Popular reviews

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  Review by Will Menaker ★★★½ 6

  At its heart a very sad and moving portrait of how adolescent boys fantasize about sex and death to cope with the essential loneliness and pain of growing up. The younger brother looks up to his older brother who drives a cool car, has huge hair, and gets laid, but is also kind of an asshole who is going to leave him behind to grow up on his own, so he invents a fantasy about an evil mortician who turns dead bodies into dwarf slaves he shrinks and stuffs in oil drums so he can send them to another planet. In this fantasy there is danger and death but he also gets to do cool shit with his brother like…

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  Review by Ian West ★★★★★ 26

  In the early to mid 90's I was an expert at sneaking around my Dad's VHS collection... one day while in extra snoop mode I came across something he had taped off tv... a vhs tape with big block letters that read "PHANTASM". I thought it was the coolest word ever so, as inquiring minds do, I looked it up in our dictionary and BOOM... There was no way I wasn’t totally going to watch this mysterious sounding spectre of movie.

  I was the perfect age to watch Phantasm, roughly the same age as our main character Mike, maybe even a little younger. I kept asking myself why he lived with his brother and it dawned on me... his parents…

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  Review by Todd Gaines ★★★★ 35

  Mike is a little kid who lost his parents in a tragic accident a couple years back. His hero is Jody his super-cool bell bottom jeans wearing older brother. Together along with Reggie the most gangsta ice cream truck driver known to man they must fight an evil like no other. A dark evil. A spooky evil. An evil that is beyond evil. This evil is known simply as The Tall Man. One of the creepiest villains ever in one of the oddest but awesomely awesome horror films ever made. Graveyard bump n' grind. Tit touch. The first time you see The Tall Man. Creepy funeral parlor. Bionic strength. The score is freakishly similar to Halloween. Badass Jody. Mike's dirt…

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  Review by Matt! ★★★★½ 5

  Having pretty much this entire movie be accompanied by the same fire eight-note tune on a loop is some John Williams-level shit, man.

  The vast majority of things in Phantasm make less than zero sense. In fact, it’s movies like this that are a testament to actors, because there isn’t a chance in hell they understood anything they were asked to do and yet they gave it their all anyway. Except for Angus Scrimm as The Tall Man. That mf knew EXACTLY what he was doing at all times, which was just being a total boss. 

  There’s a very respectable coming-of-age story laced in here though, even among all the oil-drum-dwelling Jawas snarling like hyenas and fighting ice cream truck…

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  Review by SilentDawn ★★★★½ 4

  83

  Have you ever had a nightmare where you're against an almost insurmountable force, but instead of being alone, you have a few friends and family there to back you up? To help fight whatever it is that's evil? Phantasm captures this, all while evoked in liminal spaces, with ideas of adolescence and grief floating in the autumn air. One of my favorite openings to a horror film, with the blood-red title card and dreamy score hitting like an adrenaline shot.

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  Review by Tony the Terror 666 ★★★★★ 18

  I had this rated at 4.5 stars and I’m so sorry, I don’t know what I was thinking because this is without a doubt a 5 star masterpiece of surreal nightmarish 70’s cinema and it has possibly the best atmosphere of any horror movie made during a time known for amazingly atmospheric horror movies.

  I can’t remember the first time I saw this, but I think maybe the reason I didn’t give it the full 5 before was because I just hadn’t seen it in a while and I had sort of forgotten exactly how beautifully surreal and disjointed this is. Watching it during my heavy drug days was certainly a fun time, but it really didn’t help me in…

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  Review by Josh Lewis ★★★★

  A small town coming-of-age, sex-and-death movie hybrid drawn with surreal nightmare setpieces, bizarre (implied) sci-fi lore and a Carpenter-meets-giallo soundtrack. Like if someone tried to make a Fulci movie for kids to teach them about mortality. Absolutely rules.

  Full discussion on episode 196 of my podcast SLEAZOIDS.

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  Review by claire 👁️ diane ★★★★★ 14

  This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

  my partner suggested we go out to see this & i am bad at leaving the house (panic etc) & was resistant, but i'm so glad we went & i appreciate her Persistence & Kindness because this was such an Amazing opportunity & undoubtedly one of the best Movie Theater experiences i've ever been gifted to have! this was my first time with Phantasm and i loved it. we got to see the remastered version, with a memorial intro to Angus Scrimm who passed at the very beginning of this year. <3

  what i love most about this movie is that it feels completely like a dream. i know a lot of movies get described as Dreamlike. but if any movie i've EVER seen could…

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  Review by DirkH ★★★★ 10

  I love how this film makes no sense.

  The plot basically follows the premise of boy discovering evil in hometown and tries to fix it. As simple as that sounds, it truly does not do justice to the completely bonkers nature of the narrative. It is anarchic, creative and bizarre.

  The danger here is of course that refusing to make sense will just frustrate your audience and at this it probably succeeds marvelously. But give in to the creepy atmosphere and you'll be eagerly awaiting what weirdness Coscarelli will come up with next.

  A villain called the Tall Man, flying metallic orbs with knives, spontaneous songs, people turning into Jawas from Star Wars, the worst opening sex scene ever, mysterious babes with knives, fingers turning into evil flies, it's all there.

  And I'm not ashamed to say that I love it to bits.

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  Review by Ian West ★★★★★ 2

  Phantasm: The delusion of a disordered mind.
                      A Phantom. A Spirit. A Ghost.

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  Review by Sally Jane Black 1

  Its strength is in its perplexing nature. When they attempt to explain it, the film suffers. When they step back and let the surreal visuals, score, and story be, it evokes a sense of creeping discomfort that is far better than the satisfaction of a "well told" story could ever manage. It avoids being Lynchian (especially since the Dune reference pre-dates the Lynch film version of the book) by leaning more into a mixture of slasher, Italo-horror, low-budget indie kid adventure, zombie flick, and nightmare. In other words, it feels like they reached this conclusion by the happy accident of just throwing it in there, and it comes across as a warmer, more sincere form of what-the-fuckery than the intentional…

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  Review by Graham ★★★★½

  Hooptober X(-Rated)
  Film 12/31 - Decade 4 of 8: The 70s

  Filed under 'A' for Atmosphere, Phantasm is a perfect concoction of kids being kids, graverobbers, creative violence and indiscriminate boobs.

  Built in the late 70s at a time when blockbusters were starting to take over the world, this 90-minutes of perfected teen horror stuck to its low-fi/sci-fi roots, playing the indie vibe to a fabulously well-designed script.

  Written, directed, filmed and edited by Don Coscarelli, the guy clearly had a vision for the film than comes together beautifully with some cracking performances from its young cast and Angus Scrimm as the nightmarish 'Tall Man'... a freakish joy to behold.