SO, the big question is does this pick up from where part 3 left off in such a shocking fashion? Heh. Well. Kinda. There’s some flashbacks to start, done well to re-establish the sense of foreboding after the somewhat cheesenings of the prior two films. Can cheese be used in this form? I think so. I will deem it so. But this one actually plays is pretty straight, no BS secondary characters. Well, at least not ones that aren’t Reggie love interests.
Mike is back on the road, driving a hearse through the desert. He has his fate to play out with whatever is happening there, drawn to Death Valley. Reggie doesn’t know what to do, he’s ready to call it quits after his face-to-face with the Tall Man. Fitting reaction, methinks. He is fed up with it all but knows his buddy Mike is still out there, and he can’t go back to being an ice cream man. He wants to, though. You know he does. He still even has the suit. That’s just like an extra level of creepy to the overall weirdness of what ensues.
This one is actually a more return to form of the first movie. Honestly, if they had just kinda combined the Mythology of Fuckenings of part 2 and 3 (and done away with the secondary characters of those two movies) as a prologue and launched into this? Probably better. So I actually consider this Phantasm 2.5 really. (II.V?) Coscarelli ends up using some unused footage he shot during the first one, to usually good effect. Used as flashbacks here (obviously), it supplements the story to fill in a few more of the blanks in the mythology he started with the first movie, but still just kinda stretches the plot out. The ending is not like the shock endings of prior but still left pretty open-ended. There’s still questions to be answered. Are they addressed 18 years later with what I can only imagine is the last movie in this saga, known as Phantasm: Ravager? I’m not getting off this train yet, we’ll see how it goes. This one renewed my interest a bit more to see how it all plays out.
