Well, that was something, albeit I’m not 100% sure what. I’m trying to use this month of horror viewing to catch up on some of the bigger and older hits of the genre that I’ve hitherto never seen rather than rewatches, hence tonight’s screening… Phantasm has a certain reputation for not making a lot of sense, and I can’t say it doesn’t live up to that; I’d have struggled with it had I not read the Wikipedia summary of it. I think I liked it but I am genuinely unsure. I suppose you can view it as an interesting example of low-budget independent filmmaking somewhat like Halloween, the sort of things you can do with minimal resources and a particular vision… and I will say director Don Coscarelli certainly had one of those; I just don’t know how well he explained it. I knew Phantasm had originally been nearly twice as long as the end result, supposedly mostly character development stuff that Coscarelli decided was ultimately redundant, but I feel like there was a certain amount of expository stuff that got chucked out too. Alas that, apart from the minimal sense-making, Phantasm‘s other chief weakness is Bill Thornbury in one of the main roles; there is an unfortunately good reason why his acting career has been so limited, namely that so is his acting ability… I must give it points for the things it does well, of course, especially the mood it conjures (great night-time filming too), and of course Angus Scrimm as the Tall Man. He doesn’t really do an awful lot but he also doesn’t really need to; he just needs to kind of stand there and be tall. Which, measuring at 6’4″ as he apparently did, he was very good at, and the climactic chase scene where he’s pursuing the teenage lead is particularly effective because of the size difference between them. On the whole, possibly interesting more than actually successful, but I’ll take that over dull…
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