Oooh I bet that was cool!
It was. Reggie and Mike were kind of mentors. Think Batman and company in DC Universe Online. My friend invented an entire fleet of flying balls with different capabilities.
God, I haven’t thought about that in years.
Isn’t there a close up of the car in Phantasm 2 that shows a “hemi” badge on the boot (trunk)?
Edited to add link: IMCDb.org: 1971 Plymouth Hemi 'Cuda 426 Replica in "Phantasm II, 1988"
It’s an interesting question.
The actual Phantams (I) car was a 340. The Phantasm II car was a 318 with hemicuda badges (but no Shaker hood)(The badge seen is on the scoop.).
Now, was that a 318 playing a hemicuda, or was the car, in the movie (the character, as it were), just a 318 with badges?
In other words, was the car acting? 
You knew… before it happened!
I remember there was a scene in one of them where one of the main characters sticks his upper body up through the sunroof of the 'cuda to shoot at something. Only thing was that until that very scene the car had no sunroof!
But I still enjoyed the movies.
The original was my first horror movie love and Coscarelli is iconic.
Sorry to be a buzzkiller, but from what I’ve heard the movie coming out on Oct. 7th was one that was hastily slapped together so that the studio won’t lose the rights to the “Phantasm” franchise name; i.e., it will likely suck to high heaven. (The same studio are planning a reboot of the entire series later on in 2017.)
Not that the original was by any means a masterpiece of cinematic artistry, but…yeah I totally LOVED it when I was 10! Awesome, out of control weirdness that could only possibly have been conceived under the influence of a whole lot of illegal substances.
I was a little disappointed when I read “Dune” a few years after seeing it, and realized that the initial test that the protagonist went through was stolen from the GomJabbar chapter.
Cite? AFAIK, there is no studio other than Don Coscarelli; he owns every bit of every Phantasm movie and IP.
ETA: Also Phantasm: Ravager was completed in 2014. If it was, as you say, “hastily slapped together so that the studio won’t lose the rights”, why would Coscarelli have waited 2 years to release it? :dubious:
Yeah. Kid in a denim jacket packing a .45? Has a motorcycle and a 'Cuda? The people who don’t take him seriously get trashed, but the people who listen don’t? A 'Tall Man" (thank you Angus Scrimm) who likes sniffing the cold air from ice cream trucks?
A four-barrel shotgun? (Hokey and campy as hell)
Whats not to love?
Wouldn’t be the first time. Maxwell Smart drove a Sunbeam Tiger. You could see the badge right there on the fender. Only the car they really bought was a Sunbeam Alpine, which has the same sheet metal but a smaller engine. They needed the extra space under the hood to mount machine guns and shit. But they still slapped the Tiger badge on it so it would be more badass.
They did 4? I watched the first 3, don’t think I saw the fourth.
The tall man is dead, but apparently he was in V.
My favorite scene in phantasm was the scene were Jody takes off down the road, and Mike starts running through yards after him, because he is afraid his brother will abandon him.
Maybe he’s got it confused with the most recent Hellraiser sequel.
from wiki
“In 2011, a ninth film was released to a single theater in California for a crew showing that was ostensibly open to the public. Hellraiser: Revelations is the first film not to feature Doug Bradley as Pinhead and was shot in two weeks for $300,000. It was suggested by Bloody Disgusting that the film was only shot so that The Weinstein Company would not lose its rights to the franchise before it could produce a more profitable remake of the original. The film was released on DVD on 18 October 2011.”
I finally had a chance to watch Phantasm: Ravager the other night. I went ahead and got the HD streaming thru Amazon.
The movie looked great. It still retained quite a B-movie look as far as camera angles, sets & settings, etc., but it also had a modern-ish sheen to it. I was reminded of the way that the Tarantino/Rodriguez Grindhouse movies were given a '70s schlock veneer in post because Ravager was clearly shot with the intent to evoke late '70s/early '80s B-list horror movies. The gore was well done and was true to the previous Phantasm movies.
There was plenty of stilted semi-ridiculous and banal dialogue, most of which was delivered with the appropriate amount of ham-fistedness that the franchise and the genre require.
The acting was good; the best ever for a Phantasm movie, IMO. Angus Scrim once again delivers an iconic performance; a fitting swan song for a pretty cool life and lifetime’s works. RIP, Mr. Guy.
The second best thing about all the Phantasm movies isn’t the movies themselves, it’s the story they tell. It’s an incredibly rich and complex story that starts with a young boy who’s mental image of “life” is constantly disrupted, first by the death of his parents and then by his discovery of The Tall Man. This is the central theme of the Phantasm story: the way you think things are is not the way things are. Ravager continues to explore and exploit this premise, to the point that even we can’t be sure if what we’re seeing is happening, has happened, will happen or never happened at all. We share in Reggie’s confusion, his frustration at how unlikely it is he will win out and can admire his unwillingness to stop trying to restore order to his life and ultimately to reality.
Those moments of lucidity within each sequence where Reggie is trying to make sense of things without knowing if he is able to make sense, where he realizes that he may be delusional and just ranting crazy stuff, are excellently realized and for me elevated this film far above the action sequences. I loved all the instances of the silver spheres flying around and killing and especially liked the huge and menacing spheres, don’t get me wrong, but the best parts of this movie aren’t those parts.
The best thing about Ravager (and all the Phantasm movies, IMO) is the way that the story engages our imagination and how we fill in the gaps and order the story for ourselves. Instead of everything being explained for us or being familiar enough that we allow our expectations to explain things for us, the way Ravager’s narrative is constructed, we are forced to discard preconceptions and have to process and evaluate the information we are being given onscreen, which seems to constantly contradict itself. The film goes to great pains to show footage from the previous films, as if to underscore that even those reference points may not be valid anchors to what is currently happening.
And that’s the genius of the Phantasm story is that it actively engages people’s heads, which allows each of us to have a lot invested in the story. We are actively writing part of the story in our heads all the time. It doesn’t matter if something later contradicts what we had imagined; the story encourages us to simply take the new information into account and proceed from there, just like the characters onscreen, which reinforces that mental investment. It’s a terrific passive/active feedback loop.
And so everyone can stop wondering: the 'Cuda is fucking awesome! It totally fucking rocks!
Overall, I’m giving this movie a 7/10. If you aren’t a fan of schlocky 70s/80s horror movies, the purposely-lower-than-Hollywood-blockbuster production values may turn you off.
I look forward to ordering the forthcoming BR box set so I can have and watch all 5 Phantasm movies, but I hope someone else will come up with a complex diagram showing everything that happened and when and how it relates to everything else (like how people have done for Primer).
Thanks for the review Snowboarder Bo I’m really looking forward to seeing it!