I like the storyline of this show,it attract me so much

A Disappointing Continuation

This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

I first heard of Phantasm when its sequel came out. Barry Norman reviewed it and admitted that he hadn't even heard of the first film. Neither had I.Fortunately my sister in law had a friend who had closed down their video business and so gave her a lot of the videos he used to rent out. She lent me two films that could be classed as life- changing. One was The Rocky Horror Picture Show. The other was Phantasm.The film starts off like standard horror fare- sinister goings on at a small town American mortuary. But then the film starts to get more and more surreal. Its like a lot of the film inhabits a dark dream-like world.Check out the scene where the lead character goes to see a local seer. Add to that the chase scene in which Michael chops off The Tall Man's fingers and takes one home. This film is most famous for the flying silver spheres within the funeral home. These spheres certainly don't disappoint.And then there's the soundtrack which fluctuates between gritty analogue synths of doom and funereal organs. I found the soundtrack on CD and within the sale section of a local and long gone record store. One of the best purchases I've ever parted money for.Angus Scrimm as The Tall Man deserves recognition as one of the scariest and most sinister baddies of all time. Hes unrelenting, otherworldly and the inhabitant of many viewers nightmares.This film was remastered and released at cinemas across America last year. And it deserved the 4K treatment.File this film under 'underrated'. Also file it under 'masterpiece'.

I found out about this film from horror compilation Ultimate Boogeymen: The Killer Compilation, which consisted of notable scary movie villains, killers and monsters, I was hoping it might be something worthwhile. Basically following the deaths of his parents, 24-year-old musician Jody Pearson (Bill Thornbury) raises his 13-year- old brother Mike (A. Michael Baldwin) in a small Oregon town disturbed by the mysterious deaths of its citizens. Family man and ice cream vendor Reggie (Reggie Bannister) joins the brothers in their suspicions of the local mortician, dubbed the Tall Man (Angus Scrimm), they believe he is responsible for the deaths. Mike relays his fears to a Fortuneteller (Mary Ellen Shaw) and her Granddaughter (Terrie Kalbus) about the possibility of Jody departing and leaving him in the care of his aunt, and his suspicions about the Tall Man. Mike is shown a small black box and told to put his hand inside, something grips his hand, he panics, before being told to calm down, and the grip of the box relaxes, he is taught that there should be nothing to fear but fear itself. Mike decides to enter the mausoleum, and finds the lair of the Tall Man, a series of corridors with wall burials, he is pursued by flying silver spheres, capable of drilling into the head of a victim, and a number of minions, that are in fact deceased townspeople, their corpses have been shrunk down. Jody and Reggie are sceptical about Mike's stories of what he has found, but they are eventually convinced, they all enter the mausoleum, and find white room filled with containers, as well as two beams. Mike unintentionally finds that the beams are a gateway, leading to another planet, he enters this briefly, and sees the dwarfs working as slaves, Reggie tries to escape from the Tall Man, but appears to be stabbed and killed. Mike and Jody barely escape, and devise a plan to lure the Tall Man into a local deserted mine shaft and trap him inside, they are successful, then Mike suddenly wakes up, lying next to the fire. Reggie is there and tells him he was having a nightmare, in fact Jody was killed in a car accident, this has been a common occurrence for Mike. In the end, Mike enters his bedroom, he is shocked to find the Tall Man there waiting behind the door, and he is dragged through the bedroom mirror by one of the dwarf minions. Also starring Kathy Lester as Lady in Lavender, Kenneth V. Jones as Caretaker, Susan Harper as Girlfriend and Lynn Eastman-Rossi as Sally. Scrimm does make a menacing villain, but it sits right between imaginative and illogical, a macabre fun-house mortuary is fine, and the shiny flying balls drilling and spilling blood are nasty, but the science-fiction stuff and slave dwarfs take it to a ridiculous level, a weird but sort of alright cult horror. Okay!

It's important, first off, that you understand that horror films (with the exception of horror from the 30s and 40s) is about my least favorite genre. It's mostly because too many newer films rely on too many gory special effects and not enough on a real plot. They're often just one senseless murder after another. While many love the Halloween and Friday the 13th franchises, they just don't appeal to me. I'm saying all that because this certainly has to effect my impressions of "Phantasm"....especially since I actually LIKED the movie! It sure ain't sophisticated...but it is incredibly frightening and cool.The biggest reason I liked this film is that unlike so many other slasher films, there is a backstory...an actual REASON for the killings. It's not some indestructible guy in a hockey mask or Leatherface doing all the killing but a weird group of aliens who run a mortuary and do so in order that they can reanimate the dead and send them back to their home planet to become slaves! And, when Mike discovers this, the movie jumps into warp speed--with one crazy, terrifying scene after another....and it NEVER lets up!What I also appreciate about the movie is that although it's incredibly violent, the deaths all are done with low-tech 1979 special effects so it doesn't look the least bit realistic (though I liked the fake urine used in one scene...a nice little touch). If seeing folks REALISTICALLY slaughtered happened in the film, it would have turned me off...and I would have turned off the movie! Overall, weird, very inventive and strangely fun. By the way, although the lead was only 16 and the film was CLEARLY marketed to teens, it is NOT a teen film. There's too much in the gore and boobie departments to make this a film for teens...unless, of course, you're trying to raise a young psychopath.

Phantasm has a plot, and you can actually follow what the characters Mike and Jody, the brothers who go up against the "Tall Man" and his Jawa-esque minions, and their ice-cream buddy Reggie are going through. At the same time it's also an incredibly strange and surreal experience just due to what is not necessarily explained, objects like the metallic ball that flies through the air and can basically gush out blood from a man's head once attached between the eyes, or just what those little dwarfs are (we soon find out, but it's not made totally clear how the original versions of the dwarfs are made except... horror movie magic it would seem). And there's other elements involving how the Tall Man does things and finds his way to confront characters and so on. And lest not forget the revelations in the final act.But the joy of this movie is that this is made by someone who is just a real fan of horror: Don Coscarelli, who was quite young when he made this movie (not unlike Sam Raimi with Evil Dead, which this feels like a spiritual cousin with in its ultra low-budget, gotta-be-creative-and-go-for-f***ing-broke cinematic grammar). I don't know what all of his influences are exactly (from IMDb trivia the title comes from Poe), and it feels drenched in the flavor of someone who isn't out to do something sleazy and only for the bucks, which was easy to do in the immediate post-Halloween time, but from Gothic horror literature and the more surreal visions of experimental filmmakers.Some of this may not make sense, and some of it may be rough around the edges (any woman here is basically not a good actor, and I'm not sure if it's due to the ultra-low-budget or that Coscarelli was better with Baldwin who plays the determined younger brother Mike), and yet psychologically, in the way it feels, it flows and is always cohesive. And some of it is pretty violent (I didn't know that it got rated X multiple times due to the aforementioned metal-ball-head scene), but it's all in the dark-morbid fun of a horror movie that's out to scare you and at the same time make this world of this Funeral Home-Cum-Temple that is drenched in inter-dimensional possibilities. Also like Raimi's early films, Coscarelli gets a buzz from showing things like severed fingers that turn into other objects and bleed colors that aren't blood.So not only is it terrifying (in certain spots, where certain effects haven't quite dated, which are only a few), it's an extremely funny movie - both extreme and funny in equal measure. You don't expect the laughs to come like they do, and it's not always from laughing at the excessive gore but genuinely creative dialog - it's also just downright amusing to see Jody and Reggie on the front porch playing guitar together, seemingly random but makes these guys immediately much tighter and recognizable as friends who've done this for years - and there's some honest to goodness stakes set up due to... well, what the hell this Tall Man can do to any people in the immediate vicinity!Featuring a star-making turn by Scrimm, music theme that gets repetitive but isn't too tiring, action that has some real spark and verve (I loved the chase scene at night, it's not complex but you feel the danger with all of the shotgun play), and when the filmmaker gets into hinting at the whole other world behind a particular door, all of the possibilities make it a much richer experience. This isn't the cynical sequel baiting we get today, as it works on its own as its own movie (even with a little of the 'huh' bit near the end with Mike), this is more like 'Wow, that was a lot of fun... is there another one going to be made?'