Phantastic Phantasms, Pholks!

Call me a phan, pholk. I love the Phantasm series with all my heart, but I had a weird roundabout way to see Don Coscarelli's beloved cult horror series. The original Phantasm was in a media rights package picked up by one of the big national chains who didn't put that many films into their programming, and when they did, putting a curious, ultra low budget film from the late 70s on probably wasn't on their agenda. So that film never ran on TV. Phantasm II, the only Hollywood-backed major release, was in a rights package that went to a private channel, and since they had to fill hours of programming without having their own programming they stuffed their schedule with American TV series and films. So Phantasm II was on at least once a year, if not more. Instead of falling in love with the original, that's the one I fell in love with. It's not a bad entry. It is weird as hell, but not as inscrutably weird as the original film, which is often a literal 'what the fuck just happened' experience. Phantasm barely has a plotline and almost no inner logic. Rather than a coherent film, it's more a collection of little horror vignettes involving the same people, with Scenes pretty much coming and going in seemingly arbitrary order.  

Part of this was of course it's production history, with Coscarelli basically rounding up a bunch of friends and filming the movie on weekends over an entire year, then spending months trying to put this footage into shape in editing. And the other part is that it's just a profoundly strange picture, with Coscarelli giving in to any whims and the oddest of inspirations (putting his finger through a styrofoam cup inspired him for the scene with the Tall Man's severed but moving finger), and scrapping a linear narrative for surreal dream imagery and just plain oddness. Compared to that, Phantasm II is a model of narrative clarity, though that was the price of doing business with a major studio. 'No dream sequences' was the edict which was (almost) followed, so the story is more streamlined, while still keeping enough odd moments so as not to confuse it with cookie-cutter studio ware. It does what sequels usually do, going bigger and (depending on your point of view) better: more evil dwarfs that still look like the Jawas from Star Wars, more evil henchmen, more elaborate evil spheres that drill their way through people. 

Whoah, now that's a mouthful...

I had the (mis-) fortune of also seeing Phantasm III on TV, but it's easily the weakest of Coscarelli's films, with him seemingly taking inspiration from Sam Raimi's increasingly comical Evil Dead series and Bruce Campbell's cult hero Ash, modeling series stalwart Reggie - the ever-horny, thus always trouble-finding ice cream vendor turned Tall Man-hunter - after Ash's overly confident but slightly incompetent anti-hero. That alone would've been fine, but Coscarelli want way too far in the frenetic horror-comedy direction, allowing a trio of cackling zombies that are Deadites in all but name to take over parts of the film. Add to that a black lesbian ex-marine and a precocious kid with killer traps (a perverted or possibly more honest Home Alone?!) as Reggie's sidekicks, and Phantasm III is a miscalculation. 

Phantasm OblIVion came out in 1997 after a number of attempts to make a bigger, more ambitious (and thus more ambitiously budgeted) movie fell through, Coscarelli called up the gang and decided 'fuck it, let's make a movie'. It's a truly slimmed-down low-budget affair, with a grand total of five speaking roles! Then again, the idea that the Tall Man is emptying the earth, one small town after another, kind of invites this reduction, doen't it? Coscarelli also reduces the budget by reusing a couple of scenes that didn't make the cut of the first Phantasm. And while some of these do feel shoehorned in, others are marvelous fits. Phantasm OblIVion is a definite slow burn, more of an abstract meditation on the themes of the serie sequential sequel. And in that way, very true to the spirit of the original as a bunch of distinct vignettes that hang together relatively well. It has probably my favorite shot of the entire series, shot guerilla-style on Wilkshire boulevard one Thanksgiving morning. And it ends on a marvelous scene, another outtake from 1977/1978 that mixes dialogue from 1997 in. "It's the wind...just the wind". No third sequel to a cheapo horror series has ever ended in such a poetic and wonderful way. (You can see the movie right here and the scene in question starting from the 1.23.30 mark. It's a spoiler, and it isn't. Nothing ever ends in the world of Phantasm, and evrything does.)

All right, no more ice cream for you...and you...and you...and you

Seeing the lights of Reggie's ice cream van slowly disappear in the darkness is the absolute best way to leave the series, as the belated follow-up Phantasm RaVager - not coincidentally the only film not directed by Coscarelli - is a bit of a disaster. A fan project that grew into a feature film, but can never disguise its origins as a bunch of short films, making RaVager the most incoherent film in the entire series, which really is quite the feat! Most sequences feel barely connected, and while accepting the limits of low budget constraints had alwas been part and parcel of being a phan, the awful CGI is an eye soar, it's like watching video game cut scenes from a decade earlier. Truly hideous stuff. While there is a certain pathos and satisfaction in seeing the gang go out there one more time for the hell of it, including Angus Scrimm who was a cool 86 when they filmed it, the film is just not good, or good enough. Yes, it is heartfelt, but I'd still stick to those red tail lights fading. And yet, I can't hate on it, checking in with these same actors, and these films, over a span of almost 45 years is like seeing old friends again, and you love them, even the obnoxious ones...

I don't know if you came for a retrospective on Phantasm, but hey, once you get me to talkin', I ain't stoppin' 'til I had my say. As usual, there is of course a musical reason for this as well. As Halloween is upon us, it feels just right to bring out my love for horror films, togethetr with another horro-film related treat for your ears. The music score for Phantasm was a collaboration between veteran Fred Myrow (who had scored "Soylent Green" before) and Edward Seagrave, and was inspired by Dario Argento favorites Goblin and Mike Oldfield's "Tubular Bells" extracts as made famous by The Exorcist. The latter will be obviou to anyone listening to the Phantasm theme, which is a pretty bald-faced rip-off of "Tubular Bells", but hey, I dig it more than Oldfield's tune.  

Yo Fred, we won't get sued over this, huh?! 

Today's offering are two suites, one for the original film, and one for its sequel. The score by Myrow and Seagrave has its moments - notably any time the main theme is involved, but also a lot of incidental music that isn't much without pictures (and, sign of the times, a horrid disco tune), so I basically edited the best moments together for about a vinyl side's worth of atmospheric music from Phantasm. The suite for Phantasm II was actually a bonus program for the score for Phantasm when that album was reissued by Silva Screeens in 1991. It is a rerecording, slightly synthetic-sounding, that I just tightened up a bit and relieved of its stupid, ultracheap and cheasy explostion sound effects. That score, co-written and performed by Christopher L. Stone (who would take over scoring of OlIVion and RaVager), gives a good feel of the more action-oriented nature of Phantasm II. 

An additional bonus is my improved extra edition version of Best Of Horror, a now somewhat classic compilation around here, that someone asked for and I'm happy to re-up in its proper thread. Hell, I'll also throw in 2024's offering, a sampler of music from Italian horror films and giallos, 'cause these guys know their creepy music. Features classic tracks by Goblin, Ennio Morricone and Claudio Simonetti, as well as a rare track, an outtake medley by Keith Emerson, lovingly assembled by yours truly, same as it ever was. 

Now, all that should cover your needs in atmospheric, spooky and creepy music from the movies, for Halloween or any other time of the year, really...

So, Happy Halloween if you're celebrating that, and happy listeing either way if you don't...