Phantasm II (1988) | 31 Days of Horror: Oct 2

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Silver balls, silver balls. It’s Tall Man’s time in the city.

Nine years later, The Tall Man returns in Phantasm II with the action picking up right where it left off. The sequel brings back some of the best elements of the original, introduces new things to the mythology, and scares up some great frights!

Before Viewing

The Tall Man is back still attacking people at his mausoleum with silver balls. After a brief definition of the word “phantasm” by the narrator, Reggie (a survivor of the first film) and a young boy and girl are shown in various scary moments. They wander through a cemetery full of open graves. They are chased through a hallway by the camera (presumably the POV for a silver sphere), breaking doors that are closed behind them. And when the girl reminds the boy that it’s only a dream, the Tall Man suddenly appears reminding them that it’s not! Phantasm II is what’s on call for tonight.

Presented below is the trailer for the film.

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After Viewing

The final scene of Phantasm plays out with young Mike (A. Michael Baldwin) being reminded by Reggie (Reggie Bannister) that his brother died in a car accident, and not because of any supernatural events. Mike enters his bedroom to see the Tall Man (Angus Scrimm) and gets pulled into his closet by a pair of hands. Reggie saves Mike from being carried off by the Tall Man’s mutant dwarfs by turning on the gas and letting the house explode. Liz (Paula Irvine) awakens in the middle of the night from a bad dream and checks the gas on her stove to make sure it’s off. She began having visions of Mike 8 years ago, keeping journals about him.

In the present, a slightly older Mike (now played by James LeGros) gets released from Morningside Psychiatric Clinic and immediately begins digging up graves in the local cemetery when Reggie finds him. Mike tries to explain that the Tall Man has taken all the bodies, but Reggie doesn’t listen. As they arrive at Reg’s house, it explodes in a gaseous fireball–a message from the Tall Man. The two men vow to stop him and hit up a local hardware store for guns and other weapons (leaving money of course–they’re not thieves!). They travel around the state for months trying to track down the Tall Man by looking for towns that are derelict or dying.

At Moritos Cemetery they discover empty graves and other weird things. Mike sees a naked woman on the autopsy table, but when he turns around again she is gone. In the furnace room they find a person that looks like Liz, but as they get closer a mutant creature erupts from her back. The Tall Man psychically tells Mike to “head east.” In the town of Perigord, Oregon Liz has just lost her Grandfather–something she has been dreading, knowing that the Tall Man is out there, waiting. After the funeral Father Meyers (Kenneth Tigar) stabs the grandfather’s corpse, presumably in an attempt to prevent its reanimation. He is visited that night by the reanimated grandfather. Outside of town, Mike and Reggie pick up Alchemy (Samantha Phillips), a hitchhiker–who Mike realizes looks like the naked woman in the autopsy table.

At the Perigord Mortuary, Father Meyers opens a small black coffin that contains one gold and two silver orbs. The Tall Man appears and levitates Meyers, choking him on his own rosary. A silver orb flies down the hallway slicing off Meyers ear, and then attaches to his forehead, drilling into his skull. Liz finds the dead priest and runs, falling into an open grave where Mike saves her. Back at the bed and breakfast they’re all staying at, Reggie and Alchemy have sex while Mike and Liz cuddle, talking to each other through a psychic link.

The Tall Man grabs Liz, taking her back to the mortuary. Reg and Mike pursue his hearse in their car but the Tall Man runs them off the road, wrecking the car in a massive fireball. At the cemetery Liz manages to free herself before the mortician can put her into a furnace. Reggie has a chainsaw fight with a graver, a Tall Man minion that wears a gas mask and exhumes bodies, while Mike helps Liz flee the mortician and a gold sphere–which features a buzz saw and a laser. In the autopsy room Reggie adds hydrochloric acid to a vat of yellow chemicals that the Tall Man pumps into corpses to reanimate them.

The trio opens a door which contains two silver pylons–an invisible entrance to the Tall Man’s planet or plane of existence. The Tall Man arrives attempting to kill them all, but Liz is able to stab him in the neck with the embalming wand and pump him full of acid, apparently killing him. They torch the mortuary and exit as it burns down. Alchemy, who was leaving town when her car broke down, arrives in a hearse she hotwired and drives them away. All seems well until she pulls a piece of her scalp off and throws Reggie out of the car. Mike and Liz repeat that it’s just a dream when the sliding window to the front seat opens revealing the Tall Man in Alchemy’s place. He tells them it’s not a dream, as monstrous hands break the rear window and drag them out.

“You think that when you die you go to heaven. You come to us!” – The Tall Man

It’s been four years since I looked at the original Phantasm, and I have eagerly been awaiting the chance to continue this franchise with Phantasm II. Released nine years after the original, this sequel ups the stakes on every element of the first film. But why did it take so long to get made after the cult success of the original? One reason is director Don Coscasrelli wrote and directed The Beastmaster in 1982, one of the better swords and sandals films from the 80s. He has admitted that he was unable to come up with a proper idea for a sequel, and once he did it was then about securing funding. Universal Studios agreed to a very small budget for the film, but also reportedly had some strict rules for the filmmaker. These requests included no dream sequences, no ambiguity, and hire real actors for the roles of Mike and Reggie. Both Reggie Bannister and A. Michael Baldwin hadn’t appeared in any films since 1979s Phantasm, and as such were not considered bankable leads. The studio relented somewhat allowing Coscarelli to screen test Reggie, but required him to hire a different actor to play Mike, which is where James LeGros comes in. This is actually not as jarring as it may seem, making the film slightly better than it may have been with the original actor.

Phantasm II had a lot of horror sequels to study before its release. The early to mid 80s was a time of expanding 70s (and earlier) horror franchises, including Halloween II, Psycho II, Friday the 13th Part 2, and Amityville II: The Possession, along with many other series that debuted in the 80s. The one thing all these films had in common was their ability to go bigger. Maybe it was due to increased funding for the films (Phantasm II had the largest budget of any of the five films in that franchise at $3 million) or the creators wanting to return to similar horror elements without repeating themselves. Here, there Tall Man returns, but that was never really in question for a sequel. Unlike other franchise villains, he had not been killed or vanquished in the original. The bigger surprise is the return of Mike (even if he’s played by a new actor). It seemed as if he was gone for good. And instead of one silver sphere, the Tall Man returns with three–one of which is gold and includes a blade and laser attachment. There’s also new helpers like the morticians (potential reanimated bodies) and the Gravers, who like the midgets characters are ubiquitous in their gas masks and slicker outfits. Along with enhanced special effects–like the creature in Liz’s back or the small worm that crawls out of the Tall Man during the acid scene–all lead to greater gore and potential scares. But the scariest moments are the times in between. Like waiting with the alcoholic priest to find out what’s outside his front door or holding your breath, wondering what will happen while Liz is wandering the mortuary by herself.

Coscarelli also added more humorous moments to the film as well. Reggie’s character is very much an everyman type of character–not unlike Ash in The Evil Dead–and reacts to outrageous moments with a joke. Sometimes it might even be a sly wink towards the audience, such as during the chainsaw fight where the Graver pulls out a chainsaw twice as long as Reg’s. He gives a nod that this is totally a joke about penis size. There’s also a weird, yet funny, moment that I noticed in this viewing that seems so great. It is when Liz’s grandmother rolls over to see the reanimated corpse of her husband in bed next to her. He growls. She screams, and then he gives this little eyebrow-raise like he’s coming on to her. It is a shocking and absurd moment that catches the audience unaware, inviting both a scare and a laugh..

The other element that was added into this sequel is trying to increase the scope of the film. The original Phantasm took place in the single town of Morningside where the Tall Man had set up shop to abduct bodies. But with the sequel, he’s in need of a lot more bodies, so Reg and Mike set out on the road to find him. They spend up to six months driving around the northwest trying to track him down. He’s certainly much busier in this film. This road trip gets compressed in the film, but it increases the feeling that this is a much more expansive plot than before. The characters are also more up to the task this time. It’s not just a single gun or a knife this time around. Reggie and Mike grab a whole store full of supplies (but they do leave money in the register to pay for things. They’re not criminals). Mike crafts a homemade flamethrower from multiple propane bottles, while Reggie straps two sawed off shotguns together for a four-barrel blast. He uses this just once, and then tosses the gun. What a waste! They also have at least one grenade which they use in an improvised trap with part of an old Budweiser can.

Given these advancements in the sequel, the themes of the film remain steadily similar: the fear of death and loss. This time Liz is the one grieving the loss of loved ones (her grandparents). She joins Mike and Reg in their crusade to get revenge on the Tall Man and his evil, yet unknown goals. But no longer does the film try to counsel about philosophical matters. This late 80s film teaches that wrongs can only be righted by a trunk full of ammunition and vengeance to destroy that which has wronged you–a fully Reagan era belief come to life. Both main characters also find someone they can care for. Mike and Liz spend a tender moment together fascinated by their psychic rapport (Liz calls it ‘chaining’), while Reggie goes bonkers with Alchemy. Even if she may be a minion of the Tall Man, just like the Lady in Lavender was in the first film. The Lady in Lavender only stabs Reggie. Here, Alchemy throws him out of the speeding car. His apparent death at the end of the film illustrates the slasher film rule about characters having sex: those who do, get killed.

If reports of the studios involvement requesting less ambiguity are to be believed, then Coscarelli slipped several past them. There’s still a lot of unknowns in Phantasm II, even with it furthering the mythology of the Tall Man and his minions. For example, what does Father Meyers know about the Tall Man? They seem to have a beef that precedes this film. And what was the point of the priest desecrating the grandfather’s body with that huge ceremonial blade he kept in his jacket? Was it to keep the Tall Man from reanimating it later? Maybe grandma seeing the process and fainting prevented Meyers from finishing. There also doesn’t seem to be a good answer as to why the Tall Man needs to convert so many bodies into dwarves. Phantasm II shows a similar scene of the red-skied planet with a long line of hooded dwarves. It’s shocking, and a little sci-fi, but still an unknown reason for the terror. But maybe that’s a good thing. The point of the Phantasm films is to create that dreamlike state of terror that can’t be explained. It’s as if the film’s subconsciousness is telling viewers to run, but they can’t. The exact reasoning for a lot of the weirdness in both these films is exactly the reason why so many people love them.

Assorted Musings

• Father Meyers’ name may be a nod to Michael Myers from Halloween. Coscarelli is admittedly a big fan of other horror films.
• The crew found a real house that they could blow up. They ran plenty of cameras on the scene, using the moment in two different scenes. The first is Mike’s house exploding and then Reggie’s house 7 years later. This may confuse eagle-eyed fans wondering why the same house explodes twice.
• In the crematorium, the mortician crushes up the remains of a skull with his hammer and pours it and the ashes into a bag marked with the name, Sam Raimi–a nod to the creator of Ash and The Evil Dead.
• The grandfather’s name is never spoken, but Liz sees an empty grave with the name Alex Murphy on the headstone. The pills in her grandmother’s bedroom have the last name Murphy on them, so Alex can be assumed to be her grandfather’s name. This may or may not also be a nod to the main character in RoboCop.