Phantasm II
(Directed by Don Coscarelli; starring Michael Baldwin; 1988)
The silver sphere is about twice the size of a billiard ball. It has a couple of very sharp hooks built into it. It flies through the air, attaches itself to your forehead, and digs in. Then a drill comes out and pierces your skull right above the bridge of the nose, while blood spurts out the other end. I hate it when that happens.
The sphere is the property of the Tall Man. He is an evil mortician who lurks in the ghost town of Paragore, where all of the houses seem empty, and most of the graves seem robbed. “When you die,” he tells one of his luckless victims, “you don’t go to heaven. You come to us.”
Who is us? Or, to phrase the question more elegantly, what’s going on here? After having paid close attention to Phantasm II, I am not sure I can answer that question. “This time, I’m going to get him,” Mike vows early in the film. But unless you have seen Phantasm, a low-budget horror film released nine years ago, the reference is likely to be lost. I did see the original Phantasm, but the details do not leap into my mind with crystal clarity.
There is a sense in which Mike’s history is not so important to this film—a sense in which the plot itself is expendable. Phantasm II is like an extended dream, in which characters appear and disappear according to no logical timetable, and a wide-angle lens makes everything look distended and nightmarish.
The images are of corpses and graveyards, spurting blood and severed skulls, rotting flesh and faces filled with terror. Sitting through a film like this, which contains so little of genuine interest, I find myself meditating on such images, wondering who they would appear to, and why.
The target audience for Phantasm II is obviously teenagers, especially those with abbreviated attention spans, who require a thrill a minute. No character development, logic, or subtlety is necessary, just a sensation every now and again to provide the impression that something is happening on the screen.
But why would images of death and decay seem entertaining to them? For the same reason, I imagine, that the horror genre has always been attractive to adolescents. They feel immortal, immune to the processes of aging and death, and so to them these scenes of coffins and corpses represent a psychological weapon against adults. Kids will never die. Only adults will die. Kids, of course, eventually become adults, but there is always a new generation of kids, and there perhaps we have our answer to the question of why anyone would want to make a sequel to Phantasm.
Phantoms
(Directed by Joe Cahppelle; starring Rose McGowan, Joanna Going; 1998)
Did you know that if a certain kind of worm learns how to solve a maze, and then you grind it up and feed it to other worms, the other worms will then be able to negotiate the maze on their first try? That’s one of the scientific nuggets supplied in Phantoms, a movie that seems to have been made by grinding up other films and feeding them to this one.
As the movie opens, two sisters arrive by Jeep in a quaint mountain town that seems suspiciously quiet, and no wonder: Everybody in town appears to be dead. Some of them have died rather suddenly. The baker’s wife, for example. Her hands still grip the rolling pin. Just her hands. The rest of her is elsewhere.
The sisters (Rose McGowan and Joanna Going) find more ominous signs. A dead deputy sheriff, for example. And phones that don’t work—but then one does. The older sister picks it up. “Who are you? What do you want?” she asks. It is a test of great acting to be able to say those ancient lines as if you mean them. A test like many others that this movie fails.
The sheriff turns up. He is played by Ben Affleck, wearing an absurd cowboy hat that looks like the kind of unsold stock they unload on city slickers at the end of the season. He is accompanied by another deputy (Nicky Katt) who wears an identical hat. Don’t they know it’s a rule in the movies: Hero wears cool hat, sidekick wears funny hat?
Joining the two young women, they search the town, and find a desperate message written in lipstick on a mirror, which (I’m jumping ahead now) leads them to Dr. Timothy Flyte (Peter O’Toole), an editor of the kind of supermarket rag that features babies with nine-pound ears. Dr. Flyte and U.S. Army troops soon arrive in the small town, dressed like ghostbusters, to get to the bottom of the mystery. “What kind of threat are we dealing with here—biological, chemical, or other?” he’s asked. “I’m leaning toward ‘other,’” he replies, with all the poignancy of a man who once played Lawrence of Arabia and is now playing Dr. Timothy Flyte.
The movie quickly degenerates into another one of those Gotcha! thillers in which loathsome slimy creatures leap out of drain pipes and sewers and ingest supporting actors, while the stars pump bullets into it. There are a few neat touches. In front of an altar at the local church, the heroes discover a curious pile of stuff: Watches, glasses, ballpoints, pacemakers. At first they think it’s an offering to the Virgin Mary. But no: “That’s not an offering. Those are undigested remains.”
How common are these films getting to be? Two out of the three films I saw today used the formula. With a deep bow (almost a salaam) to Tremors, they locate their creatures beneath the surface of the land or sea, so that most of the time, although not enough of the time, you can’t see them.
Peter O’Toole is a professional and plays his character well. It takes years of training and practice to be able to utter lines like, “It comes from the deep and secret realms of our earth” without giggling. It is O’Toole who gets to float the educated tapeworm theory. When these creatures eat a human, they learn everything it knows—and even everything it thinks it knows, so that since many humans think they are being eaten by the devil, the creatures think they are the devil, too. If only we could learn to think more kindly of those who digest us, this movie could have ended happily.
Pink Flamingos
(Directed by John Waters; starring Divine; 1972, re-reviewed in 1997)
John Waters’s Pink Flamingos has been restored for its twenty-fifth anniversary revival, and with any luck at all that means I won’t have to see it again for another twenty-five years. If I haven’t retired by then, I will.
How do you review a movie like this? I am reminded of an interview I once did with a man who ran a carnival sideshow. His star was a geek, who bit off the heads of live chickens and drank their blood.
“He’s the best geek in the business,” this man assured me.
“What is the difference between a good geek and a bad geek?” I asked.
“You wanna examine the chickens?”
Pink Flamingos was filmed with genuine geeks, and that is the appeal of the film, to those who find it appealing: What seems to happen in the movie really does happen. That is its redeeming quality, you might say. If the events in this film were only simulated, it would merely be depraved and disgusting. But since they are actually performed by real people, the film gains a weird kind of documentary stature. There is a temptation to praise the film, however grudgingly, just to show you have a strong enough stomach to take it. It is a temptation I can resist.
The plot involves a rivalry between two competing factions for the title of Filthiest People Alive. In one corner: a transvestite named Divine (who dresses like a combination of a showgirl, a dominatrix, and Bozo); her mentally ill mother (sits in a crib eating eggs and making messes); her son (likes to involve chickens in his sex life with strange women); and her lover (likes to watch son with strange women and chickens). In the other corner: Mr. and Mrs. Marble, who kidnap hippies, chain them in a dungeon, and force their butler to impregnate them so that after they die in childbirth their babies can be sold to lesbian couples.