Stronger people than I can keep up with a movie every day for October, as part of a blog-based Countdown to Halloween, but I can only commit to watching as many horror movies this month as I can. I’ve even got a Shudder subscription and everything! For my official first-movie-in-October entry, I chose to watch Phantasm III: Lord of the Dead.
The first Phantasm movie along with its sequel are pretty inexplicable. Both in that it’s near impossible to explain what actually happens in them in any kind of coherent way, but it’s also near impossible to explain how it all still works.
I’ve heard people say that Phantasm III keeps the streak going, and in fact is their favorite in the series. That was definitely not my experience. For me, it just seemed like a movie series that was always more “interesting” and “charming” than actually good, but here is just running on fumes.
It seems like the essential elements of a Phantasm movie have now been firmly established, and they’re all present here: guns and cars, and as many cars blowing up as possible. Gruesome practical effects for the various zombies and dwarves and murder victims. The Tall Man clearly enjoying himself, raising his eyebrow and shouting “BOOOOYY.” Of course, all of the chrome Phantasm balls and all their bladed and laser-based attachments. A nonsensical story structure that can charitably be described as “dream-like.” And of course, Reggie carrying the whole franchise by being so inexplicably cool that he somehow manages to get away with being a shameless horndog.
Phantasm 3 brings back Mike’s original actor — after recapping the second movie in a way that never shows the replacement’s face, and also, hilariously, gets rid of his love interest as quickly, definitively, and joylessly as possible. It also adds Tim, an orphan who’s been living by himself in an old house and horrifically slaughtering any looters who dare intrude on his property. And Rocky, a nunchuck-wielding badass with some vague and unspecified military history, who’s apparently started a side-hustle of hog-tying and robbing strangers in mausoleums with her sister.
I think the introduction of Rocky, and of Tim’s various murder implements, are the reasons some people think highly of the third installment. The movie does have those flashes of weird originality that run throughout the series, the bits that you might not think are that great, but you definitely remember. This one has that in the form of a zombie nurse and a trio of zombie looters, a weird attack from the Tall Man’s hands, and the reveal that the balls have little brains in them.
But they also have the feel of that Key & Peele sketch about Gremlins 2: whatever they could come up with during a brainstorm went into the movie, whether or not they were able to figure out how to make it all fit. The Idea of Rocky is pretty solid: now there’s a bad-ass character. But in practice, you just get shown over and over again how absolutely useless nunchucks are against zombies and Phantasm balls.
So the movie just feels like a zombie itself. Struggling to keep a franchise alive, retaining just enough of the vestigial elements to make it recognizable, but there’s no light behind its eyes. By the end of the movie, after the fifteenth time a character popped into a scene out of nowhere, with no resolution of their previous scene — Hang on, I know for a fact that Rocky was left hanging from a balcony after losing her nunchucks! — it had killed all the energy it had built up with zombie nurse and the looters.
By that point, I just wanted it to be over. So even though there are two other movies in the series, I’ll bow out with the one that has some kinda interesting stuff in the first 30 minutes or so. And I won’t say goodbye, but “Keep your balls in the air, Reg.”
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