“My name is Reggie. I was an ice-cream vendor by trade. Now … I’m a soldier.”

Don’t worry, I believe you’re allowed to laugh ;)

Much as I expected, I think ultimately this is my favourite of the series. The use of the old footage is almost beautiful. The moment at the end where Mikey appears to speak to himself across time and space feels like the kind of moment the whole series is working to find. How many movies can lay claim to such a moment, the same character played almost 20 years apart by the same actor, and meshing together so seamlessly as it does? I really think people underestimate the magnitude of this aspect of this movie. I only hope that a postBubba Ho-Tep Coscarelli can make “Phantasm V” even better. Listening to the commentaries, it seems there’s still more of the old footage to work into the story.

Incidentally, on those commentaries – I finally listened to them and they’re really nice, with A. Michael Baldwin, Reggie Bannister, Angus Scrimm and Coscarelli dropping in in different combos per movie. There’s not a great deal of new information in there, but you really get a sense of why these movies have always worked, like just how long they’ve known each other etc, “like family” as Scrimm says. And that “wrath of the Tall Man” credit mentioned below – appears at the end of all the movies, I think. I certainly spotted on II and III anyway.

November 14th, 2005:

Like the third movie, this movie manages to keep the same cast together, and adds to that a selection of footage that logically must have been shot for the original but it’s of scenes that would’ve had no place there. Their presence here is almost as bizarre as the whole time-space level this movie adds to the series. This one again is a little more juiced up but there’s a lot more tongue-in-cheek and you can kind of see the Don Coscarelli emerging that eventually made the fantastic Bubba Ho-Tep (I’d previously been kind of bewildered as to how he went from the original schlocky Phantasm to that relatively dreamy, poetic musing on old age).

I don’t know if there are similar things in the credits of the other films in the series, but I happened to notice here that the copyright notice at the end reads, “Unauthorized duplication, distribution or exhibition may result in civil liability, criminal prosecution and the wrath of The Tall Man.” lol The DVD doesn’t even have a trailer but it does have a commentary which, again, I’ve not yet listened to. Bring on Phantasm V!

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 28th, 2007 at 1:00 pm in 4 hearts, Movie Reviews and tagged as horror, Nineties, surreal, time travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.