Phantasm: Ravager – 1 out of 5
Well, I made it. Mission accomplished. I watched the entire Phantasm franchise and I walked away unscathed and still with my wits about me. It was pretty fun when it started because I could laugh at and have fun with how poorly made the firstthree films were but the fourth one was a bit of a wake-up call. That one was so boring that this endeavor quickly became homework. I can say that this final film; Phantasm: Ravager, is slightly better than the last one but, truthfully, not by a whole lot.
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| This was Angus Scrimm's final film. Thanks for being the only thing that was decent in this franchise. Even though I thought The Tall Man was a dumb character, Scrimm made him fun to watch. |
Reggie the ice cream man/creep (Reggie Bannister) is still out hunting for The Tall Man (Angus Scrimm) and his journey through the dimensional gates from the previous film has him confused and on edge. He starts to have visions of himself in a realty where his fight never took place and is stuck at a care facility where his friend Mike (A. Michael Baldwin) tells him he has been diagnosed with dementia. Reggie tries to explain that what is happening around them isn’t real but a trick of The Tall Man and tells him that he met a woman named Dawn (Dawn Cody) in the desert and tried to sleep with her—it’s weird that he had to include this detail but, if you’ve watched the other films, you know Reggie is a really creepy character and he clearly has very little respect for women. As he tells this tale, he finds himself waking up in an apocalyptic future where the woman Dawn is a freedom fighter alongside Mike. In this world, The Tall Man has taken over and left everything in ruins. Going back and forth from the dream of the hospital to the nightmare of the destruction, Reggie has no idea what is real and what is false and what The Tall Man has planned for him.
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| Reggie is now at that age where he can barely see over the steering wheel. |
Like I said, Ravager is just slightly better than Oblivionmostly because it doesn’t have a very slow moving plot, or an overreliance on using deleted scenes from the first film nor a story that feels like it is actively working against developing the stuff that is kinda interesting. However, it’s only better by an amazingly small fraction because this movie is a Reggie-heavy affair and, if you’ve read my reviews for the other films, you know I don’t like the character because I think he’s an unlikeable creep and I don’t really find Bannister’s performance to be that grabbing. The film does bring back one of the few legitimately cool characters the franchise has had but the person is brought in at the end during a mid-credit sequence and it felt like such a wasted opportunity. I found myself yelling, “I just had to watch the ice cream man jump back and forth from a dumb dream to a poorly produced nightmare for an hour and twenty minutes and this character is still a part of the mythology?!? Not fair!”
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| In fairness, this is the first film in the franchise where the silver balls are actually traveling at a speed where they look like a threat. |
As much as I don’t like Reggie, I will give the movie points for giving him a moment where he did finally come off like a badass. Sadly, it was towards the beginning of the film and then we had to deal with his creepiness and his love of mugging the rest of the time. However, during a short battle against two of The Tall Man’s silver spheres, there was a genuinely cool and tough guy moment that Bannister very effectively delivered. I will also give the movie points for bucking the trend of having the Ice Cream Man getting the girl he creepily hits on. We’re treated to Reggie’s usual skeevy self as he eyeballs Dawn up and down when he meets her and then I had to stop the vomit from coming up my esophagus as he tries to worm his way into her bed but, as this happens, she shoots him down and his attempts at getting some action crashes and burns. That was so nice to see.
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| Oh man, Reggie is using the guitar to try and get the girl. At this point, I can't tell if Reggie is just a parody of really douchey dudes. |
Remember, he had a family that was killed by The Tall Man but he only acknowledges them when it’s convenient to the plot. The rest of the time he’s trying to spend his off-hours from trying to kill The Tall Man with acting like the gross, greasy guy you see at a bar that you know is on some sex offender list. (Reggie’s balding pattern and his little ponytail doesn’t help eliminate this vibe.) And speaking of bringing up Reggie’s family when it’s convenient to the plot, that happens here as The Tall Man says he will give them back to Reg. He immediately says no and then they are forgotten again. Reggie’s family is a lot like the new powers they keep giving The Tall Man: They’re entirely plot specific and always tacked on for momentary use.
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| "I can bring back your family. The ones you somehow supported on an ice cream man's salary." |
The rest of the film kinda feels like a really bad throwaway Direct-to-TV sequel. With it’s really bad special effects, the nearly non-existent presence of The Tall Man (this was, after all, Scrimm’s final film) and how the movie can’t quite make the difference between the dream and the nightmare feel like anything but really bad editing, the whole experience feels like one of the bad movies you’d see on Syfy. Only, in this case, it’s just slightly better than something along the lines of Piranhaconda. Granted, I do enjoy how bad Syfy originals are and I have some fun watching and laughing at them so the film does earn some points in that regard. One thing I’ve repeated over and over again with most of the films in this franchise is that they have a “so bad, they’re good” angle working in their favor and this one feels like a return to that after the fourth film decided to just be bland and boring.
This time around, Don Coscarelli is only a co-writer with director David Hartman and I think the two of them really bit off more than they can chew. The special effects are a bit cringe-inducing and it’s hard to look past them as this film decides to go really big with The Tall Man’s plan but there just wasn’t the budget to make these ideas a reality. Ravager is basically abandoning the idea that this film is from a horror franchise and is leaning more towards the science fiction side—an element that has always had its place in these films but a very small one. Basically, Hartman and Coscarelli decide to go full Terminator Salvationas we see The Tall Man has taken over the planet in Reggie’s nightmare but going this big with such a low special effects budget doesn’t work out. The grand reveal of what has come of the world is completely undone by the overall quality and it was really hard to not laugh at what I was watching.
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| With all the realism of graphics from a Playstation 2 game! |
The smaller parts, the section where we see the ragtag team working against The Tall Man in the shadows and fighting in a derelict building look fine and sells the idea of a bleak tomorrow effectively well for the film’s budget. It’s when the film goes big that it’s really hard to take it seriously. Had this film decided to focus on a smaller scale—like, I don’t know, finally do a story about how The Tall Man can so easily decimate a small town with no neighboring areas really being that suspicious of what happened (something I’ve said would have been interesting since the second film)—this final installment might have worked out better.
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| Who would have thought that this is where the franchise would have found itself after this whole dumb journey started? This is a long way from the first film. |
Ultimately, as it stands, Phantasm: Ravager feels more like a bland attempt at a cash grab. Pretty much from the beginning of the movie it felt like it was just going through the motions to get the feature out there and get it onto the shelves of the retail store in order to get some sort of return from the fans of this cult classic franchise. In a way, this series is ending like it started: A film that feels sorta incomplete and furnished with barely acceptable acting, uninteresting characters, a non-threatening antagonist and horrible editing that is incapable of selling the dream-like reality it wants to convey. However, this being said, I won’t deny the potential this idea has and it might be a franchise that could use a little retooling and a reboot.
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