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.