Phantasm 2 (1988)
Review by the Fiend of Grue
At the very beginning, which is kind of like a prologue to the actual movie, we are introduced to a woman named Elizabeth (Paula Irving). A blond, seemingly smart late teen who tells about visions that she has had for the past 8 years. Her visions are of a boy named Mike (James LaGros), a man named Reggie (Reggie Bannister) and the terrifying entity, The Tall Man (Angus Scrimm). She’s not sure what the visions are about, but she must find answers to them.
As Liz is talking about her visions, we pick up right where part 1 ended, with Mike in his room, being pulled through his mirror by the Tall Man. Now we see Reggie hear it from downstairs and immediately he gets up and runs to find what the commotion was. He sees Michael on the floor with the Tall Man and his demon dwarves surrounding him. After a small struggle, he gets himself and Michael out of the house (conveniently) just before it explodes.
From there, Michael ends up in a psychiatric hospital for a few years where they tell him that everything that he went through was in his head. When Michael is finally released from the hospital he is 19 years old and certainly wasn’t fool enough to believe it was all in his head. Michael heads straight to the cemetery to start digging up graves to prove they are empty and Reggie shows up still trying to convince Michael to let it go. After seeing several empty graves, Reggie is still on the defensive with Michael and the two of them head back to his house in time to see it explode, killing his family inside. Once the explosion happens, Reggie suddenly decides that Michael is right and they must try and stop the Tall Man at all costs. It won’t be easy and could take years, they know, but they still must try.
Going from town to town, they search in vain for the infernal Tall Man. While on their search, Reggie picks up a woman named Alchemy (Samantha Philips) that Michael is not too keen on because of the visions he’s had of her lying dead in a morgue, but they take her with them anyways.
Meanwhile, Liz’s grandfather dies and her grandmother goes missing. While out searching for her, she stumbles upon her grandfather’s empty grave and decides to check out the nearby morgue for answers. After entering the morgue, Liz sees all kinds of strange things happening: a man bringing in an obviously exhumed casket that is covered in mud, she runs into a priest, Father Myers (Kenneth Tigar) who knows too much for his own good and even has an up close and personal meeting with one of the infamous spheres. After finally freeing herself from the madness in the morgue, she escapes right into the arms of the man she’s had visions for years of, Michael. It makes for a Kodak moment.
The happiness is short lived as Liz is kidnapped by the seemingly ever present Tall Man. Michael and Reggie see it happen and give chase back to the morgue once again, leaving Alchemy behind at the house. Liz is not going to be kept without a fight as she battles furiously with her captors. Michael and Reggie soon find their way in and the three of them have all sorts of problems in the form of the Tall Man’s little scary dwarf demons that also return from the first movie. In the original film they always lurked in the shadows, and they still do here also, but we do get to see their faces this time around and lets just say these little boogers haven’t been getting much beauty sleep. And to bring up the spheres once again, they too play a much more prominent role this time around and we also see that these things are much more versatile in their arsenal than the first movie showed.
Eventually, there is a showdown of epic proportions with the Tall Man that ends in a slimy, gory mess and leaves us with a cliff hanger to carry onto part 3, which came six years later.
Phantasm 2 was Don Coscarelli return to the director’s chair, armed with a much bigger budget than the first film due to him securing a deal with Universal Pictures. The effects are much more elaborate, gory and violent this time around with my favorite part being when one of the spheres burrows it‘s way through one of the Tall Man’s cronies, lifting and contorting his body before finally finding it‘s way out of him…through his mouth. The sets are also all top notch and the look of the film is no doubt of a higher budget.
The movie employs a mostly stellar cast, but for reasons that I am not aware of, the original Michael from the first film, Michael Baldwin, does not return here and it is an obvious downer from the get-go. While James LaGros does a decent job as 19-year-old Michael, he still doesn’t do as good of a job as Baldwin did. Thankfully, Coscarelli got Angus Scrimm and Reggie Banister to return to the fold and it does manage to make up for the missing Baldwin. And speaking of Angus Scrimm, in this movie he seems all the more menacing and creepy. Perhaps it’s because he’s 10 years older than in the original and his appearance is just more old and it makes him more scary? Whatever the reason, Scrimm is the man and with all of the recognition the man gets, it still isn’t as good as it should be. He isn’t quite on the same level as Mike, Fred, Jason and Leatherface, but he SHOULD be and this movie shows why.
The same dreamlike atmosphere from the original is intact this time out; things are seen by one person and not another and dreams and reality seem to blend together at times. Coscarelli masterfully wrote the story to where it is hard to distinguish between what is real and what is fantasy, much like the original. Much of the story takes place in cemeteries, morgues, abandoned towns and deep, dark nights, all instilling an effective setting to the material at hand. The Tall Man and all of his demonic tools (spheres, demon midgets) are still never clearly explained, leaving it up to you to decide just what in fact they really are. For some, this is frustrating, but the mystic and mystery is what adds to the creepiness and overall effectiveness of this franchise. By not explaining everything and leaving some of the plot points in the unknown, Phantasm seems to be better for it. All that is certain here, is that when you die, you don’t go the heaven, “you come to us” as the Tall Man explains to Father Meyers at one point and you know that once that happens…your ass has had it!
Better hope you don’t die!
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