Balls to the Wall - PHANTASM II

I’m a stickler for order these days.  Even before the age of massive serialized movie properties like the Marvel Cinematic Universe, where everything is connected and the movies just assume you’ve been keeping up, I felt weird about jumping into the middle of a series.  I’m always afraid I’ll be missing out on cool in-jokes, vital backstory, or emotional beats.  I can’t just walk into the latest MISSION IMPOSSIBLE movie without knowing the full details of Ethan Hunt’s marital history.  I need to understand the deep emotional subtext built into the FAST AND FURIOUS franchise (something about family).  Walking in blind to an ongoing series is the kind of thing I have anxiety dreams about.  It wasn’t always this way, though.  In fact, my introduction to horror, possibly my favorite film genre, came almost exclusively in the form of Part Twos.

In my defense, the mid-Eighties were the golden age of the Part 2 horror movie, sort of a Wild West for sequels.  The franchise boom was rolling strong, but franchise formulas had yet to be perfected.  Dozens of popular to semi-popular horror titles were exhumed with hopes of making them into inexhaustible sequel factories.  However, many of these stories were never intended to go beyond the final credits. Re-configuring them often took a bit of creative thinking and a wild tonal shift.  The best ones retooled the often serious minded original with a healthy dose of humor, excess, and crazy ‘80s fun.  In doing so they made them accessible to a new generation of fresh faced horror fiends.   Movies like Sam Raimi’s EVIL DEAD 2 and Tobe Hooper’s TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE PART 2 brought me into the horror fold.  So while Don Coscarelli’s PHANTASM II may not be as artistically important as his original movie, it's the one that most gets my blood pumping.

The Capsule:

After spending 8 years in the Morningside Hospital for spouting wild tales about a mysterious Tall Man (Angus Scrimm) who crunches down corpses to supply a trans-dimensional slave trade,  Michael (James Le Gros) finally admits it was all a dream and is released.  He is picked up by his best friend Reggi (Reggie Bannister), and they return home just in time to see Reg's entire extended family blown up by the Tall Man as a welcome back gift.  They hit the road in a '71 Hemicuda filled with weapons, intent on putting an end to the Tall Man's evil once and for all.  With the help of Mike's dream-linked soulmate, Liz (Paula Irvine), he and Reg track the Tall Man through a series of dried up ghost towns until arriving at his latest haunt, Perigord Funeral Home.  The Tall Man has a few new tricks up his sleeve, though, and Mike, Reggie, and Liz may be in for more of a fight than they were prepared for.

  

Anyone going directly from PHANTASM to PHANTASM II is bound to get tonal whiplash.  The elliptical, non sequitur structure of the first movie is gone, replaced with a more traditionally linear plot.  The sequel is no paint by numbers retread, though.  Coscarelli totally switches gears by upping the action and making a kick ass road movie.  While I love the first movie’s surreal weirdness, this was the perfect Phantasm intro for 16 year old me.  I was still years away from fully appreciating deliberate pacing, metaphor, and indie gumption, but a couple of armature monster hunters driving around in a bitchin’ muscle car with a trunk full of weapons was just up my teenage alley.

 

One of my favorite elements to those early franchise sequels was the opening catch up, the part that linked the happenings of the previous movie with the current setting.  It could come in the form of a lazy, best-of clip show, but the best one took the effort to seamlessly merge the preceding ending into the new open.  PHANTASM II has one of the best.  It starts with some psychic exposition narrated by Liz, simultaneously giving us the major points while establishing her dream link with Michael.  New, well-matched footage kicks in after the original’s crash cut ending, continuing the flashback the second it left off nine years before.  Coscarelli immediately sets the new tone by throwing Reg into a badass rescue sequence that has him punching out dwarfs, climbing up laundry chutes, and blowing up his house to save young Mike.  It is a total thrill that hooked me from the start.  

Given that this was my first taste of the Phantasm world, I had no resentment about James Le Gros replacing A. Michael Baldwin as Michael.  Le Gros doesn’t have any of the original Mike’s punk-ass bravado or emotional vulnerability, but he has plenty of dumb charm and great chemistry with Reggie Bannister.  And while Reg is played by the same actor, that character has undergone a serious evolution as well.  Taking a page from Bruce Campbell’s Ash, Reg has put away his folk guitar and ice cream man uniform to become a heroic goofball.  He never backs down from a fight, but it rarely goes as smoothly as he is expecting.

Before starting the hunt, Coscarelli indulges in a distinctly ‘80s action trope, the "getting ready" sequence.  It’s the scene that stokes our commercialism fantasy of the ultimate badass shopping spree, where the hero(s) break into a store and grab every weapon in sight.  Think of Schwarzenegger’s gun store looting scene from COMMANDO, except that since this is a horror movie, Reg and Mike break into a hardware store.  Seeing them load up on sledgehammers, chainsaws, and cordless drills gave me a giddy anticipation of the bloody mayhem to follow.   It’s not just off the shelf stuff, either.  The boys get crafty with their DIY demon hunting arsenal.  Mike builds a flame thrower by lashing together several blow torch tanks and Reg mods a couple of shotguns to make his legendary quad-barrel, anti-killer dwarf cannon.  Literally tooled up, Reg leaves a wad of bills on the register to cover their haul.  You know, to show that he is an honest citizen at heart.  Of course, that does beg the question of why they didn’t just go into the hardware when it was open and buy everything like normal people.  I guess it wouldn’t have looked as cool.

Angus Scrimm is back as the Tall Man, still scary as hell with no need of mask or makeup application.  All the menace comes solely from Scrimm’s physical performance, booming voice, and subtle, but wicked, sense of humor.  Coscarelli gives him meatier dialogue this time, but never resorts to the sort of quippy puns that changed Freddy Krueger from a primal fear into wacky game show host.  The mystery of the Tall Man and his quiet, devilish grin is far more unsettling than any clever threat.  The closest he comes is when he is toying with Kenneth Tigar’s alcoholic priest who unwisely attempts an exorcism.  “You think when you die you go to heaven.  You come to us.”    He doesn’t even bother to kill the poor sap, only to destroy his faith.  He leaves the messy work to his staff.

Speaking of the staff, the Tall Man’s roster of creepy cronies has expanded over the years.  He still has his army of killer dwarfs, but new employees include a grampa zombie, a mangled dream monster, and the gravers, hulking, gas mask wearing mutes who exhume the coffins and know how to throw down with a chainsaw.  The Tall Man also employs a couple of normal (if pallid) mortuary assistants for menial tasks, like disposing of bodies, alive or dead, and gathering up cremation ash (for a Mr. Sam Raimi, according to the label). 

Those are guys are just small time shotgun fodder, though.  The Employee of the Month is smaller, shinier, and far deadlier.  As the tag line states, “The ball is back.”  Not only is it back, it brought a couple of friends.  For such an innovative and eye catching (as well as brain sucking) murder gizmo, the first movie gave an unceremonious introduction to the Silver Sphere.  This batch gets a more fitting introduction, rolling out of a cute mini-coffin like little round rock stars.  The standard model has a few new tricks, like an ear slicing rotary saw, but the big addition is the golden sphere.  It can burn through doors, shoot lasers, and has a brand new, overly elaborate kill sequence, as one unlucky embalmer discovers when it buzzsaws into his back, churns through his torso, and pops out of his mouth.  It turns out the spheres can even be inserted like keys into special doors.  They are the supernatural horror version of a Swiss Army Knife.  

Reg and Mike are joined in the fight by a couple of new faces.  Paula Irvine’s Liz is Mike’s psychically linked romantic interest.  At first she seems like the standard damsel in distress plot device, but Coscarelli smartly subverts this expectation.  In one scene, Liz is abducted to the mortuary and is poised to slide straight into a flaming crematorium.  It looks like a Perils of Pauline style setup, where the helpless woman inches closer to doom before being rescued by the dashing hero at the last second.  Instead, Liz rolls to safety herself, kicks her kidnapper in the nuts, and sends him into the crematorium.  No rescue necessary, thank you very much.  Mike saves her from the Tall Man, but she returns the favor right away and keeps pace with the dudes for the rest of the movie.

Also in the mix is Samantha Phillips as the mysterious hitchhiker Reg picks up on the road, one who happens to look just like the dead woman Mike saw in his dream.  Oh, and her name is Alchemy, so nothing suspicious there.  Mostly she is there to be Reg’s bad girl counterpoint to Mike and Liz’s innocent romance,  and her only lasting contribution to the series is to establish Reg as a somewhat pathetic horndog.  Still, Phillips adds a nice chaotic vibe to our happy band.  

The original movie's nonsensical mine shaft showdown with the Tall Man was its weakest moment.  Coscarelli more than makes up for it here.  We get to see how tough this lanky bastard is when Mike redirects a silver sphere into his forehead.  After it does its fountain of (yellow) blood routine, the Tall Man just plucks it out and crushes it like an empty beer can.  Of course, we know there is something even better waiting in the wings.  Earlier Reg makes the point of replacing the formaldehyde in an embalming pump with hydrochloric acid, and as Chekov says, if you show a hydrochloric acid pump in the first act, you have to use it by the last. Needless to say, the end result is a spectacularly goopy display of practical effects even the Tall Man has a hard time walking off. Sure, everything ends on another circular, crash cut cliffhanger, but the road to get there more than makes up for it.  

While the PHANTASM saga continues on through another three sequels, my coverage does not.  I hate to say that none of the sequels engaged me like the first two movies.  Coscarelli made some Phanatics (fans of Phantasm) happy by bringing back A. Michael Baldwin for PHANTASM III, but since James Le Gros was my original Mike, I didn't care for it.  Plus, the plot was more convoluted and sillier.  PHANTASM: OBLIVION returned to a more serious tone, but it sent the story on a more disjointed, metaphoric path.  PHANTASM: RAVAGER was an extremely heartfelt and emotional farewell to the characters, and to Angus Scrimm himself, but the movie surrounding it was a godawful mess of terrible CGI and jarring transitions.  I still like them all, but as far as reviews go, the hearse stops at two.  That's more than enough balls for me.

C Chaka