Devolution: Phantasm IV (1998)

As promised, here’s my review of the last Phantasm DVD, Phantasm IV: Oblivion (1998). You can read the other reviews here: Phantasm, Phantasm II, and Phantasm III: Lord of the Dead. Warning: SPOILERS.

Mike drives into the desert, more specifically the accurately named Death Valley, looking for answers and a way to finish the Tall Man once and for all. Helping him is Jody, who seems to know more than he lets on. Meanwhile, Reggie tries to reach Mike, fighting a few zombies along the way.

The movie begins with a long montage going back to the original Phantasm, interspersed with creepy shots of the hearse driving through a cemetery at night and the Tall Man walking along a corridor in a mausoleum. Reggie’s voiceover describes himself as an ice cream vendor turned soldier in a war against the Tall Man and his zombies. Well, as you may recall, the soldier ended the previous movie pinned to the wall of the mausoleum by a swarm of spheres of death. And that’s where we find him. The voiceover says Mike left him “hanging there”, which is not only a bad pun, but wrong, since everyone was fine when a clearly distraught Mike left, and Reggie was the one who decided to go back to the mausoleum with Timmy to look for clues. Do you remember Timmy? The movie doesn’t. The Tall Man pulls the spheres away with the power of his mind and it turns out that they were just nuzzling Reggie, which isn’t what it looked like in the end of Lord of the Dead. Once more, the Tall Man neglects to kill him. Instead, he warns him that the “Final Game” is beginning and that he should be careful of how he plays. Play what? In the first movie, he told Michael that he had played a good game, but never explained further. There’s nothing about the Tall Man that suggests he’s some kind of trickster entity going around messing with random people for fun. On the contrary, it looks as if he has a plan and keeps working towards his goal. So, what’s this talk about a game? I guess that I may as well tell you that no, at no time is this explained in any of the five movies (yes, dear reader, I managed to watch the fifth one and I’ll be reviewing it, too).

Mike, meanwhile, is driving one of the Tall Man’s hearses on a deserted road. His impending doom has made him nostalgic and his voiceover, which is directed at Reggie, talks about the day when the Tall Man arrived, and everything went to shit. This last perfect day included Mike stealing Reggie’s ice cream and being allowed to drive Jody’s car as some kid’s dog runs next to it. Aww… But then the Tall Man shows up in his hearse and runs over Lassie! No! He’s clearly irredeemably evil. By the way, we don’t see anything, just hear crunching noises. Present day Mike starts seeing things, like a non-scary apparition of the psychic of the first movie sitting next to him, then a pygmy zombie in the back of the car, and finally, the Tall Man himself. Wait, where did the zombie go? The Tall Man tries to get Mike to join him and then dives back into the coffin that’s probably linked to that red dimension because it’s emitting a red light. Hey, remember how in Phantasm III the Tall Man told Mike “Welcome home, boy. You found your way back to where you started” (and they weren’t in Mike’s hometown), “You have lived in this flesh constraint long enough. Now it is time for you to come back. To me”, and “All that is unknown be known to you once more”, which pointed to Mike not having been fully human from the start? Well, now we’re expected to believe that this was a result of the Tall Man experimenting on him earlier in that same movie. I’m guessing it happened when he was kidnapped the first time, but the Tall Man couldn’t have kept him for that long. Was he just being melodramatic? Also, Phantasm II established that there was something special about Mike (and Liz) that allowed them to have visions of the Tall Man’s evildoing. Is the movie ever going back to that? The Tall Man offers to help him deal with his evolution. And what evolution could that be? Well, throughout the movie there’s going to be several juxtapositions between the two so, if the Tall Man has his way, Mike’s looking at a future as a sinister undertaker surrounded by zombie minions. Does this mean he's morphing these special people into more Tall Men? Is that why there are so many of them? Was Liz going to be one, too? But the new one always remembers what happened. Are they a hive mind? Why am I trying to understand this as if the movie is ever going to explain anything?

So, the movie will keep switching between Mike and Reggie, even when there’s nothing interesting happening with Reggie. These posts are usually a (snarky) commentary/review combo and I tend to follow the story as it unfolds, but I won’t do that this time.

Elsewhere, while Reggie is having car trouble, Jody shows up and tells him to go to Mike. Reggie is still angry that they left, even though Mike was obviously terribly upset, and Jody is his brother. Seriously, Reggie? Of course, the reluctant soldier, who ICYMI was also looking for the Tall Man because he killed his family, ends up relenting and decides to follow Jody’s instructions of driving a few hundred miles southeast. He drives by the same police car Mike and the Tall Man drove by earlier, only he’s ordered to stop and it’s zombie fighting time! Only this zombie cop isn’t an ordinary zombie, he’s a mutant zombie! His partner’s mutation was less successful, and he’s now stuck in the boot of their car, a weird mix of misplaced limbs. Reggie ends up locking himself in the police car while the mutant zombie tries to get him through the roof. He uses the cop’s own shotgun, which is fastened to his seat, to shoot him while he’s lying above him. This means Reggie gets a mouthful of surprisingly nontoxic yellow soup vomit. Eww! But really, shouldn’t that thing have some effect other than being gross? After some more zombie fighting, because the zombie cop was only mostly dead, Reggie blows up the car with a flare. Even after that, the mutant zombie gets out of the car only to finally collapse on the road, leading Reggie to utter the weakest, lamest “cool” one-liner in the history of cool one-liners: “Some cops can be real assholes.”.

While Reggie is trying to kill the audience with second-hand embarrassment, Mike has arrived at his destination – Death Valley, where pygmy zombies lurk in the rocks and watch him from above. They also watch him through the window of the hearse while he writes his thoughts for Reggie in a notebook by candlelight. Wait, does this mean all the hearses come equipped with candelabras, candles, notebooks, and pens? Mike calls Death Valley ground zero of the Tall Man’s experiments. That night he dreams of the Tall Man experimenting on him, first in the mausoleum and then during what’s probably the American Civil War, when he sticks a very long needle up his nose, presumably to take out his brain ancient Egypt-style. I don’t get the point of that. That would only make sense if the movie was going with some sort of past lives/reincarnation connection between Mike and the Tall Man, but the hints of Phantasm III were thrown away. Or were they…?

Mike said he had a plan to bring out the Tall Man and after a dimensional fork appears in the middle of the desert, he puts it motion. It involves hanging himself using a rope with a very well-made hangman’s knot, though I’m not sure what exactly he was planning to do after choking himself to death. Flashback/dream time! He sees himself as his young teenager self being chased by the Tall Man like it happened in the original movie. Only this time, instead of falling down a mineshaft, the Tall Man is hanged by Jody, and the brothers leave his apparently dead body hanging from the tree. At night, young Mike hears the Tall Man’s voice demanding he cut him down. He stupidly returns to the tree where the still alive Tall Man promises him, he will leave and never come back if he releases him. He even gives Mike a knife. Because he’s an idiot, young Mike accepts his obviously fake reassurances. As the rope is cut in the dream, the rope older Mike hanged himself with in the real world snaps and he falls to the ground. The dual hanging sequence was eerie. The Tall Man welcomes Mike back and says he’s been waiting for him for a very long time. He helpfully offers him a hand, which Mike rejects. The Tall Man actually seems hurt by this. Aww, the poor outer dimensional, zombie making undertaker got his fee-fees hurt. Mike goes to the dimensional fork, and he warns him to be careful with what he’s looking for. Naturally, he ignores the warning. And what does Mike find on the other side of that fork? Why, the Tall Man, of course, or more accurately, Jebediah Morningside, an undertaker/mad scientist who’s hanging out in colonial times (I think) with the laughing psychic from the first movie. He’s super nice and even offers his unexpected visitor a lemonade, but Mike freaks out and goes back to the lab where Jebediah keeps a prototype of the dimensional fork. He switches the machine on again and returns to the desert. Only now, there are a bunch of forks. Hmm, why? And what’s going to happen with them? We will never know. Really, we won’t.

I guess it’s time to go back to Reggie, who’s managed to find a pretty woman to lust over. Because of course. Her name is Jennifer, and he gives her a ride after her car explodes due to it overturning when she tried to avoid running over a turtle crossing the road. We see her face. We see her surprise. There’s nothing to indicate this was faked. And if I’m writing this, you already know what will happen with horny idiot Reggie and his new crush.

Alone in the desert, Mike is embracing his Tall Man side and uses his budding telekinetic powers to crush a scorpion with a small rock and then a pygmy zombie with a big rock. While he’s checking the engine of the hearse, Jody shows up. For some reason, Mike doesn’t trust him anymore and mocks his vague explanations. Mike would hate Ben from Lost. He also states he can only count on Reggie and Jody is too tactful to point out that Reggie had given up on him in the beginning of the movie. He finally explains something, namely that the Tall Man kidnapped him from his bedroom and faked the car crash. Mike is shocked because he remembers going to the funeral with his parents. Huh? How is that possible? Didn’t their parents die, leaving the two brothers alone, and then after Jody died Reggie took care of Mike? Phantasm II established that the conversation by the fireplace between Mike and Reggie and all that happened after it was real. So, their parents had to be already dead by then. Anyway, while searching the hearse, Mike finds the knife he used in his dreams. He works on the engine, using his newfound knowledge to build his own sphere of death. At the same time, more forks show up. Which will do absolutely nothing.

Reggie and Jennifer are currently staying at an abandoned motel because he’s been driving for like sixteen hours and must stop. Jennifer, who had her own car, too, doesn’t say she will drive instead. She also agrees to stay in the same room and strips down to her underwear behind a sheer curtain while he tells her the story of the Tall Man. She doesn’t run away screaming from this obvious nutjob and is nearly naked when accepting his shirt. Oh, and they’re sleeping in the same bed. Even after Reggie makes his move. This is totally not suspicious behaviour. During the night, Reggie dreams he’s in a cemetery and Mike shows up, only he looks like the Tall Man. He’s so disturbed by it that he checks out Jennifer’s sleeping form. Ugh! When her boobs start moving on their own, horny idiot Reggie mutters an appreciative “far out” and carefully unbuttons the shirt he lent her. Surprise! Jennifer’s moving boobs turn out to be spheres of death! Yes! Still, with this much stupidity and creepiness on display, it’s hard to worry about Reggie’s fate. It also makes it doubly annoying when he manages to defeat both spheres and zombie Jennifer. One of the spheres does pin his hand to a wall, but he hits his tuning fork against the nightstand and the sound makes the sphere explode. Without taking his hand with it. FFS, stop wasting the spheres of death! Oh, and why did zombie Jennifer accidentally crash her car because of the turtle? It would’ve made sense if she were human, but not a zombie.

Out in the desert, Mike foolishly believes he can maybe go back in time and prevent Jebediah from becoming the Tall Man, who shows up and throws him into the future instead. The city where he lands is deserted save for his stalker from another dimension. Jody shows up to get him back and mentions a risk of infection. So, there’s a virus… While they’re away, Reggie finds the hearse and for some inexplicable reason changes into his ice cream vendor outfit before grabbing his many guns and go to check it out. I don’t know why he does that other than the fact that maybe someone decided that a shotgun toting ice cream vendor would be cool and didn’t care that Reggie had spent the previous two movies wearing normal clothes. He’s attacked by pygmy zombies, but he kills them all, leaving yellow soup everywhere. Mike and Jody show up and Mike whispers to Reggie not to trust his brother. Reggie gives him the tuning fork without explaining what it’s for. The brothers return to the past and Jody explains Jebediah wanted to find the passage between life and death. He found his answer thanks to “shifting faces”, “vibrations”, and “warmth and cold”. Hmm, that explains literally nothing. This isn’t even comic book science. Mike tries to stab Jebediah when he approaches the dimensional fork, but the knife goes through him. Jody explains that it’s because they’re not in the same dimension. WTF?! Mike was in that very lab and was able to touch the machinery last time! The Tall Man comes out through the fork holding a sphere of death.

Mike and Jody end up in a cemetery where Jody shows his true, evil colours. Mike kills him, revealing him as a yellow soup zombie. How is that possible? We saw Jody turning into a sphere. I thought he was some holographic projection but even if he isn’t, how can he be a zombie? None of the other zombies have done that – they’re just reanimated corpses with the spheres placed inside their skulls. Anyway, of course, Jody isn’t really dead and drags Mike to the nearest mausoleum so the Tall Man can take the sphere out of his head and release him from his body using a rotating saw sphere of death. All seems lost until Mike uses Reggie’s tuning fork, which paralyses both Jody and the Tall Man. He moves the latter’s arm, slicing the former’s throat with the saw. That finally kills Jody, who before he dies confirms that he did die in the car crash and so has been a zombie ever since. Which, again, doesn’t match what we’ve seen. The Tall Man takes the fork with his telekinesis and just watches as Mike runs away. Why? Why does he keep letting him leave? Mike returns to the desert and Reggie but before moving on to that, I’d like to take a moment to talk (write) about the damn tuning fork. At the motel, it made the sphere explode, but here, it just paralyses everyone? How? Why? And if Mike also has a sphere inside his head, why wasn’t he affected? There should be rules!

It’s the final confrontation between Mike, Reggie, and the Tall Man! Reggie gets ready to shoot the Tall Man when he comes through the dimensional fork. He waits until he’s within reach. He waits some more. A little bit more. The Tall Man is now leaning against the shotgun barrels. Reggie does nothing and the Tall Man just throws away his gun. Mike uses his sphere and stabs the back of the Tall Man’s head. He removes it, completely unaffected, but Mike has a backup plan – the hearse’s engine was rigged to explode and it’s bye-bye Tall Man. Except not really because another one comes out through the fork and finally pulls the sphere out of a half conscious Mike’s head. Oh, shit! Mike’s dead/a sphere of death! Though, even without his brain, he still can say goodbye to Reggie, who grabs his shotguns and goes after the Tall Man. A dying Mike sees himself as a teenager again, taking a ride in Reggie’s ice cream truck. They hear whispers of their last words but try to ignore it as just the wind. Hmm, that was an open ending, so there’s room for a sequel, but it could also work as a tragic ending.

As expected, this was a mess, the dialogue was still bad and the acting uneven. I don’t get why the movie kept switching between Mike and Reggie. I’m not saying we shouldn’t have seen what was going on with Reggie, but his scenes should’ve been longer. We didn’t need four Reggie/Jennifer short scenes before getting to the motel – one would’ve been enough. There were way too many flashbacks and the Tall Man’s backstory didn’t explain much about his goals. Is he going to kill everyone until the Tall Man hive mind is the only being left alive? How can there be no answer to this basic question after four whole movies? I already complained that the people making this act as if they’re doing a TV series rather than separate movies, and Phantasm IV is a prime example of this. It gets even worse when you realize that this time, they went all George R R Martin and only released the next one in 2016, so basically EIGHTEEN YEARS after Oblivion.

Verdict: all the promising hints and possibilities end up being wasted, the answers we get leave a lot unanswered, and, worse, the spheres of death have very little to do.

By Danforth