Director of the Week: Don Coscarelli: Phantasm

Okay guys and dolls let’s kick this week off with a wee bit of horror and our director of the week as it is Don Coscarelli.   This movie is not blood caked on the walls violence and a massive behemoth of a man tearing limbs off a token black man simply because he can.  This is a complex story arc that if you skibble off to the bathroom or go get a snack without pausing; yes you will be confused and annoy your fellow viewers.   So load up your .45 and 12 gauge and shoot at anything little, brown and low to the ground.  This is Phantasm.

 

Sorry if I made you wet your pants, SIIIRRR!!

Jody: What’s out there?

Mike: I don’t know. It was little, brown and low to the ground.

Jody: Ahh, it was probably just a spoiler in heat.

Young Mike (A. Michael Baldwin of Kenny & Company, The Fantastic Journey, Eight Is Enough, Vice Girls, Phantasm III: Lord of the Dead and Brutal) has lost both his parents in a car accident and now lives with his brother Jody (Bill Thornbury of Summer School Teachers, Sarah T.- Portrait of a Teenage Alcoholic, Secrets of Midland Heights, The Lost Empire and Phantasm III: Lord of the Dead) and all is more or less well and good when Jody’s best friend Tommy (Bill Cone of Phantasm) is found dead in a graveyard , stabbed through the heart.  The official explanation is suicide but Mike doesn’t believe the inept cops and starts his own investigations.  Screw you Goonies!  Mike does this solo. 

Reggie, yer blinding me again.

Unexplained events seem to be occurring around the funeral home managed by man of 6’4” the lad simply calls The Tall Man.   As Tommy’s funeral ends and the pallbearers have done their duty, our Tall Man lifts a coffin weighing at least 200 lbs plus an additional 200lbs of dead weight inside like it was a potted plant.   Further sleuthing is needed as Mike heads into the mausoleum itself seeing these disturbing dwarves in Jawa robes and top of which silver spheres floating about and drilling into people’s skulls.   Rather than seek immediate therapy, Mike tells his brother Jody and Jody’s buddy Reggie (Reggie Bannister of Kenny & Company, Survival Quest, Phantasm, Phantasm II, The Demolitionist, Wishmaster and Bubba Hotep) and our improvised Scooby gang go and investigate.  And brother they are packing shotguns and .45s.   This is a novel concept in my book.

I have just a few notes about the film if you don’t mind.  Now in interviews Coscarelli has never been frank on what town this was supposed to occur in but clearly areas of California from Pacific Palisades where Morningside Cemetery is to parts of Oakland I was recognizing from personal travels.  Heck I saw regions of San Fernando Valley as well but the story arc is somehow in Oregon.  Seems fitting to bring something so malevolent into God’s country, right?    

Oh boy I wet 'em.

Filmed in 35 mm Spherical this film’s audio is sadly in Mono but hey it was cheaper to film in such with the old school Panaflex.  Bill Thornbury also wrote one the songs for the movie “Sittin’ Here at Midnight” which both he and Reggie Bannister performed on screen.   Hey folks these actors did their own driving and stunts too.   Ballsy lot in my thinking.