And the saga continues. Picking up pretty much where the last one left off again, some crazy hoops are jumped through to continue the shenanigans from as we last saw. But it works again. Kinda. And also opens up some direct dialogue with the Tall Man. Intriguing. He just got the hot blonde’s head, what he want with Mike? Coma-time cometh, let’s roll through a few more years in the interim, while the actor playing Mike swaps back to the original Michael Baldwin…
At this point, going over the plot seems a bit silly, so I will just go ahead and skip that. There’s still sphere-balls. There’s still some vagabond searching and 4-barrel shotgun action, and plenty feraliscious jawas on meth. But there’s also like the death-curse of a lot of 90s movies, like RoboCop 3: How to Kill a Franchise. This kinda alternates between a few cool concepts and then like a weird script-by-committee thing, trying to appeal to the widest audience? It’s...kind of a mess. Usually not good. But glimpses. Oh, the glimpses. Damn you, Coscarelli! Screentime coulda been filled with the hemicuda just drivin places.
I appreciate them bringing back the original actor for Mike, he can do what he needs to do here. Jody does his thing too, dead not-dead maybe dead. Reggie is the serious comedic horn-dog he needs to be, given any particular scene. Dude is elastic, I’ll give him that. The plot expansions don’t exactly suck, it’s the additional characters that put a bit of a drag on the overall arc. That’s basically a nice way of saying the other characters were pretty much ass. There. Let’s see how Phantasm IV picks up that challenge. I hope there’s some self-correction. I’m watching this series to the end now, I’m in it for the long haul. I just wish there’s a semblance of good alternate reality story telling this tale gets to do. Fingers crossed!
