Phantasm

Saw Phantasm, an interesting but kind of mixed bag horror film about two brothers and a spooky funeral home director.  The film contains eerie, fascinating scenes that still feel fresh and novel, and also strange, dated scenes that feel moldier than a year-old corpse.  The film is interesting on the whole and goes to some very strange and interesting places, but it's a mixed bag in the end, containing as much bad as good.

The film is apparently based on a dream the director had of a chrome sphere chasing him through marble hallways, intent on drilling into his head.  That sequence exists in this film and is great.  A lot of the horror sequences in the film dip heavily into sci-fi imagery, with chrome and machinery so advanced it is like magic.  All of these scenes are marvelous and feel like something out of Beyond the Black Rainbow or something.  The mixture of dread with high-tech magic is fascinating and ripe for the modern time: there is a toxic ghost in the machine, animating it to terrible ends.

The film does show its age in most other scenes however.  There's a lot of scenes with the younger brother in particular, delivering lines like "You gotta be shittin' me, man! That mother's strong!" in a pipping little-boy voice.  The older brother isn't saddled with such cumbersome lines, but he spends a lot of time playing guitar and driving a muscle car and being a cool dude.

There's some other scenes that are not so much dated as just kind of clumsy.  At one point the younger brother is locked in his room but MacGyver's his way out.  We watch him slowly and thoughtfully assemble the door-unlocking mechanism.  The scene kind of drags.  At other times characters are abruptly introduced only to be killed off-screen shortly after.  Allegedly the original cut of this film was 3 hours long, so perhaps that's to blame here.  Even at its current modest runtime of 90 minutes, it kind of drags at the end.

The film is worth seeing, but set your expectations low.  There's a lot of stale 70s-ness going on, but there's glimmers and flashes a much more interesting, much stranger movie in there.  This film leaves a ton of stuff unexplained or vaguely hinted at, with enough dangling material for several sequels and comic books.  There's a happy lack of zombies and an abundance of strange imagery.  It's worth a look, just be forewarned.