Phantasm

Plot synopsis:
In the opening scene, an attractive blond woman wearing a lavender colored dress is making out with a man in a local cemetery, which suddenly ends when the woman pulls out a dagger and stabs the man to death.Meanwhile, 24-year-old musician Jody Pearson is raising his 13-year-old brother Mike in a small southern California town disturbed by the mysterious deaths of its citizens. Reggie, a family man and ice cream vendor, joins the brothers in their suspicions that the local mortician, dubbed "The Tall Man", is responsible for the deaths.Mike relays his fears to a fortuneteller and her granddaughter about the possibility of Jody departing and leaving him in the care of his aunt, along with his suspicions about The Tall Man. Mike is shown a small black box and told to put his hand into it. After the box grips his hand, Mike is told by the granddaughter not to be afraid and as the panic subsides, the box relaxes its grip. The notion of fear itself as the killer is established and is what propels Mike towards his final confrontation in the film with The Tall Man.Fearing that Jody will abandon him, Mike follows him one evening to a local bar where he sees him pick up the woman in lavender from the opening scene and follows them to the Morningside Cemetery where Jody and the woman make out with each other. Just then, Mike is scared from his hiding place when a small figure wearing a brown robe jumps out at him. Jody, alerted by Mike's scream, finds him and angrily tells him to go home. When Jody returns to the make out spot, the mysterious woman in lavender is also gone.Mike begins to have horrifying nightmares about the Tall Man and of his dwarf-like minions and determines that something is going on at Morningside Mortuary. After an encounter when he is pinned under a car when one of the dwarfs drops a car on him while he is working in the garage, Mike decides to investigate.The next evening, he goes out, armed with a hunting knife, to Morningside Mortuary and breaks into the building through a basement window. Mike hides when the Tall Man and the cemetery caretaker are seen. Walking down a long hallway at the mortuary, Mike encounters a flying silver sphere, about the size of a softball, coming right at him. The caretaker appears and grabs Mike as the flying sphere comes right at him. Mike ducks in time as the sphere hits the caretaker and drills into his head, spurting out blood. Mike then encounters the Tall Man who chases him to the basement where Mike manages to sever some of the fingers of the Tall Man's right hand. Mike escapes from the mortuary and from two of the Tall Man's brown-robed dwarf minions and runs for home.The next morning, Mike shows Jody the severed finger of the Tall Man which is still twitching with life and bleeding yellow embalming fluid, which Mike is keeping in a small box. When Reggie comes over, and Mike shows them the severed finger, it transforms into a large wasp-like insect which attacks the three of them, but Jody manages to kill it by shoving it into the kitchen garbage disposal.The next evening, Jody goes to Morningside Mortuary to investigate, armed with a .45 caliber pistol, but he is immediately attacked by one of the brown-robed dwarfs in the mortuary basement, forcing him to run. Jody runs into Mike outside the cemetery driving their car when they are chased by a hearse being driven by one of the dwarfs. Jody opens fire on the hearse with his shotgun and forces it off the road. Upon examining the dwarf driver, the two brothers are shocked to find that it is a former friend of theirs (murdered by the woman in lavender in the opening scene) now crushed down to small size.Jody and Mike call Reggie who takes the still alive body of their friend into Reggie's ice cream truck while Jody drops Mike off at a local antique store. There, Mike finds an old photo of the Tall Man in an 19th Century photo during the founding of the town. Mike asks the two young store workers, Sally and Sue, to drive him home. During the drive, Mike tells them to stop the car when they see Reggie's overturned ice cream truck lying beside the road. Mike looks around and finds that the creature dwarf has escaped and Reggie is nowhere to be found. Just then, a group of dwarfs attack Mike and the girls who take control of their car and drives away, while Mike falls out the rear window.Mike goes home and tells Jody about Reggie's disappearance and about the recent attack. Jody decides to go back to the mortuary to look for Reggie and the two girls, and Mike wants to come along. But Jody instead locks him in his room, feeling that it would be too dangerous. Mike, using a buckshot shell, manages to disable the lock on his door and takes a pistol from the house to meet up with Jody, but the Tall Man is waiting for him outside (with his hand fully healed) and forcibly takes Mike into his waiting hearse to drive back to the cemetery. Mike manages to shoot out a tire from the car as it arrives at the mortuary which goes out of control. Mike manages to jump out of the car before it hits a tree and explodes, with the Tall Man still inside.Inside the mortuary, Jody is breaking into a crypt of his parents to find if their bodies are still there. Mike enters the building minutes later and sees his parents unearthed coffins and upon opening one, and finds that they are empty. Mike runs and has another encounter with the lethal flying silver sphere, until Jody shows up and destroys the silver sphere with a blast from his shotgun. The two brothers then encounter Reggie, who claims that he made it to the mortuary and has been hiding in a coffin for the past few hours. Reggie also claims to have found the missing girls in a room and freed them.Mike, Jody, and Reggie then go into another room which is a large open area, filled with storage barrels containing several dwarfs, as well as two long poles which upon close examination, is the gateway to an alien planet. Mike is briefly sucked through, but saved by Jody and Reggie who pull him back. Mike realizes that the Tall Man is using the corpses as slaves to his alien planet, and they have to be crushed to small size because of the planet's intense gravity and heat. When the lights in the building go off, Mike disappears and Jody sets off to find him.Alone in the small room, Reggie decides on a gamble to shut down the humming two-pronged gateway by slamming his hands on the tops of the poles, creating a vacuum which he barely escapes. Outside the mortuary, Reggie encounters the woman in lavender, who stabs him to death with the dagger. Mike and Jody come upon the scene and discover the woman in lavender, who changes into the Tall Man, yet another replica. Mike and Jody are forced to run as the mortuary glows and is apparently destroyed.Back home, Mike and Jody, distraught over the death of Reggie, and that the entire town is either dead or consumed by the gateway vacuum, plot on a way to stop the Tall Man by trapping him in a mine shaft since there seems to be no way of killing him. While Jody sneaks out of the house to go to a remote area near a mine shaft to prepare the trap, the Tall Man arrives at the house and attacks Mike who is forced to run. The chase leads to the mine where the Tall Man falls through a fake ground into the hole and to the bottom where Joey pushes a large boulder to seal the hole, thus trapping the Tall Man.After doing so successfully, Mike suddenly wakes up with a start in his house. Mike is next seen lying by the fireplace with the alive-and-well Reggie sitting next to him.Reggie tells Mike he was simply having a bad dream, something that has been a common occurrence since Jody died in a car crash a few weeks earlier. Mike realizes that Jody is indeed dead as well as his parents... all of whom died in the car accident, and the whole thing with the Tall Man was nothing but his horrible nightmare. Reggie suggests that they go away for a while, and Mike agrees.Mike goes into his room to pack his stuff where the Tall Man is waiting for him behind his door. After Mike is shocked to see the Tall Man behind his door, several arms of the dwarf minions pulls Mike through his bedroom window as he screams....

Tags: good versus evil, cult, horror, murder

Review:
You have your classic set-up, a spooky looking mansion where the dead are taken and your typical stupid characters that do the traditional scary movie things, like going to investigate a haunted house all by yourself, gratuitous breast shots, some eerie music and dark nights.
Phantasm director Coscarelli crafted a little gem of a horror movie that has bought me more enjoyment than any major Hollywood film I can remember.
I am grateful that he hasn't been sucked into turning out mediocre movies for major studios but has stayed somewhat true to the original spirit of Phantasm.Many of the comments here on IMDB criticize the film for weak FX and poor acting.
Critics who claim otherwise have no idea of the work involved in the process of creating a movie, especially before the advent of video.I've seen Hollywood blockbusters made for many millions of dollars with great technical values, and yet I can't think of one that I can enjoy time and time again like this film.
Mike teams up with his older brother and the local ice cream man, Reggie, to stop the Tall Man's gruesome work.I remember my mother telling me about how much "Phantasm" scared her when she was a teenager, and she rented it one day and I watched it along with her (I was about nine or ten at the time), and it was genuinely one of the most bizarre movies I've ever viewed.
For me, this film remains a nice little piece of spooky and original nostalgia, and I'm glad my mom decided to scare the daylights out of me with it at such a young age, because I grew to love this movie later on.
And then there's the Tall Man (Angus Scrimm) overseeing it all...Soon Mike, Jody and their friend Reggie (Reggie Bannister) are fighting for their lives...The story is pretty thin (and REALLY out of whack at the end), the acting dismal, there's no characterizations or depth and some of the special effects are horrible but...this is STILL a classic horror film.
Also Scrimm is EXCELLENT (and damn scary) as the Tall Man.Trivia: This was awarded an X rating FOUR TIMES because of the sphere killing...Coscarelli went all the way to the head of the ratings board who overturned it and gave it an R--a rare occurrence that the ratings board kept in a gore scene!.
When The Tall Man kills another friend of theirs, they decide to put and end to him, or at least try to.This movie has many different layered meanings, over the years some people have said that it's a reference to corporate America coming in (in the form of The Tall Man) and killing off everyone (by turning everything into a 'business') and some have said that this movie is also about a kid's loss of innocence and fears about everyone around him leaving (or in this case dying) Whatever the hell this movie is about, it's still great fun, followed by a couple of really disappointing (and belated) sequels..
I saw "Phantasm" for the first time on VHS in the early 80's and I have just seen it again on DVD and surprisingly the film has not aged, only the clothing, the hair style and the special effects.
With the help of his older brother (Bill Thornberry), the boy hopes to cut the tall man down to size.Many years later, Don Coscarelli is now seen as a master of horror and Angus Scrimm somewhat of a horror icon (though to a lesser degree than, say, Robert Englund).
But these are issues that can always be addressed in sequels.Some of the acting is cheesy -- people deliver their lines in a way that sounds forced, and Jody (the older brother) looks like he belongs behind the wheel of the General Lee. And Michael spends half the film looking like a girl.
The film suffers from some hammed up acting, classical 1970s character naivety, make-shift and jimmy-rigged special effects that don't quite work, a score that might as well be a series of MIDI files, and a plot that's all but coherent; however, Phantasm maintains a certain original charm and resourcefulness that larger budget films frequently lack.The above paragraph really isn't a complaint (despite how it may sound).
Phantasm could have been an utterly forgettable film on all levels, but instead he managed to leave a number of positive impressions.For one, the frame composition and some key scene transitions transcend budgetary implications (in particular, the Tall Man in the cemetery and the Tall Man slow-motion shot by Reggie's ice cream truck come to mind).
I won't give away the ending but let's just say the Tall Man is  temporarily disposed of until the next sequel comes out, although the  dream element that's supposed to encompass the whole sequence of events  in the film, is a big negative against it.
It managed to keep Avco/Embassy in business so they could bring  us later horror stuff like ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK (1980); THE FOG (1980)  and DEAD AND BURIED (1981)  The MGM DVD also has a lot more extras on it than you would expect from  other DVDs released by the same company, including 8mm  behind-the-scenes footage of the making of PHANTASM; a 1979 interview  down in Miami with director Coscarelli and Angus Scrimm; an appearance  at a 1989 Fangoria convention by Scrimm, and movie & TV trailers for  the film.
(in fact, I had a dream where I was in Hell and I encountered a priest that had been shrunk and dissected by a demon and this was before I saw Phantasm) I know I would be pretty hysterical if The Tall Man was stalking me.It's these points of the film that for me makes Phantasm an atmospheric and creepy horror gem, in fact it brings me back to when I was a five year old child in a video store in the 90's, traumatized by the VHS covers for Hellraiser and The Blob only to eagerly await the day I was old enough to view them.
This movie has creeped me out more than any other Horror classic ever could now and I'm far from the age I was when I used to be scared those films.
Most of the film has the Tall Man chasing the younger boy around after the kid learns of his secrets.As low-budget horror movies go, I've seen far worse.
Apart from that you get people being here and there, not understanding how they got there, how they got in etc.the main character, Mike, seems to be in a desperate need of a speech therapist;no one can really act (except Reggie Bannister)nothing really makes sense, except those spicy brain-chewing flying ballsthe Tall Man with his continuous, ever-monotonous "Boy!" is more pathetic than scaryOne last note, I did not realise when it was time to start getting frightened - it is all so awfully junky.
If you're looking for killer-jawas, horrible acting, a non-existent story and bad special effects, you'd be hard-pressed to find a better way to fill that void than watching Phantasm.
20-year-old Don Coscarelli wrote and directed this low-budget, school kid's idea of a scary story: young boy must convince his older brother that the neighborhood funeral parlor is actually a house of horrors, presided over by the Tall Man and guarded by a flying silver sphere.
The story itself is interesting -- the characters are pretty likable, and there are enough fantastic elements that it's a pretty surreal experience.However, the execution left me wondering who decided to take what would have been the most interesting parts of the film and either leave them out of the script or drop them on the cutting room floor.This movie could have been excellent -- however, major plot points are explained very poorly (when they're explained at all), apparently in favor of a few more scenes of "ahhh, midgets, get my shotgun!" Everything that DID make the movie could certainly have stayed, but two more hours of actual character development would have clinched this as one of my favorite movies.I wanted to enjoy this movie; unfortunately, I can't find enough redeeming value here to watch it again, let alone recommend it to others..
I am a proud child of the 1980s and I love the nostalgia that comes from all the great horror movies of the 70s throughout the 80s.I had seen bits and pieces of Phantasm on TV for Halloween, on Sunday afternoons and so one.
I understand that the budget was low and it was not yet the prime of modern horror, but Phantasm offers little to nothing as a so called "classic film".Aside from the darkly lit nights and the 70's hairstyles, the movie offers minimum 1970s nostalgia.
Micheal Baldwin,, Angus Scrimm, and a host of others, that really make this movie great,, but i guess what really sells this movie is the premise,, pretty much unique to itself, that the guy in charge of the mortuary is stealing bodies,, souls,, and shrinking them,, into dwarfs,, and using them as slaves for the netherworld,,The tall man only has 5 lines in the movie,, 28 words all together,, but he is definitely a man to be reckoned with,, this man will scare the heck out of you time and time again,, this is really just a great horror movie,, with a lot of twists and turns,, and great camera work two i might add, steady cam was just starting out ,, specially on this flick, so yeah it's a little on the raw side,, buy hey it's new for the time period...
Together with their friend Reggie (Reggie Bannister), an ice cream man, they must do battle with a nefarious undertaker known only as The Tall Man (Angus Scrimm) and his various minions...not to mention a neat flying sphere that can puncture skulls.Writer / director / cinematographer / editor Don Coscarelli truly hit paydirt with this enduring fan favorite, a horror / fantasy classic that spawned a franchise spanning over three and a half decades.
"BOOOYYY!!!"The film also benefits from a music score by Fred Myrow and Malcolm Seagrave that is pretty catchy, in particular its haunting, somewhat "Halloween"-esque main theme.The main set piece involves the sphere mutilating a caretakers' face; Coscarelli fought the MPAA to keep this sequence in the film and actually succeeded.Worth watching, at least once, by devotees of the horror genre.Seven out of 10..
Folks that like everything to be wrapped up nicely at the end are going to be let down, but for people looking for stand out horror from the seventies, this is quite a unique and inspired film..
It is amazingly original and therefore has a number of unique aspects!Unfortunately Phantasm was done as a low budget movie, it could have been probably more, because the sphere scene in the graveyard seems very dumb to me.Although it has what a horror movie needs: an incredibly frightening and unique bad guy the tall man (Angus Scrimm) and friendly heroes who fight him!The movie is about a boy named Mike who discovers on the cemetery - he is there because a friend of his brother died (killed by the tall man) - that the undertaker takes the buried coffins out of the earth after the burring!
The film is filled with surreal offbeat images - the killer sphere that drills into victims' heads and sprays the entire contents of their brains out behind it; the sinister figure of the Tall Man who is always shot striding along in slow-motion to the accompaniment of huge booming drumbeats; his finger that still wiggles after being amputated and then mutates into a malevolent insect; hands exploding out of walls and graves to grab people and so on.An example of the wonders you can achieve on a low budget, Phantasm was scripted (and edited, and shot) by its young director, Don Coscarelli, who wasn't afraid to give his imagination free rein in the story department.
Starting off in the time honoured manner of many horror films, with its youthful protagonist trying and failing to convince anyone, but especially his older brother, that evil is present in their small town, it works itself up into a relentless series of bizarre setpieces, without bothering to pay much attention to having it all make sense.Coscarelli sets a wonderful atmosphere in Phantasm.
The acting isn't so good and the dialogue in one mercifully short early scene (where two characters meet before the funeral that sparks the plot off) borders on C-movie-style contrivedness, but overall it's an enjoyable flick with plenty of memorable sequences and a  sense of pace and enthusiasm last seen in The Evil Dead..
the story elements (namely, a funeral home, a tall man, a silver ball with a drill on it, a killer housefly, a musclecar, an ice cream man, killer jawas, and a tuning fork) are not really combined so much as stuffed into 88 minutes, and the scariest thing about the movie is that this stream-of-consciousness approach to horror filmmaking actually works.
The character of The Tall Man played by Angus Scrimm has become a horror icon, and add the flying brain sucking spheres and the corpses turned into midgets and you've got yourself one very weird and creepy experience!
The acting is abysmal, the dialogue is risible, the plot is incoherent, the theme is yet another "Tubular Bells" ripoff, the concepts would have been too bizarre and far-fetched for Ed Wood, and the ending is silly.But somehow, Coscarelli manages to overcome all this and make a genuinely effective little horror film.
The other was Phantasm.The film starts off like standard horror fare- sinister goings on at a small town American mortuary.
If compared to other horror movies of yore, Phantasm has aged surprisingly well and still sends shivers down your spine nearly four decades after its initial release.One key element for the film's success is its twisted, mysterious and creative story that isn't always easy to follow because it isn't obvious what's dream, imagination and reality.
i remember watching this as a kid one night on hbo back when hbo was not 24 hrs a day and around midnight they would show their last movie and back in 1980 they would show this.it was like watching a strange and eerie dream.this movie is part horror,and part fantasy.angus scrimm as the tall man is clearly the star of the show even though he  has so few lines.that is what makes the movie work.
the rest of the cast does an ample job but the director showcases THE TALL MAN so well that he doesn't need to say much at all.the movie is creepy and spooky but is also interjected with some humorous moments as well.some people think that the script is full of more holes than a bad slice of swiss cheese because they think that things are not explained well enough or there is still some  questions that need to be answered, but there in lays the beauty of this film.
The film features one of horror cineams little known icons The Tall Man and those damn flying balls.
At times the acting is a bit thin (but not terrible) and the story still has some holes in it (ie questions that could use answering) but what it does have going for it is a creepy atmosphere and a director that knows how to use suspense.Too many horror movies today, especially low budget ones, rely heavily on gore.
After watching it a few times and buying the re-released version on MGM video (which has footage cut from the movie at the end of the video) I have come to love this movie.Now I see why it's a cult classic.The special effects are pretty good for a low budget horror movie, especially the sphere!Angus Scrimm as the Tall Man just rules, the movie is an eerie, dark, visual and mind bending experience.
Although filmed on a low budget (and you can tell!), Phantasm set new ground for horror movies.
I don't know why i watched the whole movie, i kept waiting for something to happen because the reviews that i had read before viewing the film were complementary to say the least, in fact a lot of people really liked it.
Most horror and scenes fiction movies with a cult few up a great films.
Don Coscarelli's "Phantasm" is regarded as a classic.However it sometimes fails to live up to its reputation.The script is original and the special effects are extremely effective.There is a fair amount of blood and gore to satisfy splatter fans.The acting is passable-especially Angus Scrimm is wonderfully creepy as The Tall Man.The ending is pretty weak to me.The plot is as follows:A young boy Mike(Michael Baldwin)notices strange actions perpetrated by The Tall Man(Angus Scrimm),the mortician at the local cemetery.The people who are taken to Morningside Cemetery for interment don't always end up where they are supposed to be.Mike and his brother then set out to stop him,with the help of Reggie(Reggie Bannister)..
For a low budget 70's horror movie "Phantasm" its strangely effective, its atmosphere and tone are kind of what make this movie enjoyable to watch, not to mention that its really original.Its not that very well written, the dialog is quite awkward and clunky, and the weird acting doesn't make things any better.
If you compare it to most low budget exploitation horror films from the time "Phantasm" almost seems elegant..
These are all classic elements of Don Coscarelli's highly bizarre but wildly creepy 1979 horror film "Phantasm".
Those who haven't seen "Phantasm" would laugh at such remarks, but once you watch it, you realize that Coscarelli, who not only directed the movie but also wrote and edited it, focuses on something we can be genuinely afraid of.The Tall Man is easily one of the scariest bogeymen in horror cinema.
Phantasm has it all when it comes to a good old fashioned horror film.
Don Coscarelli's Phantasm is a unique and original horror film that would have been great were it not for two problems; bad acting and a rather lousy ending.