PHANTASM ii (1986)

 

Seven years later, Coscarelli gives two of his characters, Mike and Reggie, the chance to become “fearless ghoul killers.” Mike was not killed as the end of the 1979 film suggested, but was declared insane and institutionalized for seven years, making him nineteen at the start of PHANTASM II. Reggie, for his part, has more or less forgotten his experiences of the first film, and when Mike once more tries to probe the mysteries of the funeral home, the older man tries to keep the younger one from exposing his obsessions. However, the boundaries between dream and reality break down once more. Mike has dreamed that Reggie’s house will blow up—and then it does, killing the older man’s family committing him to the cause.

The first film has no significant female characters; it’s purely a tale of men fighting demons. But here Mike also dreams of a young woman in another city, Liz, and tells Reggie that she too is being victimized by the Tall Man’s operations. Armed with a variety of weapons—a chainsaw, a drillbit, and various guns—the two men set out to prevent the death-demon from claiming more victims. For her part Liz suffers the loss of her grandmother, later made into a dwarf-thing by the aliens, but she acquits herself well in fighting back against the phantasmal evils.

Despite the sequel’s greater emphasis upon combative action, Coscarelli maintains the first film’s sense of oneiric dread, the feeling that at any given time the forces of the irrational can invade the waking world and sweep everything down to dusky death. In future posts I plan to examine the other three sequels, the better to judge their combative elements. As for the mythicity of the first two films, Coscarelli’s sci-fi rendering of the Great Unknown proves ingenious, but he never elaborates his general notion into a concrescent concept, which may be the overall result of his emphasis on unpredictability. And though many films about killing monsters center primarily on the monsters, here the monster-killers, both in their subcombative and combative phases, are the stars of the shows.