It's Over (For Now): Phantasm V (2016)

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I wrote in a previous post that I was going to review the first four Phantasm movies because I had the DVDs. However, I got the chance to watch the fifth movie, Phantasm V: Ravager (2016), so here we are. Warning: SPOILERS.




Reggie returns from wherever he ended up after walking through the dimensional fork at the end of Phantasm IV. The Tall Man sends the spheres of death to torment him, but then makes him a surprising offer. Reggie is at a care facility, suffering from early onset dementia. Mike visits him and listens to his stories about the Tall Man but doesn’t believe him. Also at the facility is a dying Jebediah Morningside, who occasionally shows signs of his Tall Man persona. Which of these timelines is true? The lone warrior one or the care facility one? Both? Neither? And can Humankind really be saved from the Tall Man’s evil plans?



There may be a new director, but fear not, Phantasm fans, for Don Coscarelli still co-wrote the script and Ravager is very much a Phantasm movie. This means it’s a convoluted mess in which all the ideas that should’ve been abandoned during the planning stages were kept and everything was crammed into a ridiculously short running time (less than an hour and a half). And no, Mike talking about shifting timestreams, parallel universes, and the “membrane theory” doesn’t help any of it make sense.



The Tall Man is here described as a scientist who crossed a threshold to a red world, which doesn’t really explain anything about his abilities, his zombie-making, or his plans for Humankind. He took Mike and Jody and more and Reggie has been hunting him for years. Right now, he comes out of the dimensional fork he went into at the end of Oblivion after doing something, somewhere, only to find out his car was stolen. Luckily for him, the idiot who did it is still driving along that road. Hmm, why? How long has it been that he’s still there? Whatever. Reggie kicks him out of the car and takes his clothes, which means he’s in his underwear when a sphere of death stabs the back of his head while another goes after the car, only to be defeated.



Later, Reggie comes across Dawn, the woman he will be lusting over for the next few scenes. He gives her a ride to the idyllic farmhouse where she lives in with only the Bulgarian caretaker Demeter to keep her company. As usual, Reggie is just embarrassing and even tries to write her a song. Shockingly, it seems as if she would’ve given in to his supposed charms if he hadn’t fallen asleep. However, none of this matters, because the Tall Man is outside with his spheres of death. When Reggie wakes up, Dawn already has a blood geyser erupting from her forehead. Then it’s time for an overlong, annoying sequence in which he hides in the barn and Demeter yells at him in Bulgarian and won’t shut up. (I don’t speak Bulgarian, so it’s possible I missed some brilliantly funny, enlightening dialogue) Since they can’t get to the humans, the spheres of death go after the horse standing outside. It gets awful in the end, but when the sphere first lands on the horse’s head it looks pretty ridiculous. Soon, Demeter is getting the same exsanguination treatment, but Reggie lives to fight another day. Or does he?



In a different timeline, Reggie has been placed in a care facility by Mike due to his early onset dementia. The backstory is similar – Jody died (try to remember that) and Reggie took care of his little brother – with one huge difference: the Tall Man doesn’t exist. Mike encourages him to talk about it, though, because the doctors told him to keep Reggie’s mind engaged (which probably didn’t include enabling his delusions about some guy with an interdimensional portal and a zombie horde). Could Ravager be about to dismiss four whole movies with the dreaded It Was All A Dream (or in this case Delusion)? Of course not. When have the Phantasm movies ever shied away from adding more stuff to the Mike/Reggie/Tall Man saga? It’s during these conversations that Mike mentions all those theories about time in an effort to make these incompatible storylines seem more like a well thought out plot than the anything goes approach that gave us this continuity averse series. But are these timelines really so separate? Lying in the bed next to Reggie is none other than Jebediah Morningside, who starts by acting normal and suddenly channels his malevolent alter ego. Oh, and the Woman in Lavender from the first movie is hiding under the bed and their hands are fused together. That was more weird than scary and won’t make much sense when she shows up again as a yellow soup, sphere-powered zombie.



Dimensional forks keep showing up and Soldier Reggie goes through them… which puts him face to face with the Tall Man, who’s hanging out at a liminal space. He offers to return his dead family (the wife and daughter, there’s no mention of Aunt Martha, which is just mean) from Phantasm II if he stops interfering with whatever he’s doing. This is ridiculous. As if Reggie could be a real threat to the multitude of Tall Man replacements ready to take over if needed. Not even Mike could stop him, FFS. Why doesn’t the Tall Man just kill the horny idiot? Anyway, Reggie asks for Mike, who was last seen dying with a huge hole on his skull after the brain sphere was removed, and Jody, whose yellow soup, sphere-powered self was killed a little before that. What, no love for Celeste and little Bonnie? Not only does the Tall Man not kill him, but he also gives him time to think about his offer. Reggie ends up in a mausoleum where he meets the Woman in Lavender again. He remembers she killed him in the first movie and ends up killing her, revealing her zombie status in the process. So, the main events in Phantasm weren’t a dream? Of course, if Reggie was killed by the Woman in Lavender at the cemetery, how the hell is he still around? Also, didn’t the Tall Man turn into her? But now they’re separate beings? And why am I trying to make sense of this?



Surprise! It turns out that this movie’s events involving Soldier Reggie weren’t real, and he’s been tied to a table in the Tall Man’s lab with a mind fucking machine attached to his head all along. Or maybe he was, and this is a third timeline? I’m going to do my best not to think about it. Guess who’s coming to rescue him, or more accurately, any survivors? Dawn! Only her name is now Jane, and she doesn’t recognize Reggie. So, maybe it is a third timeline? Or did the Tall Man’s machine just so happen to use her in its illusions? With her is Chunk, several unnamed resistance fighters who won’t make it out of there alive… and Mike! He tells Reggie he's been missing since stepping into the dimensional fork in the previous movie ten years ago. Does this mean that Reggie has been lying on a table for a whole decade? Oh, and you’re probably wondering how Mike survived that gaping head wound. Well, in typical Phantasm fashion, turns out it was all a drea… actually, no, it did happen. And Mike just got up and walked to the nearest building, where he used the dirtiest needle and string combo ever to sew back his skull. Hmm, didn’t the sphere the Tall Man took have his brain in it? And even if it hadn’t, given its size, there wasn’t room for much else inside his head. I get that he has yellow soup running through his veins, but wouldn’t he need his brain, too? Is Mike just walking around with no brain? Then again, since the Tall Man also has a brain sphere, at one point Jebediah Morningside's brain had to be removed. Did he perform the operation himself with no brain? Or did he just get someone else's brain and the brain sphere morphed it into his? I called the Tall Man a hive mind in my previous review, but the movie always shows only one Tall Man at a time. Is his mind body hopping?



Brainless Mike helpfully explains to Reggie what’s been going on. The Tall Man released an alien virus that made people’s heads explode. Yes, really. Sadly, we only see one of those. Then, he attacked the world with really big spheres that shoot lasers. Do those have brains inside, too? Or is the Tall Man suddenly able to build purely mechanical spheres? And what does he want? By the way, while Mike speaks, Reggie’s mind keeps sliding between timelines. Things at the care facility are pretty much the same and a complete waste of screentime. Back in the dystopian, head-exploding, sphere-filled timeline, the Tall Man and his Gravers (who are also zombies) and the pygmy zombies show up, kill everyone but the named characters, and take Jane hostage to the red world. Chunk disguises himself as a pygmy zombie and follows them.



Mike and Reggie step through a dimensional fork to go after the Tall Man, who is now finally ready to kill them. Why hadn’t he done it before? Well, Mike was a “subject” and Reggie “an amusement”. All that build-up in the previous movies about Mike’s connection to the Tall Man and now he was just a subject? Of all the things the movie could’ve done away with (like Mike’s effectively brain-free status) and it chose that?! Seriously?! And shouldn’t there be a death sphere Mike like there was a death sphere Jody? Whatever. Jane gets killed and Chunk blows himself up, taking this Tall Man and his minions with him, while Mike and Reggie escape through the dimensional fork. They end up in the desert where they’re picked up by Jody. How the hell is he alive? He died as an evil zombie in the previous movie and Mike confirmed the events of Oblivion actually happened! It gets dumber when we see the Reggie in the care facility timeline dying, with Mike and Jody by his side. WTF?! Didn’t Mike thank Reggie for taking care of him after Jody died? He should be dead in that timeline, too! Was Reggie hallucinating? Honestly, I don’t really care anymore. This is almost done and there’s still time for one more character from a previous movie to show up. It’s Rocky and she’s waiting for Chunk to come through a dimension fork. Well, that’s never going to happen, after all, he explo… oh, there he is. I’m not even going to wonder how the hell did he not die. He did lose a hand, but he still has one left to grope Rocky. Ugh! They get in the car with Reggie, Mike, and Jody, and now we’re done!



Like with the previous movies, Phantasm V: Ravager suffers from bad dialogue, uneven acting, and a needlessly messy plot. It’s frustrating that after four movies hyping the Tall Man’s evil plot against Humankind and eighteen whole years for the people involved in this series to come up with satisfying answers for everything, the audience only got glimpses of this bleak future and a quick description of how it came about. We should’ve at least seen the exploding head virus spreading and everyone’s reactions to it. However, even with all the unanswered questions, this felt very much like an ending to the series. An open ending, but still an ending. This is why I don’t understand the movie not spending more time exploring the dystopian timeline. Then again, if there’s ever a sequel, it would be easy to retcon all of this by saying it was just a dream world created by a mind fuck machine.



Verdict: it’s bad, but anyone who watched the other ones, might as well watch this one, too. The only good thing is that the spheres of death are back to randomly drilling people. Oh, and the possibility that Mike is walking around with no brain because that’s hilarious. 



By Danforth