Weirdhouse Cinema Rewind: Phantasm

In this classic episode of Weirdhouse Cinema, Rob and Joe venture into the cinematic mausoleum to discuss the dreamlike terror of 1979’s “Phantasm.” (Originally published 09/30/2022)

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, Hey, welcome to Weird House Cinema. Rewind. My name
is Joe McCormick, and the ball is back because today
we are bringing you an older episode of Weird House Cinema.
It's the one we did on Fantasm. This originally published
September thirtieth, twenty twenty two. Let's get right in.

Speaker 2 (00:25):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 3 (00:35):
Hey, welcome to Weird House Cinema. This is Rob Lamb.

Speaker 1 (00:39):
And this is Joe McCormick. And as we enter the
Halloween season on Weird House Cinema, one of our favorite
times of the year. Why would I even say one
of clearly our favorite time of the year. We are
going to be doing a series of horror movies on
Weird House this month, and we're kicking it off today
with Fantasm. I first saw this movie V projected onto

(01:02):
a wall when I was in college. I had absolutely
no knowledge whatsoever about it going in. I just knew
they're showing a horror movie projecting it on a wall.
I gotta go see it. And I think it was
about the time we got to Reggie Banister in his
ice cream Man outfit that I started to really wonder
what I had gotten myself into. By the end, I

(01:24):
was totally amazed. I was, in fact agog and I
could not tell you if what I had just watched
was a good movie or a bad movie, but either way,
I was transfixed.

Speaker 3 (01:35):
Yes, it is a film that tranfixes one. It's a
film that hypnotizes you. And yeah, I think I you know,
I have our time remembering when I saw this one
for the first time, because I think I saw Phantasm
two first. I think I saw it on Joe Bob
Briggs Monster Vision on TNT back in the day. I
think they would show this film quite a lot and that.

(01:58):
But at that point I was hooked. And then I
started picking up these other Fantasm films, renting them and
so forth. But yeah, this is nineteen seventy nine's Fantasm
we're going to be discussing. This is definitely a film
with a dream like quality to it. It's really it's
one we've kind of had in the back pocket for
a while because it is a quintessential psychotronic film. It

(02:21):
just all the boxes check off on this one.

Speaker 1 (02:24):
I would say that it is more than just a
dreamlike quality. So you might compare it to the films
of Luccio Fulci, or is that you know, this Italian
filmmaker who made strange, kind of beautiful but gross horror
films that often many scenes feel like a dream because
you're like, wait, why are we here? How did we

(02:44):
get here? Why is the person doing that? There's a
kind of dream logic connecting everything. Phantasm does have that,
but I would say it goes a step farther in that.
Unlike full Chise films, Phantasm is literally a recursive series
of dreams as best I can tell, I mean, who
who knows? Like there are at least four times in
the movie where a character appears to wake up from

(03:07):
a dream. It is not clear when the dream started
or when the dream ended. What's a dream and what's reality?

Speaker 3 (03:14):
Yeah? Yeah, I think that's a good way of putting it. Now.
I want to also note from the get go here
that this is a film with a both a devoted
following and multiple sequels that build on its lore to
varying degrees. We're mostly just going to be focusing on
the first film on nineteen seventy nine is Fantasm. I'm
going to bring up the sequel a little bit, But

(03:35):
for the most part, I haven't seen the other Phantasm
films in a long while, and I haven't seen the
final entry in the series twenty sixteens Phantasm Ravager at all.
So yeah, we're mostly going to be discussing Fantasm from
seventy nine on its own terms.

Speaker 1 (03:51):
I have not seen any of the sequels. If this
were years ago, I might try to mount an attempt
to watch them all, kind of like I did when
I was like, oh, this is the year I watch
all the hell Raiser movies. That was a good use
of my time. But I don't know if I'm going
to make it now. I don't know if I will
get past P two.

Speaker 3 (04:10):
Yeah. P two is a good stopping play, so I'll
discuss P two in a little bit. I think that
they're both very different films, and they're both very very fun,
and they're in different ways. But coming back to seventy
nine's Fantasm, let's hit the elevator pitch on this one.
I'd like to paraphrase the words of one Shack by saying,

(04:32):
you can summarize this one as flying balls, dwarves just weird.

Speaker 1 (04:36):
Phantasm does not shy away from the otherworldly imagery, probably
the most iconic of which is the first thing you mentioned,
the flying ball. In a way, what Jason's hockey mask
is to the Friday the Thirteenth series, I believe the
ball is to the Phantasm series in that it is
not really the human villain, but it is like the

(04:59):
symbol of the villain's power, right.

Speaker 3 (05:02):
And also it is something just in terms of like
elements of the film that cannot just be passively copied
by another film. Like if you have a character, a killer,
especially in another movie, put on a hockey mask, well
you just cross the line. You're in Jason's territory now,
and not necessarily mean that from a legal standpoint, but
from just a creative standpoint, like you are now clearly

(05:25):
in the shadow of Jason. You may have already been
in the shadow, but now you've stepped entirely within the
umbral shade there. Likewise, with this film, yeah, flying silver
balls of Death. You can't just have a flying silver
ball of death in your film or your story or
what have you without clearly saying yes, I come in
the wake of Phantasm.

Speaker 1 (05:46):
Before you even understand the context of the ball, we
should describe what the ball is. It's a metal ball.
It flies through the air, flies at your face, It
attaches itself to your forehead via a couple of little
hooks I guess, then get in your head, and then
it drills into your head and then drains your body
entirely of blood in a jet that shoots out the

(06:07):
back of the ball.

Speaker 3 (06:08):
Yeah. And they're so great because and I love just
thinking about what makes them great, because they're and again
largely keeping things relegated to the original film here, they
seem to be machines. They are pieces of technology. They're
very good at what they do, but they can be evaded,
they can be to certain degrees outsmarted. And then there's

(06:31):
also something about the way they function that feels not
only alien in origin, but also maybe alien in function,
Like it makes me think of parasitic infections where the
parasite goes awry because it's not supposed to be in
a human body and it's not supposed to wind up
in the brain. Like you almost feel like this is
a machine that was made to interface with a different

(06:54):
biological form, and what we're seeing here is it executing
its purpose on a box that it wasn't designed for.

Speaker 1 (07:02):
That's a very good comparison. Yes, this flying metal ball
is sort of like the toxoplasma Gandhi of the Red
planet that the aliens in this movie come from. In fact,
I was reading a bit of trivia about this movie,
and apparently the idea for Phantasm traces back to a
dream that the director Don Coscarelli had when he was

(07:25):
a teenager. He dreamed that he was running down these
endless corridors, marble corridors that never stopped, and he just
kept running and running because he was being chased by
a chrome sphere, a floating chrome ball that wanted to
penetrate his skull with a needle. And that's a pretty

(07:46):
scary image. I am surprised how well that worked on screen.

Speaker 3 (07:50):
Yeah, it did, It absolutely does. All right, Well, let's
go ahead and hear the trailer for Fanfasm Fantasm.

Speaker 4 (08:07):
Is it a nightmare? Phantasm? Is it an illusion? Phantasm?

Speaker 1 (08:28):
Whatever it is.

Speaker 4 (08:34):
If this one doesn't scare you, you're already dead fantasm.

Speaker 3 (08:51):
All right. I love this trailer, great trailer. I love
the line if this one doesn't scare you, you're already dead,
because it makes it sound like they should have another
message at the end of the movie that says like,
are you alive, then we're pleased to hear you enjoyed Phantasm.

Speaker 1 (09:08):
So we've already compared Phantasm to some Italian horror movies,
especially ful cheese movies, because of its dream equality and colorful,
lucid imagery. But another point of comparison I would like
to raise is that Phantasm kind of reminds me of
the films of very low budget independent amateur filmmakers, or

(09:32):
maybe not necessarily amateur, but low budget independent filmmakers even
going back to the fifties, like Ed Wood and Roger Corman.
Of course, you know you're gonna have different levels of
ability to realize one's vision in there, but it has
that same scrappiness that it feels like an improvised production
of young people who didn't necessarily always know what they

(09:54):
were doing or have all the permits they needed, or
have the money to realize everything in the glossiest possible way.
And yet it does kind of come together with an
infectious enthusiasm and a kind of irresistible energy, even though
it kind of lacks a sense of worldliness or experience.

Speaker 3 (10:14):
Yeah, absolutely, it does have that scrappiness to it. So
let's get into the individuals behind this scrappiness, because yes,
this is a Don Cossarelli picture. Don Costarelli was born
in nineteen fifty four. He is the director, the writer,
the cinematographer, and the film editor on this movie. He

(10:34):
was I believe twenty three years old when filming started
and twenty five years old when it was released, and
this was his third picture, following nineteen seventy five's Jim
the World's Greatest in nineteen seventy six is Kinney and Company.

Speaker 1 (10:47):
Phantasm makes so much more sense once you shared this
fact with me that Coscarelli was twenty three when he
started making it. It has such early twenties energy, again
coming back to that lack of wisdom and worldliness, but
at the same time a thing that makes up for it,
which is an absolutely like it is a leaky vessel

(11:09):
of the essence of fun. It's just like kind of
you feel the excitement about making a movie within this.

Speaker 3 (11:17):
Movie, Yeah, yeah, absolutely, it's there's I think there's a
lot to this film that does line up perfectly with
this idea of the twenty three year old filmmaker of
a early twenties dreamer who's also exploring exploring some familiar topics.
A lot of horror films deal with sex and death, too.

(11:39):
Many horror films probably deal with the dichotomy of sex
and death, but this one does so in a I thought,
a very fascinating way. Like you get the feeling of
of of the youth standing, you know, outside of childhood
but not within the adult world, confronted by the mystery

(12:00):
of death, of sex, and and just trying to figure
out what these are and like what and to what
extent they are threats to him, to what extent they
are his destiny. We see all of that wound up
in the character of Mike. Yeah, it's it's really fascinating
to look back on it and really gaze long and

(12:20):
deep into the phantasm here.

Speaker 1 (12:22):
So you mentioned that Coscarelli had made a couple of
movies before Phantasm that were not horror movies, though there
is a there's a story that I think comes from
the audio commentary track that he recorded for the movie,
but anyway, wherever it comes from, the story is that
he got the idea to make a horror film because
when he was sitting in an audience that was watching

(12:45):
his earlier movie Kenny in Company, which I've never seen.
I don't know what the deal with it is. Apparently
there's a jump scare moment in it, like a character
puts on a scary mask and jumps out, and he
watched the way the audience reacted to this jump scare moment,
and he is just he was so into it the
way that they like they literally jumped from their seats
and screamed, and he was like, I gotta make a

(13:07):
whole movie of this. I'm doing horror now.

Speaker 3 (13:09):
Yeah. I do like that he came into this after
having made two non horror films that I think both
I haven't seen either of them either, but I think
they both revolve largely around young people in the lives
of young people, and then he moves on into horror.
A lot of people yet jump right into the horror,
and so I think that's another reason that Phantasm works
so well, is that it's not just obsessed with like,

(13:32):
let's get some gore up there on the screen, like,
there is also this attention to the central youth character
in the film and what he's thinking and how he's
processing everything.

Speaker 1 (13:42):
Another way that Coscarelli's vision feels as distinctly young to
me is the way the movie tries to pack in
a lot of elements that are not necessarily They don't
necessarily like fit smoothly, but he's just trying to get
a lot of stuff in there. And I think part

(14:04):
of that is also explained by another trivia fact I
read about the movie, which is that he apparently at
one point talked about how he remembered when he was
a kid, he would see ads and trailers for horror
movies that would seem really exciting, but then when you
would go watch the actual movie, it would just be

(14:24):
people sitting around talking for most of the movie. There
were actually very few scares in them. The scares were
already in the trailer, and he wanted to make a
movie that had a scary moment at least every five minutes,
that is just packed with little scares and weird things.
And it kind of reminds me of the story of
Roger Korman telling Charles B. Griffith, Okay, when you ride
to Tack of the Crab Monsters, the important thing is

(14:46):
it has to have action or horror on every page.

Speaker 3 (14:50):
Yeah, phantasm doesn't really hold anything back, and it keeps
you on your toes that way it is, and I
think also builds into that dreamline quality. If things are
making sense and seeming normal, how long are they going
to do that? What can happen? And eventually you feel
like anything can happen at any moment. Now, this film,
like we said, the scrappiness of it, it was made for.
I think it's been estimated for around three hundred thousand,

(15:12):
though I think the estimation there is kind of rough
because I don't think they were really keeping super accurate records.
Ended up grossing millions, though with a success with audiences
and some critics. I was looking back, I noticed that
Ebert was not a big fan of Phantasm and liked
Phantasm too even less. But Michael Weldon of the Psychotronic

(15:36):
Film Guides, he loved it. It's one of his favorites.
He celebrated it as quote a unique and fascinating horror
hit with more satisfying surprises than you could find in
a dozen other recent offerings. And that was written in
I think eighty three, So this film really established Cossarelli
within the horror realm. He followed this up with nineteen

(15:57):
eighty three's beast Master, which I think is also a
pretty solid film in my opinion anyway, and certainly one
that has achieved cult status.

Speaker 1 (16:05):
He got some stars for that one, right, Who's in it?

Speaker 3 (16:09):
Rip Torn, Rip Horn is in it? The beast Master.
They got the beast Master for it, which is id
all since it's about the beast Master. What Mark Singer? Yeah, yeah,
so yeah. We talked about beast Master two on a
past episode of Weird House, So if you want more
beast Master action, go back to that one. But again,
I think eighty three's beast Mastered pretty solid.

Speaker 1 (16:30):
In Coscarelli's defense, he did not direct beast Master two.
That was somebody else, right now.

Speaker 3 (16:37):
Colgarelli did come back to direct and write Phantasm two
in nineteen eighty eight, Phantasm three, Lord of the Dead
in nineteen ninety four, and Phantasm four Oblivion in nineteen
ninety eight. His non Fantasm directional credits also include Survival
Quest in eighty eight, Bubba Hotep in two thousand and two.

(16:57):
He did a Master's of Horror episode titled Incident On
and Off a Mountain Road From two thousand and five,
both that and Bubba Hotep are based on Joe Lansdale stories.
He did John Dies at the End in twenty twelve,
and he also directed the Doo music video The Last
in Line in nineteen eighty four.

Speaker 1 (17:16):
A Doo music video. I got to look that up
after this.

Speaker 3 (17:19):
Yeah, I'm not familiar with their music videos.

Speaker 1 (17:23):
So I read a few more Internet trivia anecdotes about
Don Coscarelli in the making of this movie, one of which,
again contributing to the general idea of budgetary scrappiness. Apparently
they really juiced every last drop they could get out
of their camera and equipment rentals. So one of the
stories is that they would shoot on the weekends. I

(17:45):
think that took them like over a year to shoot
this movie because they were pretty much just shooting on
weekends and they would rent their camera equipment on Fridays
and return it on Mondays. So they're technically only paying
for one business day of rental, but then they would
use it allkend. Another thing is some of the stories
about the production make it sound like they were not

(18:06):
practicing what industry safety standards for, say stunts and kind
of dangerous the achievement of dangerous shots. So there are
stories of the director like personally doing camera work for
like filming some of the car chase sequences in not
the best way. Like one thing they did is, you know,
usually when you see characters inside a car and a

(18:27):
movie talking, the car's not actually moving. They'll have you know,
them sitting in a stationary car, and then they will
somehow simulate the movement of the outside world around the car.
If it's at night, they might just like move lights around,
or they might have a rear projection or something like that.
That's often how they do it. In this movie, they
just they just actually had characters driving the cars and

(18:48):
they were acting at the same time. That's not usually
a great idea. But another story is that there's a
scene in the movie where there's like a car chase
where one of the characters, Jody, is shooting a gun
at another car that's chasing them. And I think they
actually did film this with moving cars, with the director
sort of like sitting on the trunk of a moving

(19:09):
car filming, you know, the actor playing Jody popping up
out of the window and shooting at the car behind.

Speaker 3 (19:16):
Them with a shotgun.

Speaker 1 (19:17):
Right, I think it had lengths, But even that can
be dangerous that.

Speaker 3 (19:21):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (19:22):
I love realistic effects too, but a movie production, you know,
no movie is worth somebody actually getting hurt or killed.
You know, practice safety on sets people.

Speaker 3 (19:31):
Now, this was very much a Costarelli family labor of
love here because the producer on this was Dat Cossarelli,
who was also dad investment counselor at the time, who
helped his son fund the film and later served as
EP on Don's other films. And then Mom was also involved.

(19:51):
Kate Cossarelli, who lived nineteen twenty seven through nineteen ninety nine.
She did makeup, production, design, wardrobe. She she also this
is super interesting. She was already a novelist apparently, if
I'm understanding this correctly, She wrote books like Leading Lady,
Fame and Fortune, but she herself wrote the novelization of

(20:12):
Fantasm based on her son's screenplay, which I think is
that's that's adorable.

Speaker 1 (20:17):
I love that she had to knife fight Alan Dene
Foster for the rights, so.

Speaker 3 (20:22):
I don't know how that went down, but it's yeah,
it's apparently I was looking around for any signs of
apparently a very sought after book for diehard Phantasm fans,
but I did run across a few quotes here and
there of her talking about at adapting it and you know,
picking up on little details in the film and working
those out. So uh yeah, it seemed like a labor

(20:44):
of love for her. All right, Let's get into the cast.
We mentioned Mike. Mike is the youth. Mike is the
central character and Phantasm, and Mike was played by A.
Michael Baldwin born in nineteen sixty three, apparently son of

(21:07):
animator Gerald Baldwin, who will work on a number of
older animated shows. So A Michael Baldwin was a child
actor who appeared as early as nineteen seventy six in
episodes of Starsky and Hutch and Eight Is Enough. Later on,
he starred as Doug and Kenny and Company from seventy six.
That's Done's one of Don's previous films, and his post

(21:28):
Phantasm acting career is is pretty fantasm heavy, and I
believe he went on to teach acting. None of this
matters though, because he's I think he's absolutely perfect in Phantasm.
He's just believably awkward and childlike, but still, you know, clearly,
you know, beyond the limits of childhood. He's but he's
also even though he's awkward, he's still charismatic enough to

(21:51):
serve as the hero of the film, and you know,
to be this action based character when it's right. So yeah,
I absolutely love a Michael Baldwin's performance here, and and
I can understand why fans were disappointed that his role
was recast in Phantasm too.

Speaker 1 (22:09):
I'm going to ask a question about Mike, but this
also applies to Jody and especially Reggie. How old is
anybody in this movie supposed to be?

Speaker 3 (22:18):
Yeah, it's a little little foggy, right, because Mike, for instance,
I you know, I think it would be reasonable to
think of him as like a as being a high
school graduate. We have, but we have no idea like
where he is in terms of high school. I assume
he's done. Like we don't see we don't I don't
think we really see much in the way of friends.

(22:38):
There are a few people here and there. There's no
I don't think mentioned of school. I don't remember anything
about like his plans for the future. But in a
way that's kind of perfect, like that it's perfect for
this this kind of character who is adrift in the
very early stages of adulthood, that has no concept of
like what the future means for him, and is already
a feeling himself attached or partially detached from the protective

(23:03):
aura of childhood.

Speaker 1 (23:04):
That's interesting. You read him as a high school graduate,
I don't know. So he drives a car that you
can't tell if he's supposed to be doing that legally,
and he knows how to fix cars and things like that,
and there are other things that would suggest he's older,
but sometimes also he actually his character is supposed to
be twelve.

Speaker 3 (23:25):
Yes, definitely, But how much of that is he like
just kind of an immature, you know, young adult, but
it is very vague, And I think that's one of
the things that works about it, Like he's he's a child,
but he's he's a youth, but he's he's not he's
certainly I don't think we would say that he's fully
in the area of adulthood yet, because on one level,

(23:47):
I don't think he has a job or anything. And
his room, as we'll discuss in a bit, is still
very much feels like a fortress of childhood. It feels
like a place where you were safe, where you should
be safe from from sex and death and other complexities
of the grown up world.

Speaker 1 (24:02):
I love Mike's room, especially because he's got I don't
know how they achieve this. He's got like a wall
sized poster of the surface of the moon with the
Earth in the background. Is that supposed to be just
a single poster that you buy somewhere. I don't know
how they achieve now, but it's it's Florida ceiling.

Speaker 3 (24:19):
It's gigantic, it's absolutely dope. And then he has this
this seventies crocheted blanket. It's like yellow and green, and oh,
I love those things. I think I've napped with that
very blanket before. You're wrong.

Speaker 1 (24:31):
It's not yellow and green. It is white, brown and gold.

Speaker 3 (24:36):
Ooh, that's very good.

Speaker 1 (24:38):
Seventies colors.

Speaker 3 (24:39):
All right, So that's Mike. But Mike has a brother.
Jody's Mike's brother, right, yeah, yeah, all right, I'm pretty
sure on that. But you know, you know how it goes, Okay,
So Jody is played by Bill Thornbury born nineteen fifty two,
actor and musician. Prior to Phantasm, he appeared in nineteen
seventy five Summer School Teachers and an episode of The

(25:00):
Oxford Files. Afterward, he appeared in the TV series Secret
of Midland Heights, the Lost Empire, and also in Phantasms
three through five. He also wrote the song in Phantasm
sitting Here at Midnight. This is a perfectly fine performance.

Speaker 1 (25:16):
No notes always is this when we talk about sitting
here at midnight? Or should we save that for the
scene in the movie.

Speaker 3 (25:22):
Oh, we should save that because it involves characters and
actors we haven't introduced yet. Okay, all right, but really
one of the true stars of this film and Phantasm
films in general, is the character Reggie, played by the
actor Reggie Banister born nineteen forty five. Horror action icon
and musical legend Reggie Banister. Reggie is great in this

(25:45):
and all subsequent Phantasm films. He's the perfect mix of
the improbable and the believable. He's cool, but he's like
every day cool. He's relatable but can sell the extreme
situations and threats happening all around him.

Speaker 1 (26:00):
A story is such a weird and wonderful presence. I
could not imagine this movie without him, but every scene
where he shows up, it adds an additional level of humor.
Just like because of I don't mean to be insulting
in this way, but like the way he looks and
the way he's dressed and everything is almost always funny

(26:20):
in this movie. It's that they give him this ice
cream man outfit that we'll have to discuss later, but
he also brings a very strange kind of winking attitude
to things. For the longest time after I saw this movie,
I did not realize this actor was a different guy
from Dean Norris. I used to think that Dean Norris

(26:43):
was in Phantasm and he was playing Reggie.

Speaker 3 (26:46):
Yeah, they had similar looks. He kind of looks like
Dean Norris with a ponytail and sideburns. Yeah. I feel
like the character of Reggie here is kind of again
coming back to this youthful energy. It is like a
child or a young person's eye of an adult who
has it all together, you know, where they're like, oh,
look at look at uncle Reggie. Man, he's got it.
Not he's He's got this cool job as the ice

(27:09):
cream Man, and he still has time to jam on
front porches. I want to be like Reggie when I
grow up and work. Of course, when you grow up,
you realize, like, oh, man, Reggie's life was kind of
a mess at the time he was going through some stuff.
You know, a good guy, but you know, he did
not have it all together.

Speaker 1 (27:24):
But he seemed so cool.

Speaker 3 (27:26):
Yeah, and he is within the context of this movie. Yeah,
Reggie's cool. Yeah, and part of it is Yet you
don't know anything else about him, really, I mean, you
know a little stuff, but yeah, you don't. You don't
have all these other details. In subsequent films, they have
to make him more like tragic and you know, revenge
focused and so forth. But this, in this one, he's
just a He's just a dude going about his life

(27:46):
and then some stuff starts going down around him and
he gets involved.

Speaker 1 (27:50):
Is Reggie supposed to be twenty or fifty?

Speaker 3 (27:54):
I don't know. It's it's unknown. It's as unknown as
the as it would be to the youth who is
looking up to him, I guess. But I don't think
he's supposed to be too old, right.

Speaker 1 (28:02):
No, he's just generally adult. But like within the range
of adults, that's it's it's up for grabs.

Speaker 3 (28:09):
Yeah. So the real Reggie Banister was Slash is a
Vietnam that turned actor who started out in these early
Cosarelli films. I think he was in all of his
films except for Beast Master and the Masters of Horror
episode that I mentioned earlier, like at least had some
sort of small role. He branched out into some other
works such as La Law, Silent Night, Deadly Night four,

(28:33):
Wish Master, and many other horror titles over the years.
I think a lot of it is like he had this.
He cemented his status as an icon in the Phantasm films,
and that got him a lot of work. He's apparently,
you know, does a lot of conventions or has over
the years. He also put out an album in two
thousand and eight titled Naked Truth by the Reggie Banister Band,

(28:53):
and yeah, Reggie Rocks. There needs to be an official
action figure of him, because we have action figures of
less noble characters.

Speaker 1 (29:03):
Oh well, I wasn't going to say less noble about this,
but I've got a great action figure of Tom Atkins
from Night of the Creeps. If we've got that, we
should get a good Reggie Banister action figure.

Speaker 3 (29:12):
Get Reggie on the Horn. I'm sure you can work
out the licensing on this all right. Since we're talking
about a Phantasm film, we are of course also talking
about the Tall Man played by Angus scrim who lived
nineteen twenty six through twenty sixteen.

Speaker 1 (29:28):
I love the vibe of Angus Scrim as the tall
Man because it is once again not It doesn't just
totally go down smooth. It doesn't feel like, yes, this guy,
you know, he's not Doug Bradley's pin head or something.
He just feels like born to play this character. There's
a kind of occasional awkwardness to him, an awkwardness in

(29:49):
the way like his posture or the way he'll like
reach out for a character in a you know, jump
scare or something. But that awkwardness fits like it almost
makes the movie better.

Speaker 3 (29:59):
Yeah. I think part of it to the awkwardness is
that he the real Angus Scrim was six ' four
and they made him seem even taller, you know, by
various very practical effects, but one of them was by
putting him in a smaller suit. So he looks a
little awkward just in the way he's wearing his clothing,
and it makes him feel like he's not six '
four but like seven to four or something. So Angus

(30:22):
Scrim was his acting name, but his real name was
Lawrence Rory Guy. He adopted the Angus Scrim name for
this film. He'd previously been in some other works, including
Cossarelli's Jim the World's Greatest, and went on to star
in all subsequent Phantasm films, as well as appearing and

(30:42):
I think often smaller roles in films like The Lost
Empire Chopping Mall. He has a very brief cameo in that.
I think he's just present. I think he's like a
new reporter at a news conference about the new mall robots.

Speaker 1 (30:59):
I don't remember that at all.

Speaker 3 (31:01):
Even if you know it's coming, you can miss it.
It's such a small role. He is also in Subspecies Mindwarp, Munchie,
I Sell the Dead and John dies at the end.
He was also the opening narrator on Wes Craven's wish Master,
So if you check out the first ten to fifteen
minutes of wish Master, which is all you need, you'll

(31:21):
get a little audio from him. He was also a
five time Grammy nominated and one time Grammy winner for
writing liner notes on classical albums Huh yeah. He began
his career as a writer and a journalist, though his
degree was apparently in drama.

Speaker 1 (31:39):
Yeah, and apparently the stage name Angus Skrim goes back
to his college days when he was getting a drama degree.
I read that he was doing plays off campus when
he technically was not allowed to do that by the
theater department that he was studying at. So he tried
to keep his off campus theater work secret by using

(32:00):
a different name, using a stage name, so in case
he got mentioned in a review or something, they wouldn't
be able to trace it to him.

Speaker 3 (32:06):
Yeah, it's a great Moniker. I love it, And yeah,
I mean Angus scrim was ultimately like, this dude is
a horror icon. Like he's as much a part of
these phantasm films as Flying silver Balls and Killer Dwarfs.

Speaker 1 (32:19):
So you mentioned he's in Munchie. Is that a Groblins movie.

Speaker 3 (32:23):
Yes, I don't think it's one I've seen, but there
were at least a couple of Munchet movie. I think
Munchie and then Munchies or Munchi's too. Don't take me
to the bank on that one, but yeah, those are
Gromblins movies. Okay. A couple of other humans involved in this.
We have the Lady in Lavender, who is the tall
Man's female form slash sex incarnation. She's played by Kathy Lester.

(32:48):
Lester is an actor and a musician, but her main
roles are this nineteen ninety four's Phantasm three Lord of
the Dead, and I think she also came back in
the twenty sixteen Phantasm movie Ravager, and then Sally is
a character that pops up in this play by Lynn
Eastman Rossy. She was only active for nineteen ninety four,
but during that time she appeared in a number of notable,

(33:10):
at least notable to US films, the Savage Sasquatch film
Night of the Demon from nineteen eighty.

Speaker 1 (33:16):
Night of the Demon I remember, I think we watched
that one for Trailer Talk years ago.

Speaker 3 (33:20):
Yeah, definitely. There are two types of sasquatch movies, as
we've discussed, there's the noble Squatch and the savage Squatch.
And this is a savage Squatch film. This is where
Bigfoot is killing people.

Speaker 1 (33:31):
I think I've been torn on whether Night of the
Demon is worth covering on this show, because it's got
some really funny fun stuff in it, but I think
it's also got some really gross bummer stuff too, as
a lot of Sasquatch movies do.

Speaker 3 (33:44):
Lynn Eastman Rossi was also in Project X this is
the Matthew Broderick eight movie from nineteen eighty seven, and
she was also in nineteen ninety two's Unlawful Entry featuring
Kurt Russell, Ray Liota, and Sonny Carl Davis aka Rabbit.

Speaker 1 (33:59):
Oh we took a minute to figure this. Yeah, I
know what you're talking about.

Speaker 3 (34:02):
Trancers, Yes, okay, yeah, transfers to Rabbit. Notable performance. All right.
Getting into the effects here, I mainly wanted to commun
the effects are mostly really good in this and hold
up with one notable exception, but all the stuff with
like the flying silver balls and so forth, I think
still look really good. But I want to call out
the fact that Gene Corso, who lived nineteen thirty two

(34:25):
through nineteen ninety six, has sound effects credit on this,
shared with Lorraine Mitchell. But yeah, the sound effects and
phantasm are really great and I think certainly helps sell
that weird aura of the film, especially the weird r
of the flying death spheres. As a sound editor, Corso
worked on such films as Queen of Blood, Star Wars,
The China Syndrome, Mutant, Predator, Deep Star six, and The Rift.

(34:51):
And then Loraine Mitchell, who also worked on this, worked
on some of these films as well, along with Conan
the Destroyer and Rambo three.

Speaker 1 (34:58):
I think in general audiences really underestimate how much difference
a good audio element makes in a horror movie. Good
good sound effects, atmospheric sound design, and good music. Would
this movie be remembered anything like the way it is
if it did not have the quality of sound effects
and music that it does.

Speaker 3 (35:19):
Yeah, I think that's a great question, and I'm not
sure it would have, because, yeah, the sound effects are great,
but yeah, music is wonderful as well, iconic really. The
music is credited to fred Mero, who lived nineteen thirty
nine through nineteen ninety nine, and Malcolm Segrave, who lived
nineteen twenty eight through two thousand and one. Sea Gray's
only film credits are for the Phantasm theme, but Myro

(35:43):
has more of a history as a well. First of all,
a third generation musical professional, his father Joseph Meiro wrote
you make Me Feel So Young that song, Yeah, and
Myro also worked on Phantasm two and Phantasm three, but
his other school include nineteen seventy three's Soilent Green and Scarecrow.

Speaker 1 (36:04):
You Got the Gears turned in on some mild thematic
connections between Phantasm and Soilent Green. Both involve a discovery
of a secret science fiction manufacturing process where one of
the ingredients is people.

Speaker 3 (36:16):
That's an interesting you know, it's interesting. You can think
of these various films. You can think of Season of
the Witch, Halloween three films about at least slightly about
industrial malfeasance, some sort of like evil industrial plot to
mass produce something that is destructive to humanity. Yeah, but anyway,

(36:39):
the Phantasm score absolutely great. I have no reservations about
saying that the theme is catchy and creepy, perfectly matching
the dreamlike quality of the film. And even outside of
the main Fantasm theme song, there are all these wonderful
hypnotic soundscapes as well. So you have synth and guitar
in there, but we also have gongs and chimes and

(37:02):
cymbals and bells creating this wonderful hallucinatory effect.

Speaker 1 (37:07):
I agree, love all that stuff. There is one thing
I noticed. I didn't compare them side to side to
see exactly how similar they are, but I did hear
some strong overlap between I think it was the main
synth theme from Phantasm and one of the tunes that
is used in John Carpenter's The Fog, though of course
I'm not alleging musical plagiarism or anything. You know, there

(37:30):
are only so many notes, so you're gonna get some
similar eerie tunes. But I heard that kinship.

Speaker 3 (37:36):
Of course, The Fog didn't come out till nineteen eighty.

Speaker 1 (37:38):
Wait, what my god, you're right. I had the order
inverted in my head, so if there is any inspiration,
it would have gone the other way.

Speaker 3 (37:46):
Yeah, but like I said, there are only so many
notes you can play. All right, well, let's jump into Phantasm.

Speaker 1 (38:02):
Well, mercifully breaking our streak of movies that begin by
looking at the stars in space, this film does not
begin in space. Instead, it's just phantasm in red letters
on a black background, and then we cut to an
establishing shot of a mansion. It's a oh, I did
not look up architectural styles. Do you know what style
of house this is? It's like a big white mansion

(38:23):
with columns out front, three columns and sort of a
wrap around veranda.

Speaker 3 (38:27):
I believe. Yeah, old American, I think is the architectural
styling here.

Speaker 1 (38:31):
And then we're just straight on from this to an
absolutely hilariously awkward sex scene in a cemetery featuring a
dude who looks like Lemmy from Motorhead and a lady
with blonde hair and purple eye makeup, and.

Speaker 3 (38:48):
This would be our lady in Lavender.

Speaker 1 (38:49):
We find out, yes, she's a recurring character. In fact,
we find out she is just a sort of a
glamour a mirage, and in fact she is Anga Skrim,
but just in a different form. And we see that
because Okay, they're having sex in the cemetery. And then
suddenly the lady pulls out a dagger and she stabs Lemmy.
She stabs the dude, and then through the magic of

(39:10):
film editing, she transforms into an old man and it
is Angus Grimm. We will see him many more times
in the film. The soundtrack in the scene is symbols
and whooshing wind noises, so it's this weird mix of
like kind of cool atmosphere. But the staging of the
sex scene is so funny.

Speaker 3 (39:28):
Yeah, it's absurd. I mean, obviously, depictions of human sex
and film should always be considered it with a grain
of salt, but this one feels like it was constructed
via youthful hearsay about what the grown up world of
sexuality actually consists off. You know, it's one of these
where it's like full clothing, strange positioning. If you were

(39:49):
to try and figure out the details of human sexuality
based on this scene, you would be left with just
a lot of questions about how everything lines up.

Speaker 1 (39:57):
Yeah, I don't want to get I'm not gonna get gross.
I don't want to get too specific about the mechanics
of horror movie sex. But it is greatly confusing at
what angles these two people's bodies are supposed to be positioned.

Speaker 3 (40:09):
Yeah, it just it makes you It feels like something
like Ralph Wigham would explain, you know. And then the
baby looked at me. Yeah, I have no idea. Yeah,
it's absurd, but it also, again, I think it falls
in line with that youthful energy of the film. You know.
It's like, like, what is sex? What is death? Mike
doesn't know, and part of this film is Mike's dream

(40:31):
quest to try and figure that out.

Speaker 1 (40:33):
But okay, Lady in Lavender is actually anger scrim she
kills Lemmy and then it's morning in the cemetery and
we're back at the mansion. But it's daylight and we
hear we meet two of our main characters. By the way,
we see a science says it's morning Side Morningside Cemetery,
and we meet our main characters, Jody and Reggie. Jody
is tall, handsome, big mane of messy hair. Reggie is

(40:58):
he's shorter, He's wearing cool sun glasses. And I was
gonna say, so he's like bald in front with a
horseshoe of hair and then a ponytail. So I was
going to say it's like business in front, party and back,
but really it's more like closed for business in front, party.

Speaker 3 (41:13):
And back and close for business mostly on the top
as well. It's a substantial bald pattern there, but still
very very cool. Look. He's got some nice sideburns there
that come to a nice little goring point.

Speaker 1 (41:27):
I mean, there's no denying Reggie's cool.

Speaker 3 (41:29):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (41:30):
So they meet up and they say, hey, Tommy's gone
hell of a way to end a trio. So Tommy,
I think, meaning the guy from the opening scene who
got stabbed was their friend. They believe he committed suicide.
I don't know why they think that, but that's what
they have been led to believe. Do you Rob, did

(41:50):
you detect that they were supposed to all be in
a band together.

Speaker 3 (41:54):
Yeah. I kind of got that vibe, but I don't
remember if there was a specific line that actually nted
that concept. I mean, clearly Jody looked like a dude
that was in a band. It's just a question of
was he in the band with these two.

Speaker 1 (42:07):
Jody looks like he would fit right in in a
one piece disco jumpsuit doing a musical number and like
a variety show.

Speaker 3 (42:15):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (42:16):
Anyway, we go into a nice creepy atmospheric scene where
Jody walks around alone in the halls of the funeral home,
and the halls are lined with white marble covered in
a weird pattern of blue veins. I love the atmosphere
of the inside of the funeral home.

Speaker 3 (42:32):
Yeah, I mean it's in many ways, it's an obvious set,
and yet the uniformity I think gives it a nice
otherworldly vibe. And you know this, it feels sterile and
like a place between and at the same time it
does feel authentically like a mausoleum, like a mini mausoleums
also have that vibe, except I don't think it's quite

(42:54):
as the ones I've been in anyway, it doesn't feel
quite as monotonous, it's not quite as uniform. You do
have some little details that are that differentiate one area
from another. It might be flowers in front of these remains,
et cetera. But yeah, this whole vibe here. It feels
just enough like a mausoleum that it doesn't feel like
they're on a spaceship, but it also kind of feels

(43:15):
like they're on a spaceship.

Speaker 1 (43:17):
I have questions about how this mausoleum is supposed to work,
because I think we see later that, like many mausoleums,
it has these vaults. They're built into the walls, they
have like a name on them, and then what appears
to be some kind of covering or door. But later
we see that you can just open them up like
a file cabinet, and there is a like a file

(43:37):
cabinet drawer, and then there's a coffin inside which you
could presumably just open up and see the body.

Speaker 3 (43:43):
Yeah. Yeah, I'm not sure. I've never opened one up,
but this, if you take this movie at face value,
it's telling you that, yeah, these are just like more
drawers you can just roll on open and look at
the body.

Speaker 1 (43:55):
I am not an expert in the funerary arts and sciences,
but I think there would be problems with that design anyway.
So Jody's walking around and here's these strange sounds that
in the subtitles for the version of the movie I
watched it called the sounds warbling. I would call it
squawking or growling, maybe snarling.

Speaker 3 (44:17):
And of course in a bit we'll find out what
is making that sound.

Speaker 1 (44:20):
Right, and we see that. Let's see Jody visits the
grave of his parents, we find out they've passed away,
and then we meet Mike, Jody's little brother, who is
just tearing through the grass of the cemetery on a
dirt bike. It's like he's riding a chainsaw. Trivia fact
I found is that the motorbike used here is called

(44:42):
a Hodaka road toad. But he's literally just driving like
between the grave markers.

Speaker 3 (44:48):
Yeah, some kind of psychomania vibes to this motorcycle ride here.

Speaker 1 (44:53):
And he also hears the weird chittering and snarling sounds.
And we see a few glimpses of what appear to
be little figures in art cloaks dashing behind gravestones. Ooh,
the dwarves, and I think we're supposed to understand that
Mike is sort of a little engineer, like he has
an affinity for machines. We see him later repairing Jody's
muscle car at multiple points, and like there's a part

(45:17):
where he's working on the engine while Jody is just
standing there talking to a friend like, Yeah, I'm gonna
ditch this kid and get out of town anyway. Jody,
inside the funeral home goes investigating the weird sounds, but
he doesn't quite figure it out. Instead, there's a great
jump scare where we first hear Angus scrim talk. He
comes up behind him and slaps down on his shoulders says,
the funeral is about to begin.

Speaker 3 (45:39):
Yes, now I.

Speaker 1 (45:41):
Started noticing a pattern. I don't know if you picked
up on the same thing, Rob, Like in the funeral scene,
there's a very symmetrical shot where we see the church
service filmed from straight down the back of the aisle
where it's like a perfectly balanced frame. There are people
sitting in the pews on both side and the columns
lining on both sides, so it's totally symmetrical. We already

(46:04):
saw shots like that when Jody was walking through the mausoleum.
You know, he'd be framed in the doorway with all
these decorations that are exactly symmetrical on both sides. The
movie seems to be fond of shots like this where
the subject is in the middle and then it's just
mirror images on both sides of the screen.

Speaker 3 (46:24):
Yeah. Yeah, And I think especially with this scene, but
also with the mausoleum scenes as well, there is this
impression of narrowing, you know, as if narrowing towards the
death point, which I think lines up nicely with the
theme of the movie and the idea that you know,
we're propelled through it, that Mike is propelled through this
world and you know it keeps the pacing contributes to

(46:47):
that as well. Also, I want to point out, I
don't know if you noticed this, but in this particular,
I see this is a like an actual church, an
actual location, and they didn't build any of this or
or decorated a lot. But there's a weird painting above
the altar in this scene that again I assume it's
just a legit in church painting, but it has kind
of zombie Jesus vibes to it, like Jesus has his

(47:08):
arms up like Frankenstein.

Speaker 1 (47:10):
A bit oh interesting. I didn't notice that. I was
just thinking, what church let phantasm shoot inside?

Speaker 3 (47:17):
I mean maybe they. I don't know how it went down.
Maybe they didn't tell him what the film was about,
or maybe they explained the theme and the church was like, yeah,
works for us, as long as you get the Jesus
painting in there. We're very proud of this. Okay.

Speaker 1 (47:28):
Anyway, So Reggie and Jody are there for the funeral
of their friend, their I guess, their bandmate maybe. And Mike,
the younger guy, is trying to peep on the funeral
with binoculars. I didn't understand this at all, Like, why
isn't he just there instead, he's like in the bushes
with binoculars watching them carry the coffin.

Speaker 3 (47:50):
Mike is a consonant voyeur. He is just he's just
constantly spying on sex and death, as is the you know,
the very definition of the of the voyeuristic imput Like
his brother's meeting some lady. Well, Mike's in the bushes.
He's going to see what's happening here. Somebody's moving a
casket around. Mike's in the bushes. He's got the binoculars out.

(48:11):
He wants to see how these worlds work, these worlds
that he is not yet entered into but seems destined
to be a part of.

Speaker 1 (48:17):
But because he's spying on the funeral, he's still watching
after all of the mourners leave, and he gets to
see something very odd happen the tall Man and Gus
scrim after everybody's gone. Instead of, you know, like letting
the workers bury the casket, he picks up the casket,

(48:38):
takes it back to the hearse and puts it inside.
And he's carrying the entire thing by himself.

Speaker 3 (48:43):
Not only is he most probably evil, he's also cheap.
He's not hiring anybody else to carry these for him.
He's just picking it up himself. We also get a
sense of this when we see Jody's body in the casket.
Jody looks a little gooolish. It's like the tall Man
is not doing a good job, and Jody, I'm not sorry,

(49:03):
not Jody. What's his name, tom good friend? Tommy. Yes,
Tommy looks gholish, does not look like he's been embalmed
like a to the degree that you would want your
loved one embalmed, that would say, but he looks like
a movie corps. So yes, mission accomplished.

Speaker 1 (49:20):
Right, Okay, so we got the setup. Mike has seen
something very weird at the Morningside Cemetery, and after that
weird reveal, Mike walks around alone with excellent theme music
playing some great seventies horror movie atmosphere. You know, a
lot of great horror movies from from this time get
so much mileage, like they stick in your mind, not

(49:41):
just because of the scary scenes, but because of the
eerie scenes where a character is merely sort of walking
through the landscape and the music is playing. I think
about the early scenes of going down the sidewalks in Halloween,
or the way Mike is just walking around, maybe going
to visit the Reverend mother guy Helen Mohayam in this movie.

Speaker 3 (50:01):
Yes, yeah, this is where we get to our wonderful
Benajessa Itt scene.

Speaker 1 (50:07):
Straight Dune ripoff, and I love it. Clearly Don was
a fan of Dune. In fact, it's explicit later when
Jody goes to a bar. Did you notice this in
the bar is called Dune's Bar.

Speaker 3 (50:20):
Yeah. Yeah, he was obviously a big fan of the book.
The Lynch adaptation wouldn't come out to eighty four, So yeah,
definitely a written sci fi fan. In fact, we see
there's another scene where we see a sci fi paperback
on Mike's desk or bedside table, and I looked it up.
I forget what it is offhand, but it is a
particular sci fi novel that was included. I guess to

(50:43):
let you know that Mike's into sci fi, that maybe
he's a little more creative than other people in the
community around him.

Speaker 1 (50:50):
The book was I Am Legion by Rogers Alasni Oh
is it?

Speaker 3 (50:53):
Oh good?

Speaker 1 (50:54):
My name is Legion? Maybe I don't know.

Speaker 3 (50:56):
I've never read it, okay, but that sounds right. Yeah.
I looked it up and then forgot promptly forgot it.
But it has had very cool little late seventies paperback
sci fi cover art.

Speaker 1 (51:06):
I love it so clearly. This scene is just taken
from from Doune the book. But what would you say
is literally supposed to be happening here? Is this lady
supposed to be a fortune teller. She's like dressed in
all black, wearing dark sunglasses inside and in a room
full of candles, and she speaks through her granddaughter.

Speaker 3 (51:24):
Yeah, yeah, and it's you know, it's already got a
creepy vibe though you probably, if you've not seen the film,
you're thinking, well, it's not like then they make him
put his hand in a box and experience phantom pain
and then tell him that fear is the mind killer. Well,
actually all of that happens. That's exactly what happens in
the scene.

Speaker 1 (51:43):
They don't say mind killer. She says, fear is the killer. Yes,
doesn't quite have the same ring.

Speaker 3 (51:50):
No, And then I think the box vanishes, right, It
like straight up vanishes in front of our eyes, the
viewer's eyes on the table.

Speaker 1 (51:57):
Yes, suggesting that not only in the pain is the
pain in the box an illusion created telepathically by the
reverend mother here, but that the box itself is there
wasn't even a box.

Speaker 3 (52:07):
Now what does all this mean within the context of
the film. I don't know it.

Speaker 1 (52:14):
Well, Mike is told not to fear, he said, The
granddaughter says, fear is the killer. Don't fear. That's what
grandmother wants you to learn. It was all in your mind.
And then Mike says, oh, yeah.

Speaker 3 (52:28):
I guess it will come. We will come back around
to this later. This film does do a pretty good
job of if it establishes something, it will come back
around to it.

Speaker 1 (52:36):
Okay, I think it's time to talk about sitting here
at midnight. So at Jody and Mike's house, Jody is
sitting there on the front porch playing a playing a
stratocaster plugged into a Fender amp, and then Reggie pulls up.
Reggie now is in his workoutfit. He is wearing an
ice cream suit. I don't know. He's wearing like a

(52:58):
white shirt and white pants with a black bow tie.
And he's driving a truck that says Reggie's ice Cream.
And it's got a guitar tucked into one of the
I don't know, the cooler boxes, I guess. And so
Reggie gets out of the car, comes up and plays
guitar alongside Jody. They play a song called Sitting Here
at Midnight, where the lyrics are I'm just sitting here

(53:20):
at midnight, and I'll be sitting here till noon. You see,
my lady left me lonely, Yes she did. My baby
left me blue. And then they both go oh and
then play a riff. It's and I will give him credit.
Both actors are actually playing guitars here nice just like
moving their hands while the soundtrack plays.

Speaker 3 (53:40):
Ill also say that a lesser movie would have only
played part of the song, or would have cut away
and done some sort of a montage or something. But
now we get the full short performance of this song
right here on the porch, and I dig it. Also,
you mentioned that the ice cream truck says Reggie's ice
cream somehow that I missed out on that when i've
every time I watched it. That's an interesting detail, Like,

(54:03):
not only is Reggie the ice cream man, he's apparently
a business owner.

Speaker 1 (54:07):
Yes, he owns his own business. He's really plugged in
at the local chamber of commerce.

Speaker 3 (54:14):
Now we do get a nice weird moment there at
the end of the performance with a tuning fork.

Speaker 1 (54:18):
Though, yes we do well. First of all, after they play,
I think Jody goes not bad, and then Reggie says
we're hot is Love, you know, which makes me think
Hot as Love was the name of their band.

Speaker 3 (54:29):
Oh man, that's a good that would have totally fit.

Speaker 1 (54:32):
But so Reggie pulls out a tuning fork, I guess
to tune his guitar, but instead we just really zone
in on the fork and we listen to it it
humming out a tune until Reggie mutes it by putting
his two fingers on the end of the fork. Times.

Speaker 3 (54:47):
We will come back to this detail as well.

Speaker 1 (54:59):
Some more stuff happened. We see random like a random
blonde lady walk into the funeral home and then open
a door and light shines on her and she screams.
There are a few things in the movie that are
just like random things happen and I can't really connect
them to anything else, So you know, something like that happens.
But hey, let's go to the bar with Jody. He's
gonna go to Dune's Cantina, have a beer and try

(55:21):
to make some friends.

Speaker 3 (55:22):
And Mike is here for this. Mike is watching the
whole time.

Speaker 1 (55:26):
Yes, Mike of course follows Jody everywhere, so he's outside
peeping through the window of the bar as Jody's like
chatting up a lady, chatting up a blond lady who
they're hitting it off, and he doesn't know who she is,
but we do because we saw that horribly awkward opening scene.
It's the lady who stabbed Tommy and turned into Angus

(55:47):
scrim So Jody don't go home with Angus Grim, but
it looks like he's gonna. She leads him off to
the cemetery. I guess the goal is to kill him.
Mike is still following them, peeping on everything, and then
suddenly everything is interrupted because snarling, warbling noises start up again,
and some little creature that looks like a Jawa, like
a short figuring brown robes, charges out at him from

(56:11):
the darkness, and Mike runs away, screaming. This interrupts everything.
Everybody runs off, and Jody runs after Mike. There are
some really goofy sex jokes in the sea, and I
don't feel like describing, but anyway, so Jody ends up
running off after Mike.

Speaker 3 (56:26):
Yeah, it seems a little bit bit cringy in some respects,
but yeah, this is our first glimpse of the dwarves
actually scampering about and causing mischief, one of the key
aspects of the Phantasm films.

Speaker 1 (56:39):
Now, is this a good place to talk about the
connection between the dwarves in this movie and the jawas
in Star Wars, because we got to admit there in
the brown robes with the pointy hoods, they look extremely similar.

Speaker 3 (56:53):
Yeah, there is a strong comparison to be made. Very
similar vibes and of course different ultimately different energy is involved.
Like Jawas and Star Wars, they are just technological scavengers
looking to pick up the pieces and make a few
deals here and there. They're not evil. They're very neutral
creatures and as we've seen in later installments of Star Wars,

(57:16):
and you can have quite good relations with the Jawas.
They're they're they're non indecent folk. Uh. These creatures the
dwarves of phantasm. These are little monsters.

Speaker 1 (57:27):
That are snarling, little zombies.

Speaker 3 (57:29):
Yeah, they are up to no good. They will attack you,
they will do god knows what.

Speaker 4 (57:34):
Now.

Speaker 1 (57:34):
I think a lot of people have assumed that these
creatures were inspired by the design of the Jawas, But
in Don Coscarelli's defense, they had apparently they had this
idea and started shooting the movie before Star Wars came out,
So I think it looks like this is just a coincidence.

Speaker 3 (57:51):
Yeah, and and we do, unlike the Jawas, which in
which we never see the Jawa's face, we will get
to see the face of one of these dwarfs later on.
And I should also point out that by the time
they make Phantasm two, in which they had a much
bigger budget. By the way, one of the things they
use that budget on is always showing the dwarves faces.

(58:13):
So the dwarves look extra evil and nasty in that
film because their faces are never really Oh they may
their faces may be obscured in some scenes, but there
are whole lot of scenes where you get to see
their little snarling faces.

Speaker 1 (58:27):
So anyway, coming back to the plot, here's what some
weird stuff happens. So Jody runs off after Mike because
Mike was scared and screaming chased by a necro dwarf,
and Mike tries to explain to Jody what happened, and
Jody says it was probably just a gopher in heat, okay,
And then and then Jody sends Mike home with his car,

(58:51):
and then Mike wakes and then Mike like wakes up
and he's in his bed with the groovy blanket with
the brown, white and gold stripes, but the tall man
is standing over his bed and his bed is in
the middle of a cemetery. And then zombies like scream
and grab him. So I guess this is a dream
and then he wakes up. But like, if this was

(59:14):
a dream, how far back does that go? Like how
much of it was a dream? We don't know when
the dream sequence started.

Speaker 3 (59:23):
Yeah, or when does it end? Is it still going?
Is the tall man about to do a jump? Scare
right behind you right now, Joe, It might happen. But
those questions aside, this is a fabulous scene. This is
one that I think has used in the trailer as well,
just the symmetrical shooting of it, the way it's all
framed up, the darkness, and it also just like it

(59:44):
sums up a lot of the attitude of phantasm. Like
here is Mike the youth in bed, clearly troubled, and
like Death, the personification of Death is like literally at
the head of his bed, leering over him, and then
these things jump out and start, you know, presumably about
to just tear him in half.

Speaker 1 (01:00:04):
Then one of the funniest things is it goes from
He's waking up from a dream sequence and then it
goes straight to another scene that feels so dream like.
He's it's it looks kind of gauzy, and Mike is
wandering down the sidewalk like sucking on a lollipop and
checking the change tray and payphones for change, and then

(01:00:26):
he looks across the street and there's the tall Man
just walking past like a clothing store. And then there's
Reggie's ice cream truck in the foreground, and Reggie is
opening up the freezer and pulling ice cream out, and
there is fog emanating from the freezer. And then the
tall Man stops right behind Reggie and stands in the

(01:00:48):
freezer fog and turns and looks at Mike and does
this monstrous sniff. He's like, you know, breathing in uh
in some kind of weird agony or something. And what
the heck is going on here? Did this really happen?
Is this a dream? What is the tall man doing

(01:01:11):
when he's sniffing the freezer fog? I don't know.

Speaker 3 (01:01:15):
Yeah, it's definitely another great scene that has dreamlike qualities,
and I think has that strong youth vibe of like
here here the youth is seeing the true creepy nature
of reality. It's lost to all the other adults, like
here's Reggie, Reggie to notice this going on at all.
Reggie's just doing his thing, doing his job. I also

(01:01:36):
love how the scene it seems to imply, or it's
always struck me this way, as being a moment where
the tall Man is looking right at us the viewer.
He's looking right back at Mike. So it's like the
abyss staring back. It's game recognizing game here, it's like
Mike and the tall Man have a connection. And we'll
see another version of this later on in the picture.

Speaker 1 (01:01:59):
Yes we will. But I just want to flag again
that I have completely lost track of what's the dream
and what's reality by this point in the movie.

Speaker 3 (01:02:06):
This is This is probably a good point to mention.
In Phantasm Too. Again, Universal comes in gives them a
bunch of funding to finally make a sequel to Phantasm,
and apparently they made some demands, as you might expect
when a big studio comes in and gives you a
whole bunch of money. They said, well, we need some
romantic interests for our characters, especially for Mike. You can't

(01:02:27):
bring back Baldwin and Reggie Banister. You get to bring
back one and the other one you have to recast.
So in Fantasm Too they recast Mike, which, given the choice,
was the correct choice to make. Like you don't recast Reggie.
You got it. You can't recast Reggie.

Speaker 1 (01:02:44):
Must have Reggie Banister.

Speaker 3 (01:02:46):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:02:46):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:02:46):
But one of the other apparently, apparently one of the
other studio demands was no dream sequences. Nobody's dreaming in
this film. It's I guess they thought it was too confusing,
and they're like, everything needs to be linear, nobody has
any dreams, which is a weird demand to make on
a sequel to this film, a film that, like you said,

(01:03:06):
on one hand, like that's the whole quality of it.
It's like, we don't know when it's a dream and
when it's not. Even the title of the film is phantasm.
It is supposed to be like an illusion, something you're
not sure about. But you also understand where the studio
is like, look, this is too much. We needed to
be nice and linear. No dreams, that's a tragedy. I'm
gonna have to I wonder if I'll get mad when

(01:03:27):
I watch P two. Oh. P two is still a
lot of fun. It's very much an action film. It's
kind of like Aliens to this film's Alien, but without
the consistency of quality. Like Phantasm two is a dumber film,
but also a film that clearly had more money to
throw at killer ball effects and dwarf effects, and also, yeah,

(01:03:50):
Reggie is transformed into a pure action hero and so
it's a lot of fun as well. But it's very
different and definitely there's something to be said for it.
It's moving away from the dream imagery for the most part.

Speaker 1 (01:04:04):
So the next thing is we're going to spend some
time with Mike and Jody in their house. I love
their house. There's a part where Mike is like underneath
Jody's muscle car doing repairs on it again because apparently,
you know, he's got full mechanic training even though he
is only twelve or nineteen and he's and he is

(01:04:24):
attacked by the necro dwarves while he is under the car,
but then in trying to defend himself, he ends up
bonking Jody on the toe with a hammer. But anyway,
this is when we finally get a really good look
at their house and all of the the length of
the carpet fibers will amaze you.

Speaker 3 (01:04:44):
Yeah, there's the see the scene where I think this
is later on, but there's a scene with the stairs
in the house. We have these like floating stairs and
they're all carpeted, and man, you just want to you
just want to take your shoes off and walk on those.

Speaker 1 (01:04:57):
Things, except they also look like they would have protruding
hidden nails.

Speaker 3 (01:05:03):
Well, it is in nineteen seventies, so it's like everything's
everything in the house looks comfy and yet possibly dangerous.

Speaker 1 (01:05:09):
Anyway, Mike chills out for a bit in his glorious
bedroom with the shot of the moon on the wall
and like a John Lennon poster, I think one of
those maps of the world that cuts Asia in half
instead of dividing in the Pacific Ocean. And we see
him tuck a gigantic bowie knife into a sheet strapped

(01:05:30):
to his calf, and the knife is as thick as
his leg, so when he pulls his pants leg down
over it, it looks really funny. He also packs a crucifix,
but this is your classic suiting up scene. It's like
when Van Helsing is packing his steaks in his holy
water into the kit. But it's time to head off
to the Morningside Cemetery at night for some reason, I

(01:05:52):
guess to figure out what's going on with the tall
man and the jawas so Mike Head's over he breaks
through a window to sneak in, and he's walking around
in the dark with a lighter. He ends up hiding
in a coffin in a classic horror movie trope, somebody's
got to hide in a coffin because somebody's looking for them,
while a very blank faced man in a white hat

(01:06:13):
creeps around looking for him. Rob, did you understand that
this man in the white hat is supposed to be
of the same species as Angus scrim.

Speaker 3 (01:06:23):
I think he's more well, you know, it's it's hard
this one. This is a point where it's difficult to
sort of think about this film completely on its own terms,
because knowing what we know about later installments, I feel
like it's clear that this guy's just an underling. But
if I were just watching this film for the first time, yeah,
I might think this must be this being must be

(01:06:46):
of the same species or origin as the tall man,
because they're both they like, I don't think they exchange
any words. They have this kind of like wordless correspondence energy.
But the scene here is really cool though, you know,
with him hiding in the casket, I feel like it
has genuine tension to it, and it's this cool bit
where he's used the lighter that he was showing off
earlier to keep the casket from closing completely because I

(01:07:09):
don't know, maybe it would self lock and then he
would be stuck in there and buried or found later.

Speaker 1 (01:07:14):
I wonder if there's there are unused scenes that describe
who the man in the white hat is, like maybe
he's a human wren Field to the tall man. Because
did you read the same thing I did Rob about
how the original cut of Phantasm was over three hours long?

Speaker 3 (01:07:31):
Oh wow, Well, I guess. I mean that's not out
of character with a lot of films where the initial
cut is just really bloated. But if that's the case
with this film, I mean, good job on them cutting
it down and it being this consistently entertaining. There's not
a dull moment in the film.

Speaker 1 (01:07:48):
It's like an hour and twenty something. So if that's true,
that would mean that would have meant we lost half
the movie.

Speaker 3 (01:07:55):
I think they pull some stuff out later in some
of the sequels, and like pretty decades later in some
of the sequels, they were able to pull out whole
sequences that they didn't use.

Speaker 4 (01:08:06):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:08:08):
Well, anyway, Mike is attacked by the man in the
white hat, but at the same time he is being
pursued by the ball. This is when we first really
meet the ball. There is a shiny metal sphere that
flies through the air at Mike and it's coming at
him to drive into his face while the man in

(01:08:30):
the white hat is holding him. But Mike bites the
guy on the arm and then ducks down and then
the ball hits the guy in the white hat instead.
And I remember when I first saw this, the entire
room was just in shock watching what the ball did.
It's a roll that beautiful ball footage moment where the
drill goes in between the eyes and then it just

(01:08:51):
squirts out a jet of blood from the back of
the ball.

Speaker 3 (01:08:55):
Yeah, Like it's not trying to keep the blood, it's
just take the blood out of the thing that it
is embedded in. It's just absolutely glorious sequence. One of
the coolest, weirdest horror movie deaths you'll ever find in
a horror movie.

Speaker 1 (01:09:09):
To take it out of the context of horror movie violence,
this device, if it existed, would be a wonderful fruit juicer.
It looks, you know, flying to the side of a
watermelon and then just drain all the watermelon juice straight out.

Speaker 3 (01:09:21):
Yeah. I mean you'd have to stand behind it and
I guess catch it all in your mouth or something.

Speaker 1 (01:09:25):
Yeah, you'd need a receptacle.

Speaker 3 (01:09:26):
Yeah, But that's again that's another quality of the sphere
that I like because it doesn't feel like it was
designed to function in this world or in these circumstances.
You know, just attaching to things and sucking all the
liquid out of them and just blasting the liquid over
what's whatever's behind it. I love it. It's so weird.

Speaker 1 (01:09:45):
But there are a lot of effects in this movie
that are great low tech, low cost effects. And the
ball effects. I think this is a great example because
there are scenes where this metal sphere is actually flying
through the air toward the camera. Don't necessarily see any
wires or anything. So how did they do this? I
think what they did is they just had somebody stand

(01:10:06):
behind the camera and pitch the ball, or they might
have used a pitching machine. In any case, the ball
was being a thrown or ejected down the hall past
the camera, and then they just used the shot in reverse.
So the ball is just flying toward the camera from
out of nowhere.

Speaker 3 (01:10:20):
It looks good. It looks good. However they did it
like these are sequences that that hold up absolutely you
know that these these totally buy this flying silver sphere
from another world.

Speaker 1 (01:10:41):
Well, anyway, there's a big chase scene. The tall Man
chases Mike. At one point Mike manages to.

Speaker 3 (01:10:47):
Before the chase. Before the chase, Joe, you have one
of my favorite moments. This is the showdown between Mike
and the tall Man. This is the moment, another game
recognized game moment. They both they freeze. They kind of
Mike kind of like cautiously walks up, the tall Man's
cautiously walking up, and then in their kind of mirror

(01:11:07):
images of each other, but kind of you know, like
one to one side, one to the other, and then boom,
Mike runs for it and the tall Man chases after him.
And the tall Man he's got a lot of he's
got a lot of go, he's got some energy. He
may look like he's somewhere between the ages of fifty
and eighty. Again, his age is also suitably vague, And
of course he's probably he's not of this world anyway,

(01:11:30):
so it doesn't matter, but yeah, he can move.

Speaker 1 (01:11:32):
This leads to the finger sequence which is a whole
like series of scenes which are so so. Mike manages
to escape from the tall Man and cut off some
of his fingers. It squirts out yellow blood and his
fingers are like still moving around on the floor. Mike

(01:11:53):
takes one of the fingers, takes it home, keeps it
in a box, falls asleep on the floating shag carpet
stairs with a shotgun in his hand. That's not safe.
Then Jody finds him asleep on the stairs. Mike explains
it to Jody. He's like, here's what happened. I'm going
to show you a finger in a box. And then
he shows him the finger, and then Jody's like, okay,

(01:12:15):
I am convinced. I appreciated that that he didn't persist
in denying it once he saw the finger and the
yellow blood in the box. And then the finger turns
into a beatle demon which attacks Jody and Mike, and
then they try to kill it in the garbage disposal
in the sink, and then Reggie arrives to witness this,
so now Reggie's in on the whole demon conspiracy. And

(01:12:38):
then after this, Jody starts giving Mike a gun safety
lesson and then Jody heads off to the funeral home
to investigate things for himself.

Speaker 3 (01:12:46):
Yeah, and I love the love how we go from
this scene where Jody's giving Mike the gun safety lesson
and then Jody Bray goes into the basement of the
mausoleum at night is immediately attacked by dwarf And there's
a scene where a dwarf is on Jody's back and
Jody is trying to shoot the dwarf off of his

(01:13:07):
back with a handgun by essentially aiming the gun at
his own head. Like it's just so dangerous. It's like, really,
you were just given pointers on gun safety and now
you're doing this.

Speaker 1 (01:13:18):
That scene is so funny. Yeah, but anyway, Jody. Yeah,
so Jody has this fight with one of the necro
dwarfs in the funeral home and then he flees, and
then this leads into a car chase where Jody and
Mike are driving around shooting at a hearse I think
that's being driven by one of the creatures, and then

(01:13:38):
they crash. They get the other car to crash, and
they go up to the creature and they pull back
its hood and you're wondering, what's its face? Going to
be like and they realize, oh no, this was our friend.
Tommy is the Lemmy guy, but he's covered in yellow slime.

Speaker 3 (01:13:55):
Oh, and this is great. The reveal that the dwarves
are the bodies of the dead that have been like
compressed down into into little necro dwarves like this. I
remember when I when I when I watched one of
these films for the first time and realized this, and
I was like, oh, my goodness, that's that's genius. That's

(01:14:15):
so beautiful.

Speaker 1 (01:14:16):
So they summoned Reggie's ice cream truck, which is now
doubling his body removal truck. So they're putting it in
the in the freezer and Reggie, by this scene, I
think he was dressed like this earlier, but he looks
so funny because he's wearing a black vest over his
ice cream outfit, so he looks like a combination of

(01:14:37):
a milkman and a riverboat casino dealer.

Speaker 3 (01:14:40):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:14:41):
So Reggie, Jody, and Mike go back to their house
and they have a strategy session. Jody's going why why,
why why are they taking people's bodies and crushing them
down to half size. And then Reggie suggests, well, we
got to catch the tall man and drive a steak
through his heart. I don't know why they think that
would work. And then Mike, Mike is incredulous. He's like,

(01:15:03):
how do you think we could drive a stake through
his heart? That mother's strong. Many times in this movie
people use the word mother as a general noun to
refer to a person or a thing.

Speaker 3 (01:15:15):
Yeah, it work. Gives a looking so nicely with Mike
here though, because because it's like Mike's talking tough, He's
talking like like like he thinks an adult should be
talking in the situation. I love it.

Speaker 1 (01:15:28):
Okay, Well, we're heading into the final sequence here, so
I think Reggie and Jody are going to go investigate
the funeral home again, and they're going to make Mike
stay at Sally's an antique store. I think these are
characters who we should have met before but we haven't. Actually,
maybe maybe that got cut.

Speaker 3 (01:15:45):
The antique store is a nice sequence though, because it's
just Mike wandering around looking at strange things in an
antique store and we get some fabulous percussion, like all
the gongs and bells. It's a scene that I, yeah,
without the me I guess it might be a little boring,
but with the music it's it's really cool and creepy.

Speaker 1 (01:16:04):
Yeah, And he just wanders around looking at things until
he finds an old photograph of the Tall Man in
the nineteenth century driving a horse drawn carriage. And then
from here he's like, you must take me home immediately.
I don't know what this changes. Why does that mean
he must leave?

Speaker 3 (01:16:20):
You're like, didn't they's nine?

Speaker 1 (01:16:22):
Yeah, didn't they already know that the Tall Man was otherworld? Like,
why would he be that surprised? I don't know. So
they're driving around and the car gets attacked by the
creatures again. Uh, and then let's see Mike goes back
home and then Jody locks Mike in his bedroom where
he's like, I'm going to go go to the funeral home.

(01:16:44):
You have to stay here. And then we get one
of the moments that actually stuck in my mind the
most from when I first saw this movie. It is
when Mike comes up with a system to escape being
locked in his room, and it is an improv explosive
device that he makes out of a shotgun shell, a hammer,

(01:17:05):
a tack, and some tape.

Speaker 3 (01:17:07):
Yeah. Absolutely do not do this at all.

Speaker 1 (01:17:10):
Yeah, So he like yeah. He puts a tack in
the back of a shotgun shell and then tapes it
to the end of a hammer and then like and
then swings it at the door, and this makes the
shell explode and it shoots its shot through the door,
and then he's able to reach through and open up
the knob or dislodge a screwdriver. I think that Jody

(01:17:30):
jammed in there to prevent the door from opening. I
was trying to figure out would this technique actually work.
I have no idea. All I could find was people
doing forum posts on it, so can't vouch for this
at all, but people on the forum posts, so some
people were saying, yeah, it seems like this would work,
except the shot would not explode, you know, going straight

(01:17:50):
forward like it would if it were coming out the
barrel of a shotgun. It would explode in all directions
because of the lack of a barrel.

Speaker 3 (01:17:57):
Please do not try this out. We are not asked
to anybody to experiment and create and generate an answer
on this. Do not attempt.

Speaker 1 (01:18:05):
But it was all for nothing, really, because Mike gets
out and then immediately runs into Anga scrim Ambush at
the door. Angus Scrim's like, I've been waiting for you.
So he takes him. Tall Man takes him to the
funeral home, where he escapes a hearse by shooting out
a window. Meanwhile, Jody's already there. We get a bunch
of action. There's like the ball attacks again and we

(01:18:26):
get ball cam. Jody comes to the rescue with a
shotgun and blows up the ball. And now they got
to check out the scary door. So they're they're creeping
over to the scary door that we saw the blonde
girl open earlier. She sees the light and then she
screams yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:18:43):
And this this is the point in the film where
you've never seen it before. You might wonder, like, how
did they keep it going? How do they up the
ante here? But they do, Like the weirdness intensifies in
this scene.

Speaker 1 (01:18:53):
Well, first of all, we get jump scare Reggie. Reggie
just comes out to Reggie and the Yeah. He's like hey,
and they're like, oh, we thought you were but no,
he's good. And he reveals that he found Sally and
Susie and some other people in there and they're not dead.
They're all okay. And he's like, yeah, I snuck him
out a window. Just a whole other story was happening
while we were watching. The characters we barely knew are

(01:19:14):
also now safe, so don't They're fine? Yeah, So okay,
they want to go in the room. They open up
the door and inside the room is full of these
black barrels with little glass windows on them. Huh, what's
going on there? We get a loud hum And then
also in the room with the black barrels there is
some weird furniture. There were just these two metal prongs

(01:19:38):
coming up from the floor, and they look inside the
barrels and they're like, oh, it's those necro dwarves there
they are. So they're being created in these barrels, I guess.

Speaker 3 (01:19:48):
And then yeah, or at least created and then like
pickled in the barrel, finished in the barrel, or stored
in the barrel for transit.

Speaker 1 (01:19:55):
I don't know. And then Mike realizes that the two
metal prongs coming up from the floor are actually a
transdimensional portal, and he reaches his hand through and then
he falls entirely through and sees what's on the other side,
and it is a desert planet made of just like
stones and gravel with a red sky where all of

(01:20:16):
the necro dwarves are lined up in a row going
all the way to the horizon as if they're like
carrying stuff. And then Jody and Reggie save Mike. They
pull him out from the portal and they put everything together.
They figure out, Aha, the Tall Man is using the
human corpses as alien slave labor on another planet, but

(01:20:36):
because of that planet's gravity and I guess atmospheric pressure
or heat, they have to be crushed down to a
smaller size so they can work there as zombies.

Speaker 3 (01:20:46):
Yeah. I absolutely love this. This is a marvelous reveal,
like there's another world out there, some sort of giant,
high gravity world where crushed down necro dwarves are being
sent to serve as labor. And also they never I
don't know if they ever really draw this line or not,
but I wonder if that's also why the tall Man
is so tall, because he comes from one of these

(01:21:07):
worlds with higher gravity, it comes to a lower gravity
world and it like makes him taller somehow, I don't know. Huh.

Speaker 1 (01:21:13):
Okay, Well, anyway, there's a bunch of fighting after this
lights go out, and then Jody and Mike end up
chasing around with some of the with some of the creatures.
Reggie is left behind in the room and there's a
great moment where Reggie thinks back to the tuning fork
because he is looking at the two metal prongs coming
up from the floor, and he figures out how to
do something to them, Like he puts his hands on

(01:21:37):
the prongs like he did with his fingers on the
tuning fork earlier, and that does something it like opens
a portal, and then all the winds starts rushing and
he almost gets sucked in.

Speaker 3 (01:21:46):
It's a great sequence, and I like how it, you know,
connects to that moment with a tuning fork earlier in
the film. He's like, this is it. I know what
this is. I mean, I don't really know what this is,
but I know the basic relationship here. I'm bad if
I reach out with both hands and I stop the vibrations,
I'm going to close this portal.

Speaker 1 (01:22:05):
Another trivia thing I saw alleged on the internet is
that the idea to connect that to the tuning fork
and everything was an idea that came from Susan, who
was Reggie Banister's wife.

Speaker 3 (01:22:18):
Well it was a great idea.

Speaker 1 (01:22:19):
So Reggie makes it outside. He sees the lady in Lavender.
I think he does not know like the audience does,
that she is actually Angus scrim So he goes and
tries to help her, but he gets stabbed, and there's
general wind and chaos. There's you know, the tall Man
standing over Reggie with a knife, and a Reggie apparently dies,
and then we get the final show down where Jody

(01:22:41):
and Mike escape and Jody's like, this is so out
of nowhere, like not earned at all. Jody's like, there's
an old mind shaft up by Singer's Creek, thousands of
feet down. We just got to find a way to
get him up there. And so he sends Mike into
the house to at Ammo, and Jody says, he's going

(01:23:01):
to go remove warning signs from around the mind shaft.
But I don't know why they'd send Mike into the house,
because don't they already know that the tall Man knows
that's where they live. I don't know. Tall Man shows
up and attacks Mike in the house. You know, he says, boy,
you play a good game boy, But now the time
is finished, and so they run around chasing and Mike's

(01:23:24):
were repeating the litany against fear, except not really. Instead
he's just saying, don't fear. And they they succeed. They
you know, they they lure the tall Man into the
mine shaft, which does not look like a mind shaft
at all. It looks like a square somebody dug a
square shaped hole in the dirt.

Speaker 3 (01:23:40):
Yeah, this is the one moment in the film where
I feel like the effects feel a little bit shoddy,
especially when the boulders roll in to fill up the
pit after they drop the tall Man down there. It's
not a deal breaker for the movie or anything, but
but yeah, everything else feels fresh and believable, and this
is a little like you can see the scenes. You
can see the tarp there in that sequence, and.

Speaker 1 (01:24:01):
I was like, are they going to wake up? And
it's all a dream and you know what happens the
next thing, Mike wakes up as if from a dream,
and then Mike and Reggie are hanging out next to
a roaring fire and they're talking about how Jody died.

Speaker 3 (01:24:18):
Huh.

Speaker 1 (01:24:19):
It's like like, so instead of Reggie dying, they're saying
Jody died. And then they show Mike visiting Jody's grave,
and then Reggie's like, I'm going to take care of you, Mike,
and then Reggie starts playing. He's like, let's go on
a road trip. You know, we'll leave when the sun
comes up. You go pack your bags. And Reggie sits

(01:24:40):
there by the fire and starts to play that song
sitting here at midnight again, and it is violently dissonant
with the non diegetic soundtrack that's playing at the same time.
Sounds horrible. And then up in Mike's room, the tall
man appears in a mirror and he's like boy, and
then there's a jump scare and pulls him into the mirror,
and that's the end of the movie. I have no

(01:25:01):
idea how to make sense of any of that. It
does not connect at all.

Speaker 3 (01:25:05):
Yeah, I don't know dreams within dreams or dreams and
images caused by by traumas and losses, because it's like
there we start off with a growing understanding that Mike
has lost both his parents, and then here at the
end we get this revelation that he's lost his brother

(01:25:28):
and that the only parental figure left in his life
is Reggie. And yeah, it's I don't know, it's it's
it's hard to connect all these things together, and yet
everything shapes up in a way where you can you
kind of buy it. You're like, there's a pattern here.
I just can't quite piece it together. But if I
watch it enough times then maybe it'll begin to sink in.

Speaker 1 (01:25:52):
I have a question about the theory of this movie.
Why is the Tall Man doing murders at all? Because
we discover in the end that his goal is to
create Jawa zombies to work for him on this other planet,
and he does that just with human corpses, so he
just needs corpses. But he already operates a funeral parlor,

(01:26:15):
So why is he going out of his way to
do murders? Like I guess it would suggest that, like
at the normal rate of natural death, he is not
getting enough bodies to do what he needs to do.

Speaker 3 (01:26:27):
I guess. So yeah, Like in the second movie, they
add this nice detail where the Tall Man moves around
from town to town and he leaves just decimated funeral
homes and decimated graveyards in his wake, Like all the
bodies get claimed and turned into dwarves and send to
this other world. So yeah, maybe he just like juices

(01:26:48):
the numbers a little bit more. It's like, well, today,
I could get just thirty dwarves from raiding the cemeteries
and you know, getting some natural deaths rolling in. But
I could also juice it a little bit and maybe
kill a couple of people on the side. That's just
more profits for me.

Speaker 1 (01:27:05):
He's trying to hit those Q four numbers.

Speaker 3 (01:27:07):
Yeah, I guess also it's like people who in some
cases is there's a sense of like people who interfere
with the process here with the with the scheme, they
get killed and turned into zombies because why why waste
a good body when you could turn that into a
dwarf as well. But yeah, other times, like he's turning
into this this woman to go out and clearly lure

(01:27:30):
people to the cemetery for for for death. But I
guess that that's ultimately more about this connection between sex
and death in Mike's mind.

Speaker 1 (01:27:40):
But what if he goes to the trouble of doing
that and then the person's family decides that they want
that that person buried somewhere else.

Speaker 3 (01:27:48):
Oh, I don't think the tall Man would stand for that.

Speaker 1 (01:27:50):
He's got to use mafia tactics on grieving families to
make sure he gets all of the bodies.

Speaker 3 (01:27:56):
I guess so. But it's like a small town like
how many how many rivals? Well, I mean he's probably
put the rival groups out of business, like you're not
going to operate a funeral home in competition with the
tall Man.

Speaker 1 (01:28:07):
I guess so, Rob, this has got to be one
of our longest episodes ever. We must cap it here.

Speaker 3 (01:28:13):
Yeah, we'll go ahead and cave it off here. But yeah, Phantasm,
it's a lot of fun. It's widely available in all formats,
but the Phantasm remastered Blu Ray or digital release is
certainly where you want to go for this one. I
think I streamed the remastered version of via Prime, but
you can again find this film just about anywhere. And yeah,

(01:28:35):
it's a load of fun. It's a great Halloween viewing choice.
All Right, we'll be back next Friday with more Weird
House Cinema calibrated for your seasonal Halloween needs. In the meantime,
will remind you that we are primarily a science podcast,
with our core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. On Mondays
we do listener mail. On Wednesdays we do a short
form artifact or monster fact. On Fridays we do Weird

(01:28:58):
House cinema. If you're interested in seeing what movies we've
covered in the past, there are two places you can go.
You can go to somemmutomusic dot com. That's my blog
where I just do some very casual blog posts about
these movies that we watch. But also if you use
a letterbox that's L E T T E R box
d dot com, we are on there as weird House.
You will find our profile there and you'll find a

(01:29:20):
list of all the movies we've covered on the show,
and sometimes there'll be a little hint or a little
spoiler of what the next film will be.

Speaker 1 (01:29:28):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Seth
Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch
with us with feedback on this episode or any other,
to suggest topic for the future, or just to say hello,
you can email us at contact stuff to Blow your
Mind dot com.

Speaker 2 (01:29:50):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
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