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Ah, the Phantasm series. These movies are Odd. What they SHOULD be by all rights is a series of way too many generic, lame, pseudo-slashers, where some possibly wise-cracking weirdo throws a dozen magic death-balls at a new slew of stupid teenagers in each one then pretty much calls it a day. Instead, we've got what's really more of an odd low key horror movie with a SERIOUS sci-fi bent and a very small cast of characters, and essentially no body count. Then we've got 3 sequels to that, spaced out over 20 years, about the same characters, played by the same people, dealing with the same basic issue. You just don't generally see that sort of thing.
The other thing about this series is, zombie jawas. The plot of the original is, in all seriousness, the following. This weird old guy runs a funeral home as a front. What he really does is, after every funeral in the area, he sneaks back in, exhumes the corpse, takes it to a back room, and compresses/reanimates it into a one meter tall high muscle density zombie slave, which is then given a standard issue jawa robe, and, unless there's an immediate need for labor (dealing with meddling kids for instance), is then sent through a teleporter to some high gravity/temperature planet's mining colony, because, well, regular non-compressed zombies wouldn't be able to stand up there. I am completely serious that this is the plot. I am not interpreting anything, or exaggerating. Ask anyone. Now, the sequels to this movie, which I'm being forced to watch in reverse order because, well, that's how they're becoming available on DVD, kinda run with that. 2, from what I can tell, is indeed the standard "let's have a wacky 1980s street gang confront the bad guy and die one by one!" sorta deal, 4 is just a long plot heavy attempt to resolve everything (which, by that point, largely involves the main baddie apparently having plans to train the main character as his successor, while he tries to work out yon baddie's backstory). Then there's Phantasm 3 here.
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Now, I've been sitting here watching this, and generally getting what I expected. Here's the main character and his surprisingly awesome old balding ex-icecream man friend with his cool superweapon created somewhere in, presumably, Phantasm 2, consisting of 2 shotguns and a flashlight duct-taped together and then sawed off at opposing 45 degree angles for maximum spread and a nice sturdy spear-point in the middle. They're driving across the country, and getting attacked by zombie jawas, and confronted by "the tall man" and dealing with hovering space-opera silver death spheres and all that good stuff. Then after a while, the main character is actually successfully captured by the tall man and dragged off, while, meanwhile, some random thugs beat up his friend, stuff him in the trunk of his car, and drive off. At this point, this turns into a very different movie for a while, and I'm shocked enough to have to sit down here and start sharing some thoughts.
OK, so, we're actually following the random punks now instead of any of the characters we care about. Presumably, this is just a short little interlude, or a chance to introduce new cannon fodder characters. They end up stopping at some big old abandoned looking house for a while. Inside, they see an old guy in a rocking chair, and blow his head off with a magnum, only to discover it was just a dummy. That's... odd. Then the door locks behind them and a creepy little kid's voice taunts them. Again, this is all standard horror movie stuff, but this is not a standard horror movie. This is a movie about zombie jawas being sent to an off-world mining colony. What the heck? Suddenly, what appears to be a little kid in a mask runs by. OK. This is a zombie jawa getting bored and torturing random scumbags, I can deal with that. His mask is then removed though and uh... no. This is just some kid. Who, as it turns out, has this house rigged with various booby-traps, like a spike covered life-sized clown doll swinging off the ceiling. Uh... OK. Are we doing some sort of weird Home Alone spoof or something here? Then yon kid kills one of the random goons with a throwing knife. Again, I am baffled. Everyone runs outside, the little kid threatens the leader to put his gun down, "or I'll throw this." This being a frisbee. His threat is laughed off. So he throws his frisbee, which, on closer inspection, is covered in razor blades, and slashes the lead goon's throat. At this point I say WTF, pause this, and start to chronicle what I see before me.
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The remaining goon picks up the gun, aims it the kid, and takes a step forward, to fall into a pit trap. The kid puts a bullet through this last goon's head, pulls on a bandoleer, and rescues the ex-ice cream man from the trunk. Did I mention what a cute non-threatening kid this is by the way? While he's burying the gang members in the makeshift graveyard he has out back, containing the other various thugs who have tried to invade his Home Alone stronghold, and I'm totally serious here, he explains how he has honestly pretty much had the same plot summary as his backstory as the main character did in the first one. He stumbled onto the weird corpse stealing plan of The Tall Man, his parents were killed and converted to zombie jawas, and he took a level or 5 in little-kid-badass to try and stop him or at least keep himself from suffering the same fate. Now, I could accept this if this were the main character. Heck, I pretty much did. He never got into the bladed frisbee levels of silliness, but he was, in the first movie, a little kid forced to deal with horror movie stuff and became fairly tough from doing so. It's very jarring to just have someone show up like this though, fresh out of the box. Reggie the ex-icecream man agrees on that point by the way, and attempts to dump him off at the nearest orphanage. This fails to work, but hey, thanks for trying.
Next stop, the nearest big ornate funeral home. Reggie sneaks around a bit before it turns out I was wrong! THIS is the one with the random gang members. Well, maybe not 80s gang members. Two rather militant looking girls, one with a high-top-fade, sneaking around the funeral room for the same reason as our heroes apparently knock out Reggie briefly, thinking he works here. Death orbs attack, and kill one of them. The other attempts to fight it off, with nunchuks. Wow. That's rather ridiculous. Also not all that effective. Luckily preposterously-awesome kid comes around the corner, gun in hand, and handles things quite professionally. Unfortunately, as it turns out, thank you, but the tall man is in another castle. Or, funeral home as it were. OK, so, our 3 heroes here continue down the road to the next tiny little town whose entire population has nearly been killed off and converted to zombie jawas. Apparently the tall man here has been pretty efficient with this sort of thing, by focusing only on tiny backwater towns with only a handful of people to begin with. Militant-girl turns out to actually have been in the military, explaining a thing or two.
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Stopping at a hotel, Reggie attempts to get lucky with his new lady friend, because unlike the last couple girls he's met, this one PROBABLY isn't a zombie or the tall man in disguise. She is however, not down with the concept, handcuffs him to a bed, and that's that. They kinda spend a bit of time on this. Oh, and by the way, I should probably mention around now how one of the shiny death-probe spheres has somehow come to be possessed by the one original party member who died earlier in the series. Possibly due to them having brainwashed brains shrunk down and crammed inside them, and the brainwashing not quite taking in this case. I bring this up because yon defected orb visits Reggie in his dreams and uh, OK, yeah. As indicated by the previous night's failed activities, this is one of those dreams it's not appropriate to visit someone in. He gets his pants on though and tags along for a dream sequence on what's going on.
After this, good-orb opens up a teleporter gate to rescue the main character, which is nice of him, but the tall man tries to follow. They shut the teleporter off at the last second, and end up slicing tall man's hands off in the process. In addition to resolving the immediate problem, this proves fortunate, as it gives us an excuse to feature one of the best things any horror movie can ever contain, animated severed hand shenanigans! Yay! Pretty good instance thereof, too. I seriously have never seen anything with severed crawling zombified hands that wasn't totally great. This whole bit is followed, rather immediately, by an also fairly amusing fight scene while driving, wherein uh, you know those random punks the preposterously awesome little kid killed and buried in shallow graves? Yeah, you know how the bad guy's main M.O. is grave robbing and zombie making? So yeah, that happens. These ones don't even get compressed down to jawa size, because they're being sent on a specifically earth-based mission. After this, good-probe doles out some exposition. Turns out that yeah, after compacting zombies down to jawa size, their brains are typically removed and used as the guidance systems of the death orbs, which, quite frankly, really require better intelligence and reaction times than dumb ol' slave miner zombie jawas.
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Meanwhile zombie goon-gal from earlier decides to rape Reggie in his sleep as a prelude to their we-survived-our-car-exploding fight scene. I know I'm jumping around a lot here, but it's a fast paced weird movie. What do you want from me? Anyway, a lot of rather important stuff goes on, and then we have someone finding a zombie with a pair of nunchuks, and gee, that is just a special sight. At some point in all this, the main character is kidnapped AGAIN, along with the little kid, the latter of whom is rescued by orbity orb. Good-orb and kid make a pretty funny zombie-fighting duo, and Reggie comes in at the last minute to take zombie #3 out with a silly one-liner and his totally awesome gun. The main character is less lucky though, and seems to be having some impromptu immortal freakjob surgery being performed on him by tall man. They stop this, mostly, and shove him in a freezer. This causes him to engage his personal escape pod! By that I mean the silver death orb he apparently uses in place of a skull, what with being so stylish, and is eventually fought off with a plunger and tossed into a freezer full of liquid nitrogen and corpsicle heads.
Seems like a fairly good ending here, except that A- that immortality surgery? That was finished, leaving the main character with a shiny silver skull replacement and leaking yellow goop from his temple, wandering off in a daze, and after nunchuk girl ditches out on everyone to do something less crazy, the uh, thousands of death spheres in the back room nobody dealt with pin Reggie down to the wall, while a zombie jawa grabs the little kid and... presumably kills him off camera honestly. I mean, I don't recall him being in the 4th movie at all. So, yeah. Again, the Phantasm series is really odd.
