October Edition #20: PHANTASM IV: OBLIVION

Director: Don Coscarelli
Screenplay: Don Coscarelli
Starring: A. Michael Baldwin, Reggie Bannister, Angus Scrimm, Bill Thornbury
Release Date: 1998


Today’s entry is a movie that by all accounts should never have been a contender for review in this blog. I’ve been a fan of the PHANTASM series ever since I caught a prime time airing of PHANTASM II at the impressionable age of six on channel 39 out of Houston. I was a teenager before I was able to find a copy of the original film to watch, and after that quickly devoured part III. So why did I never get around to watching what is, to date, the final film in the series? I can’t blame the lousy reviews OBLIVION received in its initial release, because Lord knows I’ve watched plenty of shitty movies that didn’t have the benefit of being part of a series I enjoyed. You’re talking to a guy who has owned HOWARD THE DUCK across numerous formats and who was actually excited to hear about the impending Bluray release of ISHTAR.

Hell, PHANTASM III even ended on a massive cliffhanger, with intrepid ice cream man Reggie (Reggie Bannister) pinned to a wall by a horde of  flying silver sphere’s of death while Mike (Baldwin) fled into the wastelands after having one of the sphere’s surgically implanted into his skull by the Tall Man (Scrimm). You’d think I’d have rushed out and immediately rented this fucker to find out what happens to our loveably incompetent hero. To be perfectly honest I thought PHANTASM III was the series’ low point, straying too far into the realm of horror/comedy for my tastes, especially after the mostly grim tone of the first two movies.





For those of you not in the know, the PHANTASM series deals with the saga of the Tall Man, an evil mortician who commands an army of hooded dwarves, undead henchmen, and most memorably the “Sentinels”, airborne silver spheres that attach themselves to the foreheads of their prey and drill deep into their skulls, draining all cranial fluids and spraying them from out of a hole in their backs. Yeah, it’s pretty fuckin’ sweet, and that’s not to mention the Tall Man’s habit of stealing dead bodies and shrinking them down to dwarf form to accommodate their voyage to a hellish dimension he calls home, where they can count on spending eternity as his slaves. As the Tall Man said famously in part II, “You think when you die, you go to heaven? YOU GO TO US!!!” In the first movie the Tall Man ended up facing off with a young boy named Mike who, along with his brother Jody and ice cream vendor/friend Reggie, teamed up to end the nightmarish mortician’s reign of terror. As I’m sure you can tell, the story makes absolutely no sense, which works just fine, as the series relies instead on maintaining an oppressively eerie atmosphere of dread highlighted by stunning nightmare imagery that constantly has you questioning whether or not what you’ve just seen is real or a dream.

PHANTASM IV: OBLIVION picks up seconds after the conclusion of PHANTASM III. As Mike flees into the apocalyptic wastelands of Nevada, the Tall Man shows up back at the mortuary and calls off the horde of spheres that has Reggie pinned, inexplicably allowing him to live for reasons that are never made apparent. The first ten minutes are made up almost entirely of flashbacks to the previous three movies, and this unfortunately sets a precedent for the rest of the movie, as not a lot happens for the next hour and a half. In theory, it appears that some sort of plot progression takes place, as the opening scenes seem to promise to answer many of our questions as to what the fuck is happening in these movies, but by the end all writer/director Coscarelli has done is raise a metric fuck-ton of other questions.

This series has always given a big middle finger to logic and reason.

Working with a budget of under a million dollars, Coscarelli was forced to be very creatively frugal with where he took this story. As a result we get an extremely stripped-down entry, with the smallest cast of characters in the entire series. Most of the movie consists of scenes of Mike driving a hearse through Death Valley contemplating his fate, having lengthy flashbacks to events from his youth. All of these flashbacks are comprised of deleted footage from the original PHANTASM, and while none of it makes any kind of sense or alignment with the events of that film, it was still cool seeing this brand new footage of the characters of Mike and Reggie when they were younger juxtaposed with the recently lensed footage.

Just calm down, son, and hold still while I jam this up your ass.

I’d say roughly thirty percent of the movie is made up of flashbacks, with the rest of the movie dedicated to the rather slim story of Mike’s struggles to ward off the Tall Man’s attempts to transform him into a creature not unlike himself. During Mike’s travels through the desert he discovers a variety of telekinetic abilities, including squashing dwarves with levitating boulders and conjuring inter-dimensional tuning forks that allow him to travel between worlds and through time. I swear to you, if you have watched these movies from the beginning, this all does and doesn’t make any sense at the same time. While all of this is going on, Reggie is convinced by the ghost of Mike’s brother Jody, contained in a black sphere, to follow Mike across the desert for a final confrontation with the Tall Man. Along the way he encounters a demonic zombie cop who, in a first for any movie I’ve seen, pukes yellow fluid into his mouth in the middle of a fight scene, and a female traveler who he rescues from a completely random and insane car wreck. Her sole purpose in the movie is to give us more scenes of the balding, beer-gutted Reggie trying to get laid, culminating in a great gag where he lifts up her shirt to reveal that her breasts are, in fact, spheres, which erupt from her chest and attempt to murder him.

I'd still hit it.

Concurrently with all of this, Mike steps into a portal and is sent back in time to the Civil War era, where he encounters a man named Jebediah Morningside who, it turns out, was the human form of the Tall Man. Jebediah was obsessed with the mysteries of death, and so devised a way to explore what he perceived to be the afterlife via specially-developed dimensional forks. With this knowledge, Mike decides that he must travel back in time and ensure that the Tall Man takes his Mom to the “Enchantment Under the Sea” dance and….. I’m sorry, this shit is too confusing. What I meant was that he wants to go back and prevent the Tall Man from ever coming into existence. Eventually Reggie converges with Mike in the desert with his still amazingly fucking badass quadruple barreled shotgun for a confounding final confrontation with the man who has spent so long ruining their lives.

PHANTASM IV: OBLIVION is a movie that will work for fans of the series and no one else. This isn’t like a FRIDAY THE 13th or A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET,  where you can just jump into any entry and have a good time. If you start the series with this movie, your head will probably explode. But even as a fan this movie was very frustrating. Let me just say that I was very impressed with what Coscarelli pulled off on such a tiny budget. This movie looks very nice, in particular the scenes with Mike and his attempts at suicide in the desert, and a suitably epic shot of the Tall Man casually strolling down a totally deserted Hollywood Boulevard that helps lend the movie the epic scope it so desperately strives for. The PHANTASM series has always felt like a low-rent LORD OF THE RINGS of the horror genre. If someone would just give Coscarelli a large enough budget to pull off all of his ideas, I honestly think he could give us a truly epic horror classic. As it is this movie, while milking its tiny budget for every penny, still comes off as cheap. Bannister and Scrimm are as dependable as they ever were, though  Reggie is responsible for many groan-inducing one-liners that had me rolling my eyes on several occasions. I’ll give Coscarelli this much, he never met an explosion he didn’t know how to shoot the fuck out of. There are three absolutely needless vehicular explosions in this flick that are worthy of the most excessive Michael Bay film, so kudos on the nice production value.

It seems like Coscarelli made this movie for the sole purpose of keeping the series alive long enough to raise money for the never-filmed PHANTASM’S END, as there is what little happens here seems to be all set-up for an epic finale that, as the years roll by, it looks like we’ll never see. As a cautionary measure,  he has cobbled together an ending utilizing more unused footage from the original film that seems to bring the whole story full circle, suggesting that the entire series might have just been the deranged dream of a young boy with a very troubled mind, an ending which is frustrating, but also very touching and fitting with everything that came before.

I have no idea what's happening either, dude.

In the end I’m glad I finally got around to seeing this, though I finally understand why I waited so long. I think maybe I knew that I would ultimately feel let down by this final entry, and though I’ve had a decade to prepare myself, yeah, it does kinda sting knowing that this is more than likely the last I’ll ever see of these characters. Still, as frustrating as it is, this was still much better than I anticipated. The story meanders a bit, and the action is considerably scaled back, but that allows us to spend more time getting to know these characters as they contemplate what their lives might have been like without the interference of the Tall Man. It’s rare that any series maintains the same cast over such a lengthy period, allowing you to see the full effect of age and life experience on not just the characters, but the actors as well. What I guess I’m saying is that the PHANTASM series is the HARRY POTTER of the horror genre, as far as any kind of emotional resonance goes, and if that’s the final legacy of this series, well, I can think of far worse fates that could have befallen it.

My Rating:
6/10