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Phantasm |
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A boy watches a creepy cemetery worker carry away
coffins from the new graves, and strange figures
lurking around the graveyard. He tells his older
brother and the duo decides to investigate, leading
to the disclosing of an activity where stolen
corpses are turned into other-dimension slave-dwarfs.
Wow, never have I been so confused on how to review
a film. This is indeed a very bizarre movie, and even
though it's not a very good one, it's actually not
all that bad either. Rather than your ordinary
storyline this seems to be a mixture of crazy ideas,
some good, some bad.
For the bad parts we have the two lead heroes. The
little kid is one annoying character with ugly hair
(he kind of looks like a young Karen Allen) and a
suspiciously bad habit of stalking his older brother.
That brother is supposed to be this cool, hippie-like
dude who gets it on with all the ladies. In my eyes
he's mostly a dork. Both actors are anyway very bland,
acting like in a bad TV film or something.
For worse, the film moves on slowly. It becomes
occasionally dull and not much happens for several
episodes. The film has this kind of figure-out-the-
plot thing to it, but too much time is wasted on
the relationship between the two brothers. It also
lacks a heroine (the only nominal one bites it after
two scenes) and it's seriously underpopulated (the
town where it's set seems to have about ten inhabitants).
For the good parts, this is when it gets going one
hell of an entertaining movie. It has a great 70s
feeling to it, with cricket's noise loudly in the
dark and the characters doing the classic mistakes
like going alone to investigate the spooky morgue.
The special effects are (since this is obviously a
low-budget flick) underused but clearly memorable
and hilarious. We have the unexplained, flying silver-
ball that burrows into its victims heads and sprays
out blood. Or the severed finger (with yellow goo
instead of blood) that later turns into a monstrous,
mad fly! This just never stops.
The slave-dwarfs are actually quite scary, even
though it sounds silly (they reminds of those caped
figures from Star Wars), especially in the scene
where the hide behind the gravestones and jump up
on the little boy from a bush in the dark (a good
shock-effect). But the best thing in the film is
Angus Scrimm, as the Tall Man, who mostly just
wanders around in slow-motion, looking very
sinister and whispers "Booooooy...". He is, like
the special effects, underused and never gets a
chance for real character-developing, but he sure
steals every scene he's in.
There's a knife-stabbing already in the first scene,
the silver-ball with the blood-gushing effect and
another stabbing (with overly long death scene to follow).
Very 70s and owes a bit too The Exorcist, with that
creepy piano-clinking.
Silly but fun, not for inpatient as it's quite slow
and dull sometimes. Not a real, good film but it sure
is entertaining.
Review By: Slicer-Dicer
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