Here comes the sphere! DUCK!

PHANTASM (1979)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

At its core, "Phantasm" may be considered a junky, low-rent horror flick about cemeteries, mausoleums and a supernatural figure dressed in a black suit who screams "BOY!" Yet Don Coscarelli's film is not a throwaway exploitation picture - it is a unique film with a certain kind of dread and dreamlike power that should not be dismissed.

A teenage kid in a motorbike named Michael (A. Michael Baldwin) arrives at Morningside Cemetery during a funeral.  The kid is fascinated by the cemetery and the marble walls of the mausoleum (let's face it - such places do invite curiosity). One day Michael witnesses a man carrying a coffin into a hearse with no assistance, prompting the kid to mouth the words: "What the F&*%?" WTF indeed, as we discover that the cemetery's undertaker, known as the Tall Man (Angus Scrimm), has been stealing corpses from marked graves and compressing their bodies into hooded zombie dwarves. It seems that in a planet or alternate existence or something maybe resembling Hell, the reanimated dead are slaves though I can't say for sure what their enslavement entails.

"Phantasm" doesn't make much sense nor do I fully understand the Tall Man's singular purpose in this cemetery. One shot reveals that this dark Satanic figure has been around for more than a century. A couple of scenes show him shape-shifting (through abrupt cuts) into a hot number called the Lady in Lavender, who picks up men at the local tavern and lures them to a cemetery where they are knifed! I can imagine a rendezvous with such a woman, but not if she is the Tall Man!

"Phantasm" has an evocative dreamlike power that keeps you in a bit of a trance. The film is not the digestible kind of clear-cut horror film where gore and mutilations take precedence over everything else, nor is it your average haunted mansion type of picture - the film holds your interest in its odd clues and even odder, murkier environments. The marble walls and floors of the mansion itself looks too pristine, as if something bad is about to happen. The cemeteries look just as uninviting. Director Don Coscarelli keeps us on the edge of our seat, throwing logic to the winds and silver spheres at our eyes (I am glad nobody converted to this 3-D because the sphere makes you duck already in two dimensions). I can't say what it all adds up to (and I have seen this twice more since it was on TV in the 1980's) but I will say the film is creepy, has a combative young hero at its center, and the most sinister villain since the days of Count Dracula.