Phantasm (1979)

Movie: Phantasm (1979), directed by Don Coscarelli

Watched on: Amazon Prime

Ran: 6.67 miles, 9’09”/mile, 01:01:02 (light run)

 

I wound up having kind of a crappy run tonight—no biggie, it happens, I think I just hadn’t eaten enough today—but the saving grace was that I had decided to choose an unseen classic to run to, something that I should have seen forever ago and somehow had just never gotten around to watching. How fortunate, then, that I’d settled on Phantasm.

 

You guys! HOW have I never seen this gem before? Let me give you the dizzying rundown from the perspective of a slightly-more-than-casual horror fan seeing this masterpiece for the first time: less than three minutes in you’ve already seen a couple gettin’ it on in a graveyard, bare breasts, and a dude stabbed to death with a dagger, so you think to yourself, okay, it’s that kind of 1979 horror flick. (Spoiler: you are wrong.)

 

Cut to the funeral, where the guy’s bandmates Jody and Reggie can’t believe that good ol’ Tommy “killed himself.” Jody’s 13-year-old brother Mike was kept away from the funeral because he was so traumatized by the death of their parents the previous year, but Mike’s got some abandonment issues (understandable) and follows Jody everywhere, and he’s been spying on the funeral through binoculars. Once the other mourners have departed, Mike sees the creepy undertaker lift the 500 lb. coffin from the gravesite and yeet it back into the hearse like it’s a sack of laundry. So now you think, hey, things are a little more interesting than I thought they’d be.

 

Next up is a scene with a psychic grandmother whose powers are apparently real enough to make things fade into and out of the physical plane of existence, so you readjust your expectations, only to have them rattled once more by a musical interlude of Jody and Reggie jamming out with guitars on the porch (the end shot of which led me to shout “IT’S CHEKHOV’S TUNING FORK!” and, reader, I was not wrong).

 

And then that is followed by Jody getting seduced by the same woman who killed Tommy—and if you weren’t already getting a strong Greg and Bobby Brady vibe from Jody and Mike, their wholesome “wows” upon seeing her topless will fix that—but before things get good-then-bad, Mike runs by screaming at the top of his lungs because a Jawa spooked him in the woods, so Jody gets to deliver the immortal and curiously deadpan line “What the heck? Wait here, it’s my little brother, I think he’s got some kind of a problem” with a pair of panties between his teeth.

 

Tonally all over the map, you say? Well buckle up, Buttercup, because we’re just gettin’ started. Mike straps a big honkin’ hunting knife to his leg and breaks into the Morningside Mortuary at night to investigate on his own, and before long is pursued by a creepy caretaker and a flying silver sphere—which eventually hits the caretaker instead, drills into his skull, and erupts a GEYSER of blood out the back. When he’s chased by the undertaker, Mike—who screamed in mortal terror when menaced by a Jawa—calmly cuts off the guy’s fingers with the knife, doesn’t even blink at the fact that his blood is yellow, and takes a still-moving finger with him as evidence as he skedaddles back home.

 

Back at the ranch, Jody coolly looks at the finger, which is still twitching and oozing French’s mustard (or maybe it’s Plochman’s, not sure), and deadpans, “okay, I believe you.” Then Reggie joins Team Phantasm when he sees that the finger has now turned into a gigantic flying insect that tries to kill them all. Luckily, the house has a working garbage disposal—and is also FULL OF GUNS, which come in handy when, two scenes later, the movie suddenly turns into a Dukes of Hazzard high-speed car chase and shootout. (“There’s nobody driving that mother,” says Jody; you have just seen that somebody, indeed, is driving that mother.)

 

I swear I did not set out to describe this entire movie scene-by-scene, but things keep getting more and more bonkers and I’m having trouble figuring out where to stop. It’s like at the beginning of every new scene, everything changes again and you feel that, okay, NOW the movie is starting.

 

Meanwhile, look, now Mike’s in an antique store and seeing the mortician in a vintage photograph! Guess it’s time to persuade the two young blondes running the shop to drive him home so he can warn Jody that the dude is immortal or something. If you’ve ever wanted to see three able-bodied youngsters get their asses handed to them by a Jawa while all four are squished into a classic Volkswagen Beetle, now’s your chance!

 

Follow that up with arguably the most nerve-wracking scene so far, in which Mike MacGyvers an escape from his bedroom by using a thumbtack, some Scotch tape, a live shotgun shell, and a hammer to blow a hole in his locked door. Eh, what could go wrong?

 

More gunplay, we are reminded that in the ’70s all cars explode if they run into a pole at more than 7 mph, and then Team Phantasm fights their way past a mysterious door in the mortuary to find a gleaming white room full of futuristic black barrels and the world’s biggest tuning fork (CALLED IT) that doubles as a transdimensional gateway to Tattooine—and, with a mere 17 minutes left on the clock, we finally find out that we are 100% absotively posilutely watching a science fiction movie.

 

And that’s where I’ll leave off, because even though the movie will pull the rug out from under you at least one more time, that’s practically a staple of the genre, and I have to leave something for you to look forward to. But if I haven’t made this clear, this movie is utterly bananas, in the best possible way.

 

I will say that although it appears on a lot of “Scariest Movies” lists, I didn’t find Phantasm to be scary in the slightest, but that doesn’t make me love it any less. Honestly, if a studio had cranked this out, it would have been schlocky AND soulless, and rightfully abandoned to the ashcan of time. What saves it is that it is bursting with heart. Phantasm is so clearly a labor of love you want to wrap it in a blankie and tenderly feed it muffins. The mere fact that a guy could write and direct what feels like the stanniest fanfiction of a franchise that only existed in his head makes you want to leap to your feet and cheer. That he did it on a shoestring budget and in the flippin’ ’70s—if you’re at least as ancient as I am, you know what I mean by this; if you aren’t, take my word for it, young ’un—is astounding.

 

So, thumbs up for this good time that I can only describe as “rollicking.” And while my expectations are suitably tempered, I do look forward to watching the four sequels.