Cold Fusion Video Reviews

• Written and directed by Don Coscarelli
• Starring
  • James LeGros
  • Reggie Bannister
  • Angus Scrimm
  • Paula Irvine
  • Samantha Phillips

Maybe it’s just the fact that this was the first Phantasm movie I saw, but as far as I’m concerned, it’s not only the best of the series, but one of the better things to come out of the eighties.

Plot descriptions are fairly useless when describing this series, which is one of the best exemplars of the “rubber reality” horror movie, in which at least one protagonist sees things that other people don’t, and often can’t tell which is the dream sequence and which is reality. Granted, horror movies have used this trick for ages, but most of them use it as a crutch to add spooky value to long stretches of story in which nothing really happens (see House 4). In this movie though, and in the Phantasm movies generally, the whole rubber reality adds to the stylized, atmospheric mood of the story, giving us a masterpiece of ambience above all. (The fact that some of the scenes in this movie were originally shot as dream sequences and then made a part of the narrative only adds to that wonderful confusion.)

Knowledge of the first movie is unnecessary, aside from the pickup used at the beginning of this one to bring you up to speed: Young Michael (Michael Baldwin) has lost his brother, and blames the Tall Man (Angus Scrimm), a tall and mysterious undertaker with dwarven minions. Because of his insistence on this, he’s been in a mental institution for the last seven years (i.e., since the events of the first movie) — long enough to be replaced by actor James LeGros. The substitution, apparently, was due to studio interference, as Baldwin hadn’t done any acting recently. When the third and fourth movies were made independently, like the original, Baldwin got his old role back; meanwhile, LeGros has moved on to Ally McBeal. For some reason, the LeGros Michael seems to be much more an active, take-charge character than Baldwin’s version in any of the other movies, and it’s interesting to speculate as to the reason — a character rewrite (more studio interference), or possibly a simple matter of how LeGros plays the character.

Anyway. Getting out of the institution, Michael teams up with the only “family” he has left, ice cream vendor Reggie (Reggie Bannister); and with Reggie’s family killed by the Tall Man, the two set out on a quest for vengeance, tracking the Tall Man across the Northwest with a trunkful of weapons and tools, guided only by Michael’s vague dreams and hunches.

Adding more depth is Liz (Paula Irvine), a young woman who has been haunted by dreams of Michael and the Tall Man for years, and who knows that, sometime soon, the Tall Man will be coming to her small town, and hopes that Michael will arrive before things come to a head.

Beyond this, a plot description is of little use. The disjointed narrative adds to the wonderful dreamlike narrative; the Tall Man is never truly explained, except for the fact that his mere presence somehow drains the life from small towns, allowing him to then reanimate the cemetery’s corpses as malevolent dwarves and ship them off to Somewhere Else. In this movie, Angus Scrimm’s age works perfectly, portraying the Tall Man as a being of ancient evil; in later movies, he tends more towards plain old and tired.

While I tout the dreaminess of this movie, such would obviously be dreary if it were the main defining characteristic of a movie; in fact, I think that the original Phantasm suffers from too much languid unreality, which slows the pace too much. Here, Coscarelli has added the elements of a male-bonding road trip (enhanced by wonderful well-considered cinematography, which gives the movie a visual richness that disguises its low budget), as well as more comic-booky action scenes involving the drawves, the Graver minions, and the trademark flying spheres, which cruise the hallways of the Tall Man’s mausoleum, using a wide variety of accessories to slice and dice their victims.

Also wonderfully macabre is inclusion of actual embalming techniques. If there’s anything spookier than the assistant mortician pounding to dust the fragments left over after a cremation, it’s that same mortician sewing shut the lips of Liz’s dead grandfather with a curved needle — a scene made all the more striking when the Grandpa comes back to claim Grandma, and his lips bear the tiny tears where he opened his mouth and tore through the stitching.

It’s not a perfect movie — the actors are comfortable but not stellar, and there’s a little too much roaming the halls encountering the next spooky obstacle — but it is a very good one, worth watching and remembering. The first film is ponderously slow and dated by late 1970s fashions and music; the third one veers too far into camp territory; and the fourth one, while capturing much of the mood of the second movie, relies far too much on familiarity with the rest of the series to give it meaning. But this one, as far as I’m concerned, is a terrific combination of all of the admirable elements in the rest of the series.

See it.

A Notable Quotable:

“You think that when you die, you go to heaven? You come to us!”

- The Tall Man

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 22 (plus 1 rat)
• breasts: 2
• explosions: 3
• dream sequences: 2 for certain, and possibly many more
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• attacks on the male crotch: 2
• characters who get to do voice-overs: 4
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 2
  • Kenneth Tigar (Father Meyers) played “Dammar” in the Voyager episode “Displaced”
  • J. Patrick McNamara (Michael’s psychologist) played “Captain Taggert” in the TNG episode “Unnatural Selection”