Director of the Week: Don Coscarelli: Phantasm III: Lord of the Dead

Hello all and welcome back to more of Director of the Week: Don Coscarelli.  Since Phantasm II has already been covered I thought it only fair to drag you kicking and screaming into the depraved depths of its continuation.  So load your Dwarf Cutter, gas up the ’71 Barracuda and let the road be your guide.  This is Phantasm III: Lord of the Dead.

Hmm, my coat is on fire.

Reggie: I sure hope that ball got a better sense of spoilers than mine do.

Minutes after escaping the mortuary with the Tall Man destroyed our heroes Reggie, Mike and Liz hop in a hearse driven by Alchemy (Samantha Phillips of Phantasm II, Deceit, The Other Man, Hot Springs Hotel, Menno’s Mind and Cheerleader Massacre) and off to safety…or is it?  Alchemy is revealed to be yet another of the Tall Man’s vessels of death and destruction as she flogs Reggie and tosses him out of the hearse.  Mike and Liz are rocked about as the car crashes into a tree.  Reggie finds Mike (A. Michael Baldwin again) and the grassy area is surrounded by the Tall Man’s undead dwarves.

C'mon you mutha!

Blowing away a generous portion of them, Reggie gambles with his and Mike’s lives threatening to blow themselves up with a grenade.  The Tall Man seems to have other plans for Mike and bows out of the impeding conflict.  Mike in a coma begins to dream and understand what the Tall Man is, what the dwarves are and why the spheres are so lethal.

Not for hanging on the Christmas tree.

Saving himself from a possessed nurse, Mike and Reggie make tracks to clear out before the Tall Man comes knocking again.  As they prep they are visited by a ghost from the past.  Jody appears before them and both Reggie and Mike are confused seeing Jody died 12 years ago.   He warns Reggie of the Tall Man only to be too late as he slaps both Jody who is now one of the killer spheres and Reggie down and claiming Mike as a prize.

Back on the road trying to find Mike, Reggie drives through abandoned and ransacked towns with graves turned up and no living soul to be found.  He is befriended and saved by a 12 year old kid name of Tim (Kevin Connors of Full House, Prehysteria! 2, and Pleasantville).  The two scope other towns when they encounter a couple of fairly well armed women that want to know what happened to their town.  A sphere nails one of them draining her dry and the other, Rocky (Gloria Lynne Henry of Phantasm III: Lord of the Dead, The Devil’s Advocate and The Horse Whisperer) joins Reggie and Tim to fight the evil forces of the Tall Man.

 

Da wife is a real twist, eh?

I have a few complaints to register about this film.  Thanks to the anal retention of the MPAA, the film in its original VHS release was neutered to great levels cutting down on the violence and only a handful of films kept the movie intact.  In 2007, Anchor Bay was allowed to release an unrated version having the same level of violence and gore as the previous two films.  After 1985, Horror genre slasher/supernatural/zombie films had a lot of interference due to overbearing parents, Christian focus groups and people feeling that art could persuade some folks to imitate it in real life.  If that is true to form I am off now to watch 1978 Superman in order to fly, bend steel in my hands and gots to try out that X-ray vision.

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.

The Balls are back!

Hey kids this looks like a potentially good sequel. Grab a head lamp and shovel and let’s start digging.  This is Phantasm 2.

My God look at the size of the spoiler!

Director Don Coscarelli (Phantasm I through IV, Beastmaster, Bubba Ho-tep, and Incident on and Off a Mountain Road) attempts to capture the spirit of its predecessor back in 1979 with a new round of terror.  With A. Michael Baldwin (Mike from the first movie) off on a retreat to learn a musical instrument and devoting his time to such, (James Degros of Drugstore Cowboy, Point Break, Enemy of the State and Vantage Point) tackles the role of Mike as a teen after the death of his brother and being assaulted yet again by the mysterious and devious Tall Man (Angus Scrimm of Phantasm I through IV, Subspecies: The Awakening and I Sell the Dead)  With his undead dwarven minions at his command, the Tall Man seeks to capture young Mike with Reggie (Reggie Bannister of Phantasm I through IV, Bubba Ho-tep, Wishmaster and Cemetery Gates) standing in his way. 
 

With a narrow escape from the evil that conquered their town, Mike is institutionalized for 6 years for what the state felt was clearly a child's overactive imagination as a defense mechanism helping the grieving process to handle the death of his brother Jody.  Reunited with Reggie once more they make their way to Reggie's family home only for Mike to receive a psychic image of the house being destroyed moments before the house is engulfed in flames.
 
 The two men scarred and bereaved from their traumatic experiences, they vow to hunt down and eliminate the Tall Man and stop his fiendish abominations. Mike further receives more psychic effects as he has a rapport with a girl he has never met.  Her small town is cut off from any help as graves become empty, and the dead are used as tools of the Tall Man. Liz (Paula Irvine of Phantasm III, Santa Barbara and Doin’ Time on Planet Earth) contacts Mike through a psychic link enabling our heroes to journey to her rescue.  Allied with the Tall Man are his latest assistants in evil practices simply known as the Grave Diggers.  With little encouragement on Mike’s behalf, Reggie gases up the ‘Cuda and the two hit the road in search of the Tall Man and try to think of a way to end his reign over the dead and God only knows his true purpose for his sinister deed.

 While Don Coscarelli merely hints that the Tall Man is from either a Hell dimension or perhaps another universe all together is never truly known. In a recent interview he exclaimed it was more fun to let people speculate and give him ideas.   Between some unique steady cam as well as track, the $3 million budget allows for improvements of the killer spheres previously constructed by Will Green from his prop effect department Turntable Rentals and Sales.  While this was the largest budget for all for four movies, it did offer additional killer dwarf dispatching weapons, such as a homemade flamethrower and the infamous quad-barrel shotgun which the fans lovingly referred as the Dwarf Cutter.