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Finally! Netflix has been really weird about acquiring DVDs of the Phantasm series. For the longest time, they only had the first one, which is awesome in how it seems like we're just going to have a kinda weird horror movie that for some reason lifts its opening scene from Dune of all things, then turns out to actually be this weird sci-fi thing, and the fourth one, which is a big hunk of low budget continuity porn made many many years later. Then they eventually acquired Phantasm 3, which I covered in a previous consciousness stream, and only just now have they finally tossed in 2. So... basically I'm almost seeing all of these in reverse order. And of course between 4 and 3 I went and found Kenny and Company, called Phantasm 0 by some. It's a non-horror movie with the same cast that really, weirdly works as part of the series.
Anyway, we're opening up with a psychic girl, reading her diary about her psychic visions about the first movie. Again, to recap, local mortician, The Tall Man, is stealing corpses, condensing them down into ultra tough zombie jawas, and sending them off via teleportation gate to do mining work on a high temperature and gravity planet. We come out of this recap right where the first movie ended. Everything seems generally safe and sound for our two heros, Mike the Kid and Reggie the Icecream Man, when suddenly in horror cliffhanger tradition, hands reach out from the door behind Mike to grab him.
So yeah, that's where we're picking things up from. I love me a good immediate sequel. The Tall Man and his horde of zombie jawas are inside the house, and they are ticked off. We get a surprisingly good look at the zombie jawas in good lighting, which is kind of a shame because now they just look like zombie midgets in brown robes than flat out zombie jawas. Reggie, being a bit of a badass, fights through them to save Mike then blows the whole place up. Time skipping by a good 10 years or so, we see that Mike has been institutionalized since then, looking now not nearly as androgynous as he did in the first one, but rather oddly like Spoony. He tells the doctors he know longer believes "that story about blowing up my own house because it was infested with... midgets" as Reggie puts it to be factual, so they let him out. He immediately heads over to the local graveyard, digs up a few empty coffins to prove he's sane, then Reggie picks him up to drive him to his new house and family...
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... which explodes as they're pulling up. Mike psychically predicts this JUST too late to be helpful. So... now it's official. Zombie jawas have taken away everything these two hold dear. It's time to go hunt them down! First though, they stop to raid an abandoned hardware store at one of the many small towns whose entire populations have been jawa-fied to get some Weapons. This leads to a bit of a cool montage where, in addition to some other stuff, we see Reggie making his totally awesome quad-shotgun thing I mentioned plenty when talking about Phantasm 3. Equipment also includes "Boogie Down" baseball cap, and lollypop. And you know, flamethrowers, flashlights, these two totally have their act together.
So now we're just kinda doing the crazy cross country road trip from ghost town to ghost town, searching each for clues, survivors, and lingering jawa ambushes. They open the funeral home! Inside it was... a totally naked dead girl lying on a slab. So uh... that fills our random nudity quotient plenty well, with multiple camera angles and no intervening objects of any sort, but it's presented more like "yeah, that's a corpse alright" than "check out this naked chick!" Also in this particular funeral home, huddled in the corner with her mouth taped up is oh hey! Framing device girl! You know, the one who's apparently psychically linked to Mike and explained the plot of the first movie to us... and uh... wow. While she's still alive, her spine has been turned into a freaky little monster face on a stick deal that's very very The Thing. So naturally, as soon as it perks up and taunts them to continue to the east if they want to find Tall Man, Reggie flips out and roasts it with a flamethrower.
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Apparently this wasn't the REAL Framing Device Girl, because we now cut to her, in Oregon somewhere, attending her grandfather's funeral. Her grandmother and... older sister? are here with her, but that's it. Man, Gramps apparently wasn't a very popular guy. Anyway, she wanders off on her own, down one of those swank marble morgue halls all funeral homes seem to have in this series, sees a jawa first hand skulking around in the background, and slightly thereafter the priest on hand pulls out a giant dagger to carve up Gramps and make him unsuitable for shrunken zombification, being onto things here. Unfortunately Grandma picks that exact moment to wander back into the room. AWKward...
Later that night, Priesty is sweating in fear and hitting the booze, when suddenly he hears a rapping, rapping at his chamber door. And well, you can guess how that works out for him... and be slightly wrong, because it's actually a full sized zombie sent to kill him. The shrunken ones are way more common, but every so often Tall Man'll skip that step because, well, it's extra work, and having a few exclusively for earth based stuff is handy too. Specifically, it's Zombie Gramps sent to off him. His corpse apparently wasn't desecrated sufficiently. He also apparently goes for Grandma. Meanwhile, while Mike is sleeping, Reggie picks up a hitchhiker off the side of the road, who kinda looks exactly like the dead girl on the slab earlier... which was gone after first being spotted. Mike explains that she's either a zombie, or he was just having a psychic vision of her earlier and she's rather doomed, but they figure, meh, might as well keep her around for now. She says her name is Alchemy, which is actually a fairly neat name.
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We cut briefly to Framey getting told to meet Tall Man in the funeral home, as she continues to pretty much just retread the first movie. Meanwhile, Chemy invites them to stay at her father's bed and breakfast which is obviously a trap, they know it, but they're also totally prepared to throw down at a moment's notice and actively jawa hunting, so hey, why not? They chainsaw into the boarded up B&B, set up some awesome booby traps on all the doors, including a grenade/half-a-beer-can/string setup that's rather groovy, and then we cut back over to Framey for a bit. She's snooping around and sees one of Tall Man's probably-zombie goons replacing a cadaver's blood with worcestershire sauce. There's also a really cool cross sectional sort of shot as she's wandering further of priesty (remember him?) muttering prayers in a side room as she walks by. Apparently he wasn't actually killed by zombie grandpa, and is also snooping around in here. Tall Man catches him and telekinetically chokes him with his own rosary, saying that no, you don't go to heaven when you die, you come work for me in my crazy interplanetary mining operation! Well, he's not QUITE that blunt about it. Then he let's him wander off and sicks the death orbs on him. His death suffers from some bad editing, but Framey gets to see it. She also gets to see Zombie Jawa Grandma! And smack her in the face with a big stone urn! Awesome. Unfortunately, she escapes only to run straight into an open grave. Fortunately, it's the one Mike and Reg are checking out, having ditched Alchemy to go out on patrol.
Recapping occurs. Along with using a flamethrower to light a fireplace. Also, seriously, we're still hanging out with clearly-a-zombie girl? We're kinda dragging this out a bit now aren't we? I guess Reggie is willing to play the odds on hot zombie sex though. Don't believe it's the first time, or the last. By the end of this series I'd assume him to have developed a fetish over it honestly. So, here's some more slutty zombieness, while in the other room, Mike and Framey use telepathy at close range for novelty's sake. Suddenly, a boobytrap is sprung, snapping us out of bedroom mode. They can't figure out what did it exactly, but apparently Alchemy's family had a poodle or something they left when they abandoned their house or something. Uh, whoops. Meanwhile upstairs, Framey starts looking out windows out of paranoia's sake, and after dragging that out for quite a while, hey, here's Tall Man come to abduct her. Cue the high speed car chase!
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Their car flips, the gas tank starts leaking, and Reggie's seatbelt is jammed... oh, and there's a flaming big of junk down hill. Fortunately, some quick knife work gets him free, so we don't get the shocking image of his severed head landing in Mike's lap, followed by him getting cool wrist blades and beard stubble. Onward! They also really fortunately managed to get at least a sizeable portion of their inventory free. Meanwhile, Framey is tied up, in view of Tall Man's human looking goon here pulverizing the chunky bits of the cremated remains of... Sam Raimi? Seriously? What a WEIRD bit of name dropping THAT is. In fairness though, this is a movie from 1988, and if the whole Evil Dead trilogy comes out between your first and second movies, I suppose it makes sense to pay some respect.
Framey manages to partially escape, and is rescued by Mike before nearly being pegged by a death orb. An axe wielding human-looking goon catches it in his hand in the scuffle that follows immediately. Meanwhile, off in Reggie land... dear frelling gods. OK, Reggie gets jumped by the remaining human looking goon, so he whips out his chainsaw to go to town on him. At this point, the goon reaches to a nearby shelf, from which he pulls a chainsaw of his own. I think we may actually be gearing up here for a frelling Chainsaw Duel. First though, we need to deal with Mike and Framey and Axe-Goon and another death orb, this one being a weird variant for the sake of this being the one Phantasm movie that's actually a gorey horror movie. Also? Between getting a death orb cam, and a fairly silly death for axe goon, I now understand why we had to randomly toss Sam Raimi's name out there.
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Also? There is totally a chainsaw duel! Awesome! Once it resolves, with Reggie of course victorious, a whole bunch of jawas jump out... and arrange themselves PERFECTLY for Reggie to finally get some use out of what really is one of the coolest impractical gun designs I've ever seen. Anyway, our group is now nice and safe, except probably for Alchemy, who we ditched a while back plus who cares about her she's a zombie, and it's time to break into the room with the teleporter to show Framey how seriously, we're teleporting condensed zombies to do mining work on high-G world. You'd think the sequels would drop that plot point and go for standard horror stuff, but no. This is Phantasm! We have our crazy sci-fi weirdness plot!
Tall Man arrives and jumps everyone, some fighting occurs, partly on high-G world, but eventually we... pretty much seem to get a clear victory. Mike tosses a captured death orb right at his head, which proves to be non-fatal, but DOES reveal him to have a rather odd case of head-sandworms. Then they jab him with the nozzle of the embalming machine I forgot to mention they had earlier secretly filled with acid, and make a nasty mess. Then they burn the place to the ground, head out, and find Alchemy conveniently having caught up and ready with a getaway hearse. So... we're all set for happy ending land, but that never happens, so they check to make sure the coffin in the back doesn't have surprise monsters in it. The good news is, it doesn't. The bad news is that Alchemy is so totally a zombie, locks the other two in the back, monsters out and gives Reg a thrashing, dumps him out the door, and drives back for some jawas and a regenerated Tall Man to pull everyone through the windows, because that's kinda the Phantasm Ending Tradition.
So... yeah. Phantasm 2. It's way way way more of a traditional horror movie than the rest of the series. That would make it the worst of the lot if 4 had anything at all going for it. As is, hey! We have an honest to goodness chainsaw duel partway through this movie, and if we have to sacrifice weird non-standard plot progression to get that, I suppose I really can't complain. I can however complain about this being the only movie in the series not to have the same actor playing Mike as the first movie did. Awkward aging be damned, it's the right thing to do!
