I finally had a chance to watch Phantasm: Ravager the other night. I went ahead and got the HD streaming thru Amazon.
The movie looked great. It still retained quite a B-movie look as far as camera angles, sets & settings, etc., but it also had a modern-ish sheen to it. I was reminded of the way that the Tarantino/Rodriguez Grindhouse movies were given a '70s schlock veneer in post because Ravager was clearly shot with the intent to evoke late '70s/early '80s B-list horror movies. The gore was well done and was true to the previous Phantasm movies.
There was plenty of stilted semi-ridiculous and banal dialogue, most of which was delivered with the appropriate amount of ham-fistedness that the franchise and the genre require.
The acting was good; the best ever for a Phantasm movie, IMO. Angus Scrim once again delivers an iconic performance; a fitting swan song for a pretty cool life and lifetime's works. RIP, Mr. Guy.
The second best thing about all the Phantasm movies isn't the movies themselves, it's the story they tell. It's an incredibly rich and complex story that starts with a young boy who's mental image of "life" is constantly disrupted, first by the death of his parents and then by his discovery of The Tall Man. This is the central theme of the Phantasm story: the way you think things are is not the way things are. Ravager continues to explore and exploit this premise, to the point that even we can't be sure if what we're seeing is happening, has happened, will happen or never happened at all. We share in Reggie's confusion, his frustration at how unlikely it is he will win out and can admire his unwillingness to stop trying to restore order to his life and ultimately to reality.
Those moments of lucidity within each sequence where Reggie is trying to make sense of things without knowing if he is able to make sense, where he realizes that he may be delusional and just ranting crazy stuff, are excellently realized and for me elevated this film far above the action sequences. I loved all the instances of the silver spheres flying around and killing and especially liked the huge and menacing spheres, don't get me wrong, but the best parts of this movie aren't those parts.
The best thing about Ravager (and all the Phantasm movies, IMO) is the way that the story engages our imagination and how we fill in the gaps and order the story for ourselves. Instead of everything being explained for us or being familiar enough that we allow our expectations to explain things for us, the way Ravager's narrative is constructed, we are forced to discard preconceptions and have to process and evaluate the information we are being given on screen, which seems to constantly contradict itself. The film goes to great pains to show footage from the previous films, as if to underscore that even those reference points may not be valid anchors to what is currently happening.
And that's the genius of the Phantasm story is that it actively engages people's heads, which allows each of us to have a lot invested in the story. We are actively writing part of the story in our heads all the time. It doesn't matter if something later contradicts what we had imagined; the story encourages us to simply take the new information into account and proceed from there, just like the characters on screen, which reinforces that mental investment. It's a terrific passive/active feedback loop.
And so everyone can stop wondering: the 'Cuda is freaking awesome! It totally freaking rocks!
Overall, I'm giving this movie a 7/10. If you aren't a fan of schlocky 70s/80s horror movies, the purposely-lower-than-Hollywood-blockbuster production values may turn you off.
The movie looked great. It still retained quite a B-movie look as far as camera angles, sets & settings, etc., but it also had a modern-ish sheen to it. I was reminded of the way that the Tarantino/Rodriguez Grindhouse movies were given a '70s schlock veneer in post because Ravager was clearly shot with the intent to evoke late '70s/early '80s B-list horror movies. The gore was well done and was true to the previous Phantasm movies.
There was plenty of stilted semi-ridiculous and banal dialogue, most of which was delivered with the appropriate amount of ham-fistedness that the franchise and the genre require.
The acting was good; the best ever for a Phantasm movie, IMO. Angus Scrim once again delivers an iconic performance; a fitting swan song for a pretty cool life and lifetime's works. RIP, Mr. Guy.
The second best thing about all the Phantasm movies isn't the movies themselves, it's the story they tell. It's an incredibly rich and complex story that starts with a young boy who's mental image of "life" is constantly disrupted, first by the death of his parents and then by his discovery of The Tall Man. This is the central theme of the Phantasm story: the way you think things are is not the way things are. Ravager continues to explore and exploit this premise, to the point that even we can't be sure if what we're seeing is happening, has happened, will happen or never happened at all. We share in Reggie's confusion, his frustration at how unlikely it is he will win out and can admire his unwillingness to stop trying to restore order to his life and ultimately to reality.
Those moments of lucidity within each sequence where Reggie is trying to make sense of things without knowing if he is able to make sense, where he realizes that he may be delusional and just ranting crazy stuff, are excellently realized and for me elevated this film far above the action sequences. I loved all the instances of the silver spheres flying around and killing and especially liked the huge and menacing spheres, don't get me wrong, but the best parts of this movie aren't those parts.
The best thing about Ravager (and all the Phantasm movies, IMO) is the way that the story engages our imagination and how we fill in the gaps and order the story for ourselves. Instead of everything being explained for us or being familiar enough that we allow our expectations to explain things for us, the way Ravager's narrative is constructed, we are forced to discard preconceptions and have to process and evaluate the information we are being given on screen, which seems to constantly contradict itself. The film goes to great pains to show footage from the previous films, as if to underscore that even those reference points may not be valid anchors to what is currently happening.
And that's the genius of the Phantasm story is that it actively engages people's heads, which allows each of us to have a lot invested in the story. We are actively writing part of the story in our heads all the time. It doesn't matter if something later contradicts what we had imagined; the story encourages us to simply take the new information into account and proceed from there, just like the characters on screen, which reinforces that mental investment. It's a terrific passive/active feedback loop.
And so everyone can stop wondering: the 'Cuda is freaking awesome! It totally freaking rocks!
Overall, I'm giving this movie a 7/10. If you aren't a fan of schlocky 70s/80s horror movies, the purposely-lower-than-Hollywood-blockbuster production values may turn you off.