Phantasmagoria (2005)

(On Cable TV, January 2021) Most long-running horror series have a documentary or two to explain their creative origins, laborious making-of and fannish appeal. The Phantasm series was only four films long when Phantasmagoria was released (a fifth film has since joined the series), but you could argue that it needed an accompanying documentary more than most. Deliberately shrouded in mystery, changes of direction, budget-related compromises and visual kicks taking over a haphazard sense of storytelling, the Phantasm series leaves more than most to the viewer’s interpretation. An authorized documentary may not solve much, but at least it gives viewers the chance to hear the filmmakers (the most important being the series’ writer-director Don Coscarelli himself) a chance to explain some of their intentions. Phantasm, to be fair, remains a series with more potential than satisfaction: For all of the exhilarating weirdness of its blend between horror, Science Fiction, coolness and not enough humour, the Phantasm series doesn’t quite know where it’s heading, nor how to maximize the possibilities of its ideas. Usually executed with too-low budgets, the series has energy but no discipline and the result always under-delivers. With Phantasmagoria, at least we get to hear the reality behind the results: Seat-of-the-pants independent filmmaking, studio interference during the second film, no coherent overall plan and various ideas popping up during production are only some of the shifting winds affecting the movies. At least the films sound fun to make most of the time (the second film once again being an exception), as the actors and crew share memories of their good-and-rough times during shooting, explain some of the series’ most amusing or mystifying moments, and help resolve the puzzle of plot pieces being pushed from one film to another, with the fourth making extensive use of the extensive footage shot for the first film but then left on the cutting room floor. Absurdly enough, the way Phantasmagoria goes instalment by instalment helps act as a primer/explainer for the series as a whole, with a coherent vision straightening some of the creative intent behind it all. It’s quite an enjoyable documentary for fans of the series, and it may actually help ambivalent viewers such as myself become more sympathetic to what Coscarelli and his merry band of underpaid cast and crew were trying to accomplish.