Phantasm II, or, BOY, Interrupted

When I finally saw Phantasm, the movie whose reputation terrified me so much that it took me until middle age to see it, I was surprised by how charming it was. Phantasm II doesn’t have even close to the charm of the first one, but it did still manage to win me over.

The first Phantasm actually has a lot in common with other movies that I was curious about when I was younger, but didn’t watch until I was an adult. It wasn’t as scary or graphic as I’d been imagining. It wasn’t as expansive, sophisticated, or as deep as I thought “grown-up” movies must be. And it didn’t show as much of the balls as I’d been expecting.

Phantasm II makes up for the last part, at least. I was a little concerned at first, as it was used for only one graphic kill scene, which was as violent as I’d been imagining, but then it just seemed to disappear. I even started to form a theory — the “plot” of the movie is one that lets your mind wander — that maybe only having one scene per movie was the point, and that it was for the best. The killer stabbing and drilling balls are the most distinctive image from the franchise, next to The Tall Man himself, and maybe some of that terrifying mystique would be ruined by over-use.

As it turns out, I was wrong on multiple counts. Later in the movie, there’s tons of balls in faces (literally), a clear sign that the filmmakers knew what the people wanted when they came to a Phantasm movie, and it wasn’t just a dreamlike meditation on the nature of childhood grief. And maybe surprisingly, it didn’t feel over-used, since they built on it and used it in multiple different, increasingly gruesome ways.

There’s a lot of that feeling of “give the people what they want” in Phantasm II, as a matter of fact. It’s pretty grating for the first half, because it felt like the first movie had gone through an awkward adolescence and matured into a disappointing adult. All of the stuff that was “things a 12-year-old boy in 1980 would think is rad as hell” had now become “things a bunch of guys in their late 20s through early 40s in 1988 would think is rad as hell.”

We get a couple of huge explosions that must’ve been pretty expensive. There’s a gearing-up montage straight out of The A-Team.1I did think it was funny later on to see a glimpse of a handheld gardening rake in the trunk of the Hemicuda. What did they expect to do with that? Reggie’s welded himself a four-barreled sawed-off shotgun. “Mike” has turned what looks like a welding torch into a flame-thrower, and he’s safety-conscious enough to always wear the mask while operating it.

I put “Mike” in scare-quotes because they famously recast the kid from the first movie with an adult who looks pretty much nothing like him. But still showed shots of Mike as an adolescent at the beginning of the movie, which just drives home how much it’s not the same guy. Maybe the mental institution he’s been living in for years also did extensive facial and dental reconstruction. Maybe it’s all just a dream, like everything else in these movies.

But you’re not here for Mike, anyway. No matter how many young women are drawing psychic vision-inspired portraits of him in their notebooks, and writing his name with hearts. We’re all here for Reggie, and to its credit, the movie recognizes that. Reggie’s still got the male-pattern-baldness-in-the-front, party-in-the-back look going on2But minus the pony tail for most of this movie, unfortunately, and once again, he is absolutely crushing it.

As I understand it, the first Phantasm was basically self-and-family-funded by writer/director Don Coscarelli. The sequel has Universal Pictures money behind it, which might help explain all the elaborate ghost-town sets and the explosions. Whether there’s any truth to it or not, I like to imagine that somebody at the studio insisted on recasting Mike with 1980s Hollywood’s idea of a hot younger man, and keeping Reggie around as the comic relief. And everybody involved with the actual production of the movie just nodding and playing along, knowing that Reggie Bannister (RIP) is the heart of this franchise.

He and not-Mike have an energy to them similar to Andy Samberg and Bill Hader’s in the Laser Cats shorts for SNL, just short of calling each other “kemosabe.” So much as I did while watching the first movie, I spent a lot of Phantasm II wondering whether they were in on the joke, and if so, how much. By the end, I became convinced that they knew what they were doing all along.

All of the work the first half of the movie spends establishing them as hardened bad-asses on a post-apocalyptic road trip in a sweet sweet Barracuda loaded with heavily-modified weaponry, gets cleverly undermined in the second half. Not-Mike and Reggie even have a whole conversation acknowledging how silly their plan is, after one of their traps kills a stray animal. When Reggie has a who’s-got-the-bigger-chainsaw battle, and is perpetually denied the chance to use his quad-barrel shotgun, it’s evident that they’re making fun of themselves in a way that’s actually clever instead of too much winking at the camera, or patting themselves on the back for being meta.

And Reggie does finally get to use the shotgun one time, in a moment that is both silly and satisfying, taking out four Jawas at once.

Remarkably, the charm even extends to the part of the whole movie I found the most uncomfortable, where 44-year-old Reggie is leering at the 22-year-old hitchhiker Alchemy. Technically, it’s not irredeemable, but it feels unnecessarily skeevy, even for the late 1980s. Somehow, Phantasm II walks the tightrope without falling into the feeling of being gross and exploitative, in my opinion, by making Alchemy the aggressor. Samantha Phillips’s performance sells it, since it always has the feeling that she knows what she’s doing and she’s having a good time doing it.

Which is just the overriding vibe of the whole movie, after it gets past the “do they get it?” unease of the first half. I’ve seen it classified as “dark comedy” or just flat-out “comedy,” but I got more of a vibe that it was made by a bunch of people who believe that horror movies should be weird and fun.

There’s a gag inside the Crematorium in Phantasm II that references Sam Raimi, and I haven’t done enough research to know whether that was just an homage, or if Raimi was actively involved. Either way, this isn’t exactly the vibe of a Sam Raimi movie, because it never quite goes over-the-top enough. It felt more like a movie made by people who get Sam Raimi movies, and who know why they’re so much fun.

1
I did think it was funny later on to see a glimpse of a handheld gardening rake in the trunk of the Hemicuda. What did they expect to do with that? ↩︎

2
But minus the pony tail for most of this movie, unfortunately ↩︎

1 I did think it was funny later on to see a glimpse of a handheld gardening rake in the trunk of the Hemicuda. What did they expect to do with that?

2 But minus the pony tail for most of this movie, unfortunately