sequence here, so I think Reggie and Jody are going to go investigate the funeral home again, and they're going to make Mike stay at Sally's an antique store. I think these are characters who we should have met before but we haven't. Actually, maybe maybe that got cut.
The antique store is a nice sequence though, because it's just Mike wandering around looking at strange things in an antique store and we get some fabulous percussion, like all the gongs and bells. It's a scene that I, yeah, without the me I guess it might be a little boring, but with the music it's it's really cool and creepy.
Yeah, And he just wanders around looking at things until he finds an old photograph of the Tall Man in the nineteenth century driving a horse drawn carriage. And then from here he's like, you must take me home immediately. I don't know what this changes. Why does that mean he must leave?
You're like, didn't they's nine?
Yeah, didn't they already know that the Tall Man was otherworld? Like, why would he be that surprised? I don't know. So they're driving around and the car gets attacked by the creatures again. Uh, and then let's see Mike goes back home and then Jody locks Mike in his bedroom where he's like, I'm going to go go to the funeral home. You have to stay here. And then we get one of the moments that actually stuck in my mind the
most from when I first saw this movie. It is when Mike comes up with a system to escape being locked in his room, and it is an improv explosive device that he makes out of a shotgun shell, a hammer, a tack, and some tape.
Yeah. Absolutely do not do this at all.
Yeah, So he like yeah. He puts a tack in the back of a shotgun shell and then tapes it to the end of a hammer and then like and then swings it at the door, and this makes the shell explode and it shoots its shot through the door, and then he's able to reach through and open up the knob or dislodge a screwdriver. I think that Jody jammed in there to prevent the door from opening. I was trying to figure out would this technique actually work.
I have no idea. All I could find was people doing forum posts on it, so can't vouch for this at all, but people on the forum posts, so some people were saying, yeah, it seems like this would work, except the shot would not explode, you know, going straight forward like it would if it were coming out the barrel of a shotgun. It would explode in all directions because of the lack of a barrel.
Please do not try this out. We are not asked to anybody to experiment and create and generate an answer on this. Do not attempt.
But it was all for nothing, really, because Mike gets out and then immediately runs into Anga scrim Ambush at the door. Angus Scrim's like, I've been waiting for you. So he takes him. Tall Man takes him to the funeral home, where he escapes a hearse by shooting out a window. Meanwhile, Jody's already there. We get a bunch of action. There's like the ball attacks again and we get ball cam. Jody comes to the rescue with a shotgun and blows up the ball. And now they got
to check out the scary door. So they're they're creeping over to the scary door that we saw the blonde girl open earlier. She sees the light and then she screams yeah.
And this this is the point in the film where you've never seen it before. You might wonder, like, how did they keep it going? How do they up the ante here? But they do, Like the weirdness intensifies in this scene.
Well, first of all, we get jump scare Reggie. Reggie just comes out to Reggie and the Yeah. He's like hey, and they're like, oh, we thought you were but no, he's good. And he reveals that he found Sally and Susie and some other people in there and they're not dead. They're all okay. And he's like, yeah, I snuck him out a window. Just a whole other story was happening while we were watching. The characters we barely knew are also now safe, so don't They're fine? Yeah, So okay,
they want to go in the room. They open up the door and inside the room is full of these black barrels with little glass windows on them. Huh, what's going on there? We get a loud hum And then also in the room with the black barrels there is some weird furniture. There were just these two metal prongs coming up from the floor, and they look inside the barrels and they're like, oh, it's those necro dwarves there they are. So they're being created in these barrels, I guess.
And then yeah, or at least created and then like pickled in the barrel, finished in the barrel, or stored in the barrel for transit.
I don't know. And then Mike realizes that the two metal prongs coming up from the floor are actually a transdimensional portal, and he reaches his hand through and then he falls entirely through and sees what's on the other side, and it is a desert planet made of just like stones and gravel with a red sky where all of the necro dwarves are lined up in a row going all the way to the horizon as if they're like
carrying stuff. And then Jody and Reggie save Mike. They pull him out from the portal and they put everything together. They figure out, Aha, the Tall Man is using the human corpses as alien slave labor on another planet, but because of that planet's gravity and I guess atmospheric pressure or heat, they have to be crushed down to a smaller size so they can work there as zombies.
Yeah. I absolutely love this. This is a marvelous reveal, like there's another world out there, some sort of giant, high gravity world where crushed down necro dwarves are being sent to serve as labor. And also they never I don't know if they ever really draw this line or not, but I wonder if that's also why the tall Man is so tall, because he comes from one of these worlds with higher gravity, it comes to a lower gravity world and it like makes him taller somehow, I don't know. Huh.
Okay, Well, anyway, there's a bunch of fighting after this lights go out, and then Jody and Mike end up chasing around with some of the with some of the creatures.
Reggie is left behind in the room and there's a great moment where Reggie thinks back to the tuning fork because he is looking at the two metal prongs coming up from the floor, and he figures out how to do something to them, Like he puts his hands on the prongs like he did with his fingers on the tuning fork earlier, and that does something it like opens a portal, and then all the winds starts rushing and he almost gets sucked in.
It's a great sequence, and I like how it, you know, connects to that moment with a tuning fork earlier in the film. He's like, this is it. I know what this is. I mean, I don't really know what this is, but I know the basic relationship here. I'm bad if I reach out with both hands and I stop the vibrations, I'm going to close this portal.
Another trivia thing I saw alleged on the internet is that the idea to connect that to the tuning fork and everything was an idea that came from Susan, who was Reggie Banister's wife.
Well it was a great idea.
So Reggie makes it outside. He sees the lady in Lavender. I think he does not know like the audience does, that she is actually Angus scrim So he goes and tries to help her, but he gets stabbed, and there's general wind and chaos. There's you know, the tall Man standing over Reggie with a knife, and a Reggie apparently dies, and then we get the final show down where Jody and Mike escape and Jody's like, this is so out
of nowhere, like not earned at all. Jody's like, there's an old mind shaft up by Singer's Creek, thousands of feet down. We just got to find a way to get him up there. And so he sends Mike into the house to at Ammo, and Jody says, he's going to go remove warning signs from around the mind shaft. But I don't know why they'd send Mike into the house, because don't they already know that the tall Man knows that's where they live. I don't know. Tall Man shows
up and attacks Mike in the house. You know, he says, boy, you play a good game boy, But now the time is finished, and so they run around chasing and Mike's were repeating the litany against fear, except not really. Instead he's just saying, don't fear. And they they succeed. They you know, they they lure the tall Man into the mine shaft, which does not look like a mind shaft at all. It looks like a square somebody dug a square shaped hole in the dirt.
Yeah, this is the one moment in the film where I feel like the effects feel a little bit shoddy, especially when the boulders roll in to fill up the pit after they drop the tall Man down there. It's not a deal breaker for the movie or anything, but but yeah, everything else feels fresh and believable, and this is a little like you can see the scenes. You can see the tarp there in that sequence, and.
I was like, are they going to wake up? And it's all a dream and you know what happens the next thing, Mike wakes up as if from a dream, and then Mike and Reggie are hanging out next to a roaring fire and they're talking about how Jody died.
Huh.
It's like like, so instead of Reggie dying, they're saying Jody died. And then they show Mike visiting Jody's grave, and then Reggie's like, I'm going to take care of you, Mike, and then Reggie starts playing. He's like, let's go on a road trip. You know, we'll leave when the sun
comes up. You go pack your bags. And Reggie sits there by the fire and starts to play that song sitting here at midnight again, and it is violently dissonant with the non diegetic soundtrack that's playing at the same time. Sounds horrible. And then up in Mike's room, the tall man appears in a mirror and he's like boy, and then there's a jump scare and pulls him into the mirror, and that's the end of the movie. I have no idea how to make sense of any of that. It does not connect at all.
Yeah, I don't know dreams within dreams or dreams and images caused by by traumas and losses, because it's like there we start off with a growing understanding that Mike has lost both his parents, and then here at the end we get this revelation that he's lost his brother and that the only parental figure left in his life is Reggie. And yeah, it's I don't know, it's it's it's hard to connect all these things together, and yet everything shapes up in a way where you can you
kind of buy it. You're like, there's a pattern here. I just can't quite piece it together. But if I watch it enough times then maybe it'll begin to sink in.
I have a question about the theory of this movie. Why is the Tall Man doing murders at all? Because we discover in the end that his goal is to create Jawa zombies to work for him on this other planet, and he does that just with human corpses, so he just needs corpses. But he already operates a funeral parlor, So why is he going out of his way to do murders? Like I guess it would suggest that, like at the normal rate of natural death, he is not getting enough bodies to do what he needs to do.
I guess. So yeah, Like in the second movie, they add this nice detail where the Tall Man moves around from town to town and he leaves just decimated funeral homes and decimated graveyards in his wake, Like all the bodies get claimed and turned into dwarves and send to this other world. So yeah, maybe he just like juices the numbers a little bit more. It's like, well, today, I could get just thirty dwarves from raiding the cemeteries
and you know, getting some natural deaths rolling in. But I could also juice it a little bit and maybe kill a couple of people on the side. That's just more profits for me.
He's trying to hit those Q four numbers.
Yeah, I guess also it's like people who in some cases is there's a sense of like people who interfere with the process here with the with the scheme, they get killed and turned into zombies because why why waste a good body when you could turn that into a dwarf as well. But yeah, other times, like he's turning into this this woman to go out and clearly lure
people to the cemetery for for for death. But I guess that that's ultimately more about this connection between sex and death in Mike's mind.
But what if he goes to the trouble of doing that and then the person's family decides that they want that that person buried somewhere else.
Oh, I don't think the tall Man would stand for that.
He's got to use mafia tactics on grieving families to make sure he gets all of the bodies.
I guess so. But it's like a small town like how many how many rivals? Well, I mean he's probably put the rival groups out of business, like you're not going to operate a funeral home in competition with the tall Man.
I guess so, Rob, this has got to be one of our longest episodes ever. We must cap it here.
Yeah, we'll go ahead and cave it off here. But yeah, Phantasm, it's a lot of fun. It's widely available in all formats, but the Phantasm remastered Blu Ray or digital release is certainly where you want to go for this one. I think I streamed the remastered version of via Prime, but you can again find this film just about anywhere. And yeah, it's a load of fun. It's a great Halloween viewing choice. All Right, we'll be back next Friday with more Weird
House Cinema calibrated for your seasonal Halloween needs. In the meantime, will remind you that we are primarily a science podcast, with our core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. On Mondays we do listener mail. On Wednesdays we do a short form artifact or monster fact. On Fridays we do Weird House cinema. If you're interested in seeing what movies we've covered in the past, there are two places you can go.
You can go to somemmutomusic dot com. That's my blog where I just do some very casual blog posts about these movies that we watch. But also if you use a letterbox that's L E T T E R box d dot com, we are on there as weird House. You will find our profile there and you'll find a list of all the movies we've covered on the show, and sometimes there'll be a little hint or a little spoiler of what the next film will be.
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from My Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.