Reggie Bannister

  • Phantasm III: Lord of the Dead (1994)

    Phantasm III: Lord of the Dead (1994)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2021) Don’t tell anyone—especially not rabid Phantasm series fans—but I’m particularly fond of Phantasm III: Lord of the Dead. Much of this has to do with it being the series’ most overly comedic instalment. Horror comedy is a tough genre to pull off (bad ones end up feeling like repulsive examples of pure sociopathy) but when it’s executed well, you can end up with classics à la Evil Dead II, which probably influenced Phantasm III in some ways. To be clear, it’s not an end-to-end laugh fest: The focus here remains on the overweight, ponytailed, balding Reggie (once again, unlikely star Reggie Bannister) helping his younger friend Mike (Michael Baldwin, back in the lead after being recast in the second film) fight against the creepy spooky alien monster The Tall Man (Angus Scrimm, great as usual) and assorted metal spheres. Part of the film’s slide into comedy probably has to do with how familiar and self-aware it was at that point. The Hemicuda muscle car, quadruple-barrelled shotgun, metal spheres and Tall Man are iconic by this instalment, a looseness translating into a film that represents the series’ cruising altitude, making appropriate use of its limited budget and seat-of-the-pants filmmaking. Director Don Coscarelli remains better in set-pieces than overall narrative coherency, but he gets to feature the best female leads of the series here—I would have enjoyed more screen time for Sarah Scott Davis, but Gloria Lynne Henry’s character Rocky is a clear highlight of the series, so much so that she was brought back for a cameo in the fifth film’s mid-credit scene. Those bits and pieces (including a rather successful mausoleum fight in a series that has many of them) are reasons why I consider Phantasm III to be perhaps the most comfortable entry of the series: not the best, not the one with the better story, not the one with the most satisfying special effects, nor the most coherent—but perhaps the most all-around enjoyable one, firmly aware of its strengths and weaknesses in trying to make fans happy.

  • Phantasm II (1988)

    Phantasm II (1988)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, January 2021) In the grand fannish mythology surrounding the Phantasm series, Phantasm II is the misguided big-budget one. Writer-director Don Coscarelli convinced a studio to finance a follow-up to the 1979 original film, but the money came with restrictions: the studio insisted on recasting the lead character, and placed demands on the narrative that made the sequel a somewhat more coherent affair. Shifting from a small-town horror story to a road movie narrative, Phantasm II also codified much of what would become iconic in subsequent instalments. The Hemicuda was already present in the original, but it becomes a fetishistic object here. A very cool quadruple-barrelled shotgun is introduced, as are new golden spheres. More significantly, the focus of the film shifts a bit toward having unlikely heroic figure Reggie Bannister plays the lead, introducing some comedic elements that weren’t necessarily in the first instalment. The ending perhaps counts as one of the most interesting in the series, with a white-walled climactic location providing a rare victory for the heroes (one immediately nullified by a coda setting up further sequels). Despite the strengthened narrative (which endears me to this instalment), there is still plenty of weirdness and lack of adherence to a coherent set of rules—the Phantasm series, true to its title, is about being onboard for a ride that may not be under anyone’s control. In this regard, I see this maligned sequel as stronger in some aspects, weaker in others but still consistent with the series’ more-ambitious-than-successful nature.

  • Phantasm (1979)

    Phantasm (1979)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Hoopla Streaming, April 2020) The biggest surprise of Phantasm is that (especially with its new restoration) it looks just slightly newer than its 1979 release year—had I not known, I would have pegged the film as one of those imaginative mid-1980s horror movies with big ideas and no budget. The plot doesn’t quite make sense (a lot would be explained in the sequels), but as long as we stick to the Tall Man (Angus Scrimm), the sci-fi gadgets and weird imagination of writer-director Don Coscarelli, then we’re in good hands. The amateurish no-budget constraints of the film do grate, however, especially when the film’s high concepts can’t be delivered effectively: this is a film where these are clear differences between what’s being said and what’s shown on-screen. Still, imagination is a great asset, and the film is often effective in its impact. I just wish that there had been stronger attention paid at the higher level: Even after five films, I feel as if the Phantasm series has only scratched the surface of what it could achieve.

    (Second Viewing, In French, On Cable TV, January 2021) This is my second time having a gander at the horror/Science Fiction cult classic Phantasm, and I still don’t have a good handle on what’s going on. That’s by design: writer/director Don Coscarelli was labouring under severe budgetary constraints and a lack of narrative direction when he put together Phantasm (some of the hour-long amount of footage cut from the film would be revived as part of the fourth film in the series) and the emphasis is clearly on the high concepts, the uncanny visuals and the dreamlike atmosphere. The result is not uninteresting—and it’s a great deal more original than the slasher craze that was burgeoning at the time!—but those who crave a strong narrative will not necessarily have a good time. Of course, having a second look informed by the rest of the series helps in backfilling creative explanations that did not exist at the time: the sequels do a lot in providing context and pointing at the way some initially secondary characters would become the series’ focus over nearly thirty years. Angus Scrimm obviously remains the series’ most distinctive actor (his death in 2016 marked the definitive end of the original series more than any creative exhaustion or narrative conclusion), but who could have guessed that Reggie Bannister would become the series’ most valuable player? The ambitions of the film are constantly defeated by the low budget and the haphazard narrative, but there’s some undeniable power to the silver spheres, the mixture of horror and science fiction (which Coscarelli would later execute to a superlative degree in John Dies at the End) and the dreamlike atmosphere that emerged from heroic low-end filmmaking. It’s not clear to me if any of the sequels are better despite better production values, special effects and a better idea of where the narrative is meant to go: there is a rough filmmaking power to Phantasm that, at least, explains why it led to four follow-ups over the following thirty years.