Phantasm: The Undertaker’s New Clothes

 I always feel a little uneasy when I plan on tackling something that’s considered a classic in one way or another, especially when it’s something I’ve never seen before. There’s always the concern that a longtime favorite won’t have held up, but when something I’ve never seen before has a history and reputation and a devoted following and it doesn’t click for me, well…

…well, then you get Phantasm. It’s a definite cult classic, spawning multiple sequels and firmly embedded in the horror lexicon. Years ago I watched it (or tried to) and I remember feeling confused and underwhelmed enough that I don’t think I finished it. But that was a long time ago, my tastes have broadened, and it’s a gap in my cinematic education. But having seen it now, I find myself very confused by the adoration for this film, because I really don’t think it works.

It opens on a man and a woman, in a graveyard, engaging in what I think is supposed to be sex. It’s tough to tell, because they aren’t really doing the things you expect from a couple having sex, like expressing enthusiasm, or moving. The man mumbles something about how good it was, in a tone of voice you usually associate with falling asleep. But suddenly the woman has a knife! And she stabs him! For just a moment, her face is replaced by that of a gaunt, unsmiling old man. On to the next scene. The man who we just saw getting stabbed was Tommy, and his friends Jody and Reggie meet outside the funeral home adjacent to the cemetery where Tommy met his end to discuss his passing (“hell of a way to break up a trio”) and the upcoming service (“I just don’t get off on funerals, man. They give me the creeps”). Jody’s thinking about leaving town, but he has his little brother Mike to think of. They lost their parents in a car accident, and ever since, Mike’s had real abandonment issues, sticking to Jody like glue. Jody told Mike to stay home because the funeral would be upsetting, and so Mike sneaks out to the cemetery (on a very loud dirt bike) and hides in the woods to spy on the funeral through a pair of binoculars. You know, like you do. And once the service is over and the mourners have left, a tall thin man comes up to the grave, grabs the casket as if it didn’t weigh a thing, and loads it into the hearse.

It's the man we glimpsed while Tommy was dying.

So a sad young boy with abandonment issues and creepy voyeuristic tendencies discovers that strange things are afoot at the local funeral home, and after that it’s all over the place. There’s no real story to speak of, this is a movie where something happens, then something else happens, then another thing happens with varying levels of abruptness. It’s one of those movies that’s so cheap and so clumsy that it attains a level of surrealism -see also Messiah Of Evil and Carnival Of Souls - but unlike those films, it never really manages to develop much of an atmosphere or mood, so all you’re left with is one what-the-fuck moment after another, and if anything the cheapness and clumsiness undercuts a lot of the horror, rendering what should be tense, eerie moments comical.

In between scenes of Mike and Reggie and Jody talking in various combinations and a puzzling interlude with an ostensibly blind and mute fortune teller, there are a couple of nightmare sequences that, to be fair, have a certain raw vitality to them, and the strange things afoot at the local funeral home are certainly very strange - whatever you think is going on, you’re probably wrong - and events go places you wouldn’t expect if you were going into the film blind. But then the action stops so Jody and Reggie can play a quick song out of nowhere. A tense chase scene involves an ice cream truck and is thus scored by an especially tinkly version of “Three Blind Mice.” Mike interrupts a potentially tense scene by literally running through it hollering at the top of his lungs, There’s little sense of continuity and no sense of narrative flow or rising tension, and that combined with wooden acting and beyond-wooden dialogue, consistently cheap art direction, effects and set design, all has the potential to lend everything the sort of gritty strangeness you’d need for the film to get over. It really does have that weird fever-dream vibe, but some of the choices made here…well, it’s hard to tell if they’re supposed to be intentionally comic or not. The result is a film that’s hard to take it seriously even on its own level, or even to meet the movie halfway. It feels like store-brand giallo, or the kind of film out of which Mystery Science Theater 3000 makes an absolute meal.

It does have its moments, albeit few and far between. There are some effective visuals - the antagonist is a tall, thin, unsmiling undertaker who cuts a striking presence and seems to be everywhere at once, and he’s responsible for the moments when things do work. There are some other interesting visual choices here and there - washes of bright red for a particular point of view, a moment in an antique store with an old photograph that’s effortlessly dreamlike and unsettling - but there’s too few of these scattered too thinly throughout to really feel like more than missed opportunity. And so it’s really frustrating and baffling for me, trying to find the film’s appeal as a horror film. I can understand its appeal as a weird bad movie, but it’s given the reverence of something like Halloween or Night Of The Living Dead and I just don’t get it. It’s certainly striking for its time - it was released close enough to Halloween but far away enough from A Nightmare On Elm Street that I can see how could really make an impression on someone who had no idea what to expect. The rules hadn’t been codified yet. But it’s hard enough to get past the flaws now that the gap between the film I saw and the reputation it has me doubting my own sanity a bit.

IMDB entry
Available on Tubi