Phantasm V: Ravager

Phantasm V: Ravager (2016)

Dir. David Hartman

Written by David Hartman and Don Coscarelli

Starring muthafuckin Reggie Bannister, A. Michael Baldwin, Angus Scrimm,

The PHANTASM films have been a lot of things over the years. Nightmarish indie horror classics (PHANTASM). Schlocky, outrageous gorefests (PHANTASM 2). No-budget team comic book sci-fi DTV adventures (PHANTASM 3: LORD OF THE DEAD). Whatever the hell part IV was (PHANTASM IV: OBLIVION).

PHANTASM V: RAVAGER is all these things and also a lot of other things, made for even less money. It’s sloppy and amateurish in some ways, and overstuffed and slapdash in every way. But it’s also fiercely ambitious, heartfelt, and crammed to the gills with the the absolute maximum weirdness-per-dollar that science has yet been able to produce. Which means: it’s a PHANTASM film. And for that, I have no choice but to love it.

When we last saw Reggie (Reggie Bannister) and Michael (A. Michael Baldwin), they were… uh, I think I remember Michael was a brain-ball, and they went into the past and the tall man was some kind of Amish civil war doctor? I’ll confess, it’s been a little too long. The last PHANTASM movie came out in fucking 1998. RAVAGER is the first of the series to premiere in this fucking millennium, and it has very little interest in the idea of gently bringing you up to speed. It offers a cursory summary of the insane plot so far which probably has more value as absurdist comedy than any potential as a helping hand to neophytes. But fuck the newcomers. PHANTASM V is for true believers, and that’s OK. Go back to the beginning and start from there if one character having a murderous golden orb in his brain seems surprising to you.

We open with the promise of a somewhat more normal PHANTASM film, as former ice cream man and balding-with-a-ponytailed interdimensional warrior Reggie Bannister triumphantly reclaims his classic black 1971 Plymouth Barracuda and quickly mixes it up with some of those flying silver orbs of death, albeit in an unfortunately cheesy CG way. Of course, “normal” is probably not quite the right way to describe this, except in comparison to the other movies. This part is insane but par for the course at this point in the increasingly unhinged mythos of the series; hell, it’s downright conservative compared to OBLIVION’s time-hopping outtakes-recycling BACK TO THE FUTURE 2 nonsense.

Things get unexpected when we interrupt the action to check in on Reggie in an entirely different scenario. Suddenly he’s an old man in a nursing home, battling dementia and caregivers who patronizingly brush off his claims that he’s a freedom fighter against demonic interdimensional corpse-snatchers. Even Michael doesn’t seem to have any recollection of evil alien dwarfs or brain-sucking death balls. And the Tall Man shows up, too -- not as a evil mastermind, but as another patient. Reggie is sure that all of this is the result of a diabolical plot to lull him into giving up the fight. But are we as sure as he is? Is it possible that the increasingly nonsensical adventures of Reggie and Michael in Phantasmland were really a byproduct of the deteriorating mind of an ageing ice cream vendor waiting around for death in a depressing nursing home?

This is a surprisingly sad and earnest direction for the movie to go, so it compensates by getting even weirder and more outrageous in other respects. Whether or not  this is all in Reggie’s head, the next thing we know he’s part of a rag-tag resistance in a post-apocalyptic future controlled by the Tall Man and his armies. Gigantic silver balls patrol the skies, and raze whole cities with lazer beams. Michael is now Earth’s greatest hero, and one of his fellow rebels is a woman (Dawn Cody, PLEASANTVILLE) who Reggie met back in the present, but she has a different name and doesn’t remember him, so, huh. This takes us into full-on sc-fi action movie territory (or at least SyFy Original Action Movie territory) with a bunch of futuristic machine gun battles and a extremely cheap-looking but kinda cool long camera zoom through a post-apocalyptic hellscape.

So essentially we have three separate storylines going all at once. All involve Reggie, but none are directly related to each other, at least in any kind of obvious literal way. They may be hallucinations, or alternate realities, or just multiple timelines, and the movie has very little interest in deciding which. That was sort of the case in part IV too, IIRC, because that one lost funding at the last minute and had to use outtakes and unseen footage from the original movie to fill it up to movie length, resulting in a similarly surreal patchwork of plotlines. In this case, the explanation is that apparently, this was not originally intended to be a full-length movie, but rather a series of internet shorts. It was pretty far along in production (maybe even finished? I can’t find any source to definitively say one way or another) before the “webisode” concept was scrapped and they decided to stitch the various episodic shorts into a final movie sequel. The world desperately needed a PHANTASM V -- and I say that with the exact opposite of sarcasm-- but guys, you had 16 years to plan for this. Next time, figure out what kind of movie you want to make before shooting it, huh? Fate / The Man has not smiled kindly on the PHANTASM series, but I can’t help feeling that this was something of an unforced error.

Which brings us to the most inexplicable and annoying thing here: Don Coscarelli did not direct it. Coscarelli, of course, is the B-or-lower movie king responsible for beloved cult classics like BUBBA HO-TEP, BEASTMASTER, and all the previous PHANTASM films. He hasn’t been actively directing since JOHN DIES AT THE END, which wrapped production in 2011. Why in the fuck is he not behind the camera here? True, he produced and co-wrote it, but in the director’s seat is David Hartman, a guy who seems to have spent most of his career directing animated kid’s TV shows and low budget shorts (everything from the animated Jackie Chan Adventures to Dan Harmon’s short-lived Laser Farts*). Hartman gets the essential nature of the franchise down, but there’s no getting around it, he’s not a feature film director and a lot of the film is ugly-looking and indifferently framed in a way that no Coscarelli film would ever be, no matter how low the budget. I can deal with nonsensical weirdness no problem. In fact, it’s really more of a feature than a bug at this point. But eyesore low-rent CG gore is a crime against Phantasm kind. I know the budget is low, but that’s when you ought to get creative, not just shrug and hand it off to the cheapest nerds you can find. It doesn’t look charmingly bad, like overambitious practical effects might. It just looks bad.**

So that’s the downside here, and it’s a pretty hard-to-ignore downside. But the upside is equally obvious: this is a movie with a lot of genuine affection for the characters we’ve now spent nearly 40 years with. The first film premiered in 1979. Michael was just a little kid back then, Reggie was just 34. Now Mike is 53, and Reggie is fucking 71. Mike is older today than Angus Scrimm was back when he first played the “old man.” Over the course of five films, we’ve seen them age and grow old, like a weird sequel to BOYHOOD with evil dwarfs. And I suppose we’ve grown old with them. We’ve watched our own lives get more complicated than we expected, we watched our dreams of glory and meaning fizzle out and die like an endless stream of increasingly low-budget sequels. We waited for years for the resolution to a hilariously sprawling seemingly stream-of-consciousness narrative which straddles five decades. And that may not mean much, but damn it, it means something. And its saving grace is that PHANTASM: RAVAGER knows that.

In a lot of ways, it’s a movie about failure. Reggie doesn’t really have any reasonable hope of stopping an evil interdimensional alien whatever. Hell, here we get a glimpse into a future where he’s already lost. And maybe he was never even fighting to begin with, maybe all his adventures were just the aggrandizing fantasy of a very average dying man who can’t admit that he never was anything to begin with. And in a series first, he doesn’t even get the girl! Granted, he’s still ladies’ man enough to arouse the interest of a very pretty lady who’s at least 30 years his junior, but he ends up falling asleep before he can seal the deal. And while this is played for laughs, they’re laughs with a hint of affectionate melancholy. This can’t go on forever; the guy spent his life as a badass warrior, and now that he’s winding down, what does he have to show for it? Victory, or even comprehension of the forces he faces, seems as distant as it ever was.

But it hasn’t been an entirely wasted life, either. Even if he’s never made any real progress in his fight against the Tall Man --if there ever was a Tall Man to begin with-- he’s made some real friends. There’s a genuinely touching moment in the nursing home when Mike comes in and thanks Reggie for raising him when his brother died. He doesn’t care that Reggie isn’t a badass warrior of the wastelands. He just loves him. He might never gain any ground, but he did gain a family, and, fittingly, that’s where the movie leaves us. The fight --of the delusion-- continues ever on, but by the end of RAVAGER, Reggie and Michael are back together with old friends and new, ready to keep on doing what they’ve always done. And no matter how bleak things may look, they’re together, and that’s enough. It’s a silly, ridiculous moment which is simultaneously genuinely sweet, and maybe even a little heartbreaking. Which more or less describes the movie itself -- it’s ridiculous and uneven, but undeniably heartfelt. And yes, maybe that’s enough.

*Which also, now that I look at it, featured PHANTASM V co-star Dawn Cody

**In all fairness, Coscarelli himself got into a little trouble with this in the chintzy climax for JOHN DIES AT THE END. But at least the bulk of that one looked like a real movie.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2016 CHECKLIST!

Good Kill Hunting

TAGLINE	The Final Game Now Begins
TITLE ACCURACY	Yes, and it continues OBLIVION’s clever gimmick of putting the roman numeral in the title. oblIVion, raVager. I guess they could just do obliVIon again for the next one.
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	No
SEQUEL?	Yes, part V, possibly the end of the series since Angus “Tall Man” Scrimm died after filming.
REMAKE?	No
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	US
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Oh man, uh, Sci-Fi Horror, I guess? Really, the PHANTASMs are pretty much their own subgenre.
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	None
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	Angus Scrimm, Reggie Bannister
NUDITY?	Don’t think so
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	None
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	None, although a horse gets the business end of a brain-ball
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	None, unless you want to count the evil dwarfs, which I guess are repurposed human corpses
POSSESSION?	No, unless yes?
CREEPY DOLLS?	None
EVIL CULT?	Tall Man’s plans are too impenetrable to know if there’s a religious element to it, or what. The dwarfs do wear robes, though.
MADNESS?	Yeah, a surprisingly serious look at age-related brain deterioration
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	Nothing that I recall
VOYEURISM?	No
MORAL OF THE STORY	Bald men are and will always be sexier than anyone wants to admit, and a ponytail never hurt either.

It probably doesn't deserve this high a rating in terms of quality, but I can't bring myself to go lower.

The Arrival (1991) aka The Unwelcomed

The Arrival (1991) aka The Unwelcomed

Dir. David Schmoeller

Written by Daniel Ljoka

Starring Robert Sampson, Joseph Culp, John Saxon, Robin Frates

The years following David Schmoeller’s undisputed masterpiece TOURIST TRAP were littered with near-misses. He had a studio thriller with Morgan Fairchild which just didn’t catch on. A harrowing experience directing Klaus Kinski in the sleazy CRAWLSPACE, which didn’t add up to much commercial success. A castlebound religious horror effort which sat on the shelf for years before it was re-titled and released as the fourth movie in the unrelated CURSE series. Only the fun, kiddie-horror PUPPETMASTER from 1989 --a full ten years after TOURIST TRAP-- managed to come together into something that worked. And that was direct-to-video, and Full Moon video, no less, so not exactly a victory to shout from the rooftops. His follow up, THE ARRIVAL (retitled for video THE UNWELCOMED, and in West Germany, ALIANATOR 2) was a step up in the sense of actually getting at least some theatrical release. I can’t find any specific box office figures, although I know it was at least less successful than the $356,000 Hal Hartley’s TRUST made as the 32nd most lucrative film of 1991. Also I know it did less than the $519,000,000 that TERMINATOR 2 made the same year.

But great art is not always appreciated in its own time, so let’s not hold that against it. Considering it must have been made for almost nothing, this is in some ways technically better than you might imagine, in some ways, I guess. It is, I think, a somewhat more solid effort than his subsequent ambitious-but-disappointing NETHERWORLD, but unfortunately it has the same essential problem that one does: A semi-interesting premise and decent atmosphere are undermined by a poorly structured plot and a lack of sufficient genre goods.

Basically, this is a sci-fi horror tale of some kind of alien entity (seen only for a few scattered frames) who crash-lands on Earth and takes up residence in the body of bespectacled septuagenarian grandpa Max Page (Robert Sampson, Dean Halsey in RE-ANIMATOR). This seems to kill Max, but in the morgue he suddenly regains life, and his health improves in record time. It’s not long before he’s inappropriately but endearingly flirting with his nurse (Robin Frates, PUPPET MASTER and Talia Shire’s ONE NIGHT STAND, exuding an easy sense of endearing girl-next-door warmth). And then… he keeps getting better, starts to feel youthful. And then starts to look more youthful. And then also starts blacking out and drinking blood. OK, so one notable downside, then. Pretty soon, Max realizes he’s a danger to his family, and heads out on a cross-country road trip/killing spree with continually incredulous detective John Saxon in pursuit. All the while, he’s killing more women and getting younger, until finally he looks like hunky, leather-jacket-wearing motorcycle-riding Kenneth Anger alien fantasy Joseph Culp (Dr. Doom from the original 1994 FANTASTIC FOUR and son of Robert Culp).

There are definitely some decent things in here. The movie looks pretty good, for one thing, even if it negates a lot of its visual atmosphere with a chintzy keyboard score from noted Charles Band accomplice/brother Richard Band. There are some surreal, symbolic dream sequences at the beginning which look quite handsome, and a strange, dreamy ambiance to the editing and acting throughout. The acting is significantly better than you’d expect, with both Sampson and Culp giving performances which are subtly textured but intriguingly opaque. All that works in the movie’s favor, because what it kinda turns out to be is a sort of early blueprint for UNDER THE SKIN, with an alien predator who isn’t exactly evil, but has very little interest or aptitude for pretending to be the humans it preys on (it even figures out to turn into a hot guy to lure women). THE ARRIVAL even adds a little wrinkle to the UNDER THE SKIN formula, in that there’s obviously still a little of Max in there, or at least his memories. But how much, and what motivates this strange amalgam of human and alien intelligence?

This is what the alien looks like, which is actually pretty cool. Shame it's probably on-screen for less than a second in the whole film, and I had to meticulously screen-capture it by going frame by frame.

All that stuff is pretty good, and there is ample evidence that someone put at least a little thought and craft into the story. There’s a recurring motif of white roses for some reason, and hey, somebody knew enough to know it was both necessary and morally right to get Michael Pollard in there as a wacky witness that John Saxon talks to one time. It’s a pointless, worthless exposition role which just fills Saxon in on a few details we already knew, but Schmoeller (who has a brief cameo as a doctor himself) almost certainly lets Pollard ad-lib his way into by far the most entertaining scene of the movie. Still, there’s no getting around it: this whole enterprise could definitely use a little more whammy. Its dreamy, quiet middle is almost completely free of narrative tension, it’s just the alien wandering from place to place and occasionally eating a woman off-camera. Nothing in it is assertively bad, but it treads water for an inexcusably long time while waiting for the finale to finally introduce some conflict again. The film doesn’t even seem to settle on a main character til the final act, when it finally decides against all logic and reason that for some reason the alien ain’t that bad, and we should be worried mean ol’ John Saxon is going to stop his murder spree. How this makes any sense at all, I cannot say, but at least once it firmly comes down on the alien’s side, the filmmaking is strong enough to manage a little tension that most of the film lacks.

Even so, there’s just not a lot of meat on the bone, here (although the version I saw inexplicably had the “fucks” beeped out [though the “shits” are left in?], so maybe there’s another cut out there that delivers a few more exploitation goods.)* It has a few ideas and some little unique touches, but as with NETHERWORLD, the filmmaking isn’t quite strong enough for the dreamy, slow burn thing to resonate much. But also like NETHERWORLD, a thin through-line of dark humor is key to it squeaking over the finish line without turning into a total snooze. Pollard is a hoot, Stuart Gordon has a cameo as an unfortunate biker, and his wife Carolyn Purdy-Gordon also steals a scene as a belligerent alcoholic trying to scam a free drink at a liquor store. Little asides like that add some much needed color. And it can be pretty funny to watch this weird alien guy make people uncomfortable by barely making an effort to fit in. Sometimes it’s also not-so-intentionally funny, like when the Cops spot this multiple-murderer leaving a house, and Saxon admonishes them not to follow him, but to just wait around where they are in the hopes that he’ll come back. Pretty crafty police work there. He does come back, although I bet the people he kills in the interim would appreciate a slightly more proactive approach. I’d ask the same of the film.

*Huh, the trailer actually has a scene of our alien in a bathtub full of blood with a naked women, which also isn’t in the version I saw, or if it was I don’t remember it. So maybe this review isn’t giving it a fair shot. They also tease a freaky naked three-way that they don’t deliver on but later make reference to. I gotta check the runtime on my 99 cent Dollar store DVD copy.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2015 CHECKLIST!

Play it Again, Samhain

• TAGLINE: Fear is never an invited guest.
• LITERARY ADAPTATION: No
• SEQUEL: No
• REMAKE: No
• DEADLY IMPORT FROM: USA
• FOUND-FOOTAGE CLUSTERFUCK: No
• SLUMMING A-LISTER: None. Wait, does Michael Pollard count? He was in BONNIE AND CLYDE.
• BELOVED HORROR ICON: John Saxon!
• BOOBIES: No Well, not in the version I watched, but this trailer has some at the end, so I think there were some originally.
• MULLETS: Didn’t notice any.
• SEXUAL ASSAULT: He usually kills his victims while making out with them, but the making out was consensual.
• DISMEMBERMENT PLAN: None
• HAUNTED HOUSE: No.
• MONSTER: We see a very, very few fleeting glimpses of some sort of weird, I dunno, rock alien?
• THE UNDEAD: No
• POSSESSION: Definitely, although by aliens instead of ghosts, for once.
• SLASHER/GIALLO: Doesn’t really follow a standard slasher plotline, although he does kill using a scalpel.
• PSYCHO KILLERS (Non-slasher variety): No
• EVIL CULT: None
• (UNCANNY) VALLEY OF THE DOLLS: None
• EGYPTO-CRYPTO: No
• TRANSMOGRIFICATION: Yes, old man to Joseph Culp.
• VOYEURISM: Cops watch alien while they laboriously plan what should be an easy arrest.
• OBSCURITY LEVEL: Extremely high
• MORAL OF THE STORY: Hey old, man, wanna get your lovelife workin’ again? It’s as easy as letting an alien take over your body and turn you back into a retro-50’s motorcycling hunk! With one slight catch...
• TITLE ACCURACY: “THE ARRIVAL” makes some basic sense, the title I saw it under, “THE UNWELCOMED” doesn’t really.
• ALEX MADE IT THROUGH AWAKE: N/A.

Die, Monster, Die!

Die, Monster, Die! aka Monster of Terror (1965)
Dir. Daniel Haller
Written by Jerry Sohl
Starring Boris Karloff, Nick Adams, Freda Jackson, Suzan Farmer

No! That's German for "The Monster, The!"

    A good companion piece to the mildly decent DUNWICH HORROR (with the same director), this, too, is an Arkoff/Nicholson production of an H. P. Lovecraft story except five years earlier and hence not quite so weak to the lure of 70’s psychedelic silliness. No Corman on this one, either, so that might also explain it. The result is a slightly classier, better structured film, although one which also could probably do with a few cheaper thrills.

    Former “Twilight Zone” writer (and Charles Beaumont ghostwriter, if his iffy-sounding wikipedia page is to be believed) Jerry Sohl adapts Lovecraft’s “Colour out of Space” by changing it to a mystery, where a clueless young woman’s boyfriend comes into town and notices a few suspicious things about her Dad (for instance, he’s played by Boris Karloff) and the sprawling gothic estate (for instance, the maid fled the house and now lives in the woods as a knife-wielding black-veiled maniac). In what seems to be something of a trend in these English-set 60s movies, the girlfriend is maddeningly oblivious to her father’s shifty behavior, but she’s game to help boyfriend Nick Adams* investigate.

You kids get these lousy lawn ornaments off my castle grounds!

    The beginning of the film is all slow burn dread, implying something sinister but never quite letting us see exactly what’s going on. Surprisingly, it actually works pretty well when it’s being serious, finding some good horror images and generally maintaining suspense even before the action starts. Once we actually encounter the titular colour out of space, things turn a little more hokey with some iffy effects and not-so-convincing peril for our heroes. Lovecraft’s story is creepy because of the subtle way that the "colour" affects and gradually alters people and things. I’m betting he didn’t imagine it as a “zoo from hell!” as described in the dialogue and populated by what look to be three or four dour-faced snuffleupagus family members.

It's not easy being green.

    In the H.P. Lovecraft documentary FEAR OF THE UNKNOWN, John Carpenter opines that someone ought to make a movie of “The Colour Out of Space,” apparently unaware that someone already did under the silly title DIE, MONSTER, DIE. He notes, however, that he doesn’t know how they could because you’d have to depict the actual color, which Lovecraft describes as something “without a place among the known tints of Earth.” Well, here they solved that problem by making the color green. It’s that kind of movie. But even so, the generally serious treatment they give to the material gives this the dubious distinction of being one of the better Lovecraft adaptations. It ends up about as silly as the title suggests, but for the greater balance of the runtime it builds a convincingly creepy atmosphere and gets appropriate mileage out of it’s gothy sets and grumpy Boris Karloff power**. And hey, the poster isn’t lying, that ax does figure into the finale!

As usual, don't forget to check out Dan P's alternate take in ABBOT AND COSTELLO MEET FASTER, MONSTER, KILL, KILL: THE FINAL CROSSOVER! 


*Adams led what appears to be a very interesting life, going from pool hall hustler to possibly having gay sex with James Dean and Elvis and along the way coming perilously close to becoming a huge movie star before dying of a drug overdose that some regard as mighty suspicious. Of course, none of that can be confirmed in any meaningful way.

**Karloff, only four years from death at the time, is wheelchair-bound and looks tired (by the end of his life he had only one half of one lung left and required oxygen after each take) but gamely gives it his all. Way to be, Boris.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2012 CHECKLIST!

LOVECRAFT ADAPTATION: Indeed, and vaguely recognizable as such, for once.
BOOBIES: Nah.
> or = HERSCHELL GORDON LEWIS LEVEL GORE: No significant gore.
SEQUEL: None.
OBSCURITY LEVEL: Mid. Karloff probably boosts its profile a little, in one of his last film roles (he died in 1969).
MONSTERS: A couple tentacles and so forth.
SATANISTS: Nah, although the grandfather in the story was known to invoke an old one or two.
ZOMBIES: No, mutants.
VAMPIRES: None.
SLASHERS: None.
CURSES: There's discussion of a curse from their grandfather, but no evidence that it works.
ALEX MADE IT THROUGH AWAKE: N/A.