(no subject)
Phantasm is simultaneously one of the worst horror movies I've seen and one of the classics that you absolutely have to see. It also has one of the bitchin'est theme songs ever.
Click to viewThe storyline is pretty convoluted--an alien posing as a mortician steals human bodies, turning them into dwarves and sending them to his home planet as slaves. A few local boys find out after one of their friends is murdered by the temptress apparition the alien uses to find fresh bodies, in addition to the ones already in the cemetery.
They should demand a refund from whoever did the corpse's makeup:
The kid brother, who is always spying on and following his older brother, sees the strange tall mortician lift a full coffin by himself, which of course no one believes when the kid tells the story later.
He worries that his older brother is going to leave town one day since their parents died not long before. He ends up following his brother everywhere he goes. Find the annoying little brother in this picture:
The kid brother spies on the Tall Man in town, noticing his fondness for the cold of their friend Reggie's ice cream truck. I search through this scene for the frame with the perfect amount of gay in it.
The boy's lurking almost gets him caught, but the groundskeeper is killed by the movie's iconic flying bladed ball, a weapon of the Tall Man's that seems more like a cool idea the director had and didn't really know how to incorporate. I like the fact that true to reality the corpse has voided its bladder.
He manages to land a blow against the Tall Man and severs a finger, which then transforms into a cheap looking bug thingy, another contextless image, which the older brother witnesses and finally believes the boy's story.
He tries to leave his brother in safety while he goes to battle the Tall Man, but the younger brother finds old photographs that show the Tall Man a hundred years before looking exactly the same. The kid realizes they're dealing with something supernatural (really?) and enlists the help of their friend Reggie to help his brother.
Reggie discovers the portal room that connects to the Tall Man's home world. He disrupts the portal and saves the day. Believe it or not there's another twenty or so minutes after this scene. This movie is just a bunch of disjointed shots and stories kind of thrown together but God love it, it's a classic.
Out of all the movies I watched last holiday season, this one was probably the most fun. It's set in an alterna-future, where humanity has been plagued by radioactive fallout from space that causes the reanimation of dead bodies--zombies! One company has risen in this '50s-style future, Zomcon, to protect (and control?) the lives of the living. It's the story of a boy and his zombie.
The head of Zomcon has just moved in down the street from the Robinsons, and little Timmy falls hard for his daughter, who's not only cute but can consistently get headshots.
Timmy is the weird kid in school because his dad won't let the family own one of the domesticated zombies Zomcon offers. He won't admit it to strangers, but the reason is he's traumatized from having to kill his own reanimated father when he went zombie.
Mrs. Robinson (Carrie Ann Moss) is intimidated by the new neighbors and buys a zombie without her husband's permission. Their lonely son finds an immediate friend, but proves to be an irresponsible pet owner, as his zombie is soon lose and creating new zombies left and right.
Timmy is saved by his neighbor, Mr. Theopolous, a former Zomcon employee who was fired for falling in love with his zombie Tammy. Mr. T teaches Timmy how to reactivate Fido's domestication collar in case of an emergency.
But Fido is always devoted to Timmy, even when his collar fails. Even Mom begins to show a soft spot for the endearing zombie.
Two school bullies try to blackmail Timmy and Fido and through their own idiocy end up dead and subsequently zombies themselves. Fido saves the day by getting Mom, who kills the zombies and burns the evidence.
Dad becomes increasingly jealous and disturbed by the bond between his family and the zombie, a bond he has never had with them himself. Since he has remained ignorant of his wife's pregnancy and made a fool of her in front of the head of Zomcon, she makes a fool of him in his house in front of the zombie.
Dad's jealousy leads him to strike a deal with the head of Zomcon that will get Fido shipped off for the murder of all the people Timmy managed to let him kill. Fido is sent to work at the Zomcon headquarters, so Timmy and Mr. Theopolis break in to save him. Of course the head of Zomcon interferes and tries to eliminate Timmy by throwing him into the Wild Zone. Dad proves himself by saving his son and dies in the process, leaving Timmy and Mom to a happy new life with Fido!
Andy Barclay has been taken into foster care, his mom is locked up in an institution, and the Good Guy company has the original Chucky doll. The events of the first movie are being dismissed as a child's fantasy, and the company is ready to move past the embarrassment and get back to business. They restore the Chucky doll to find out what about it could have possibly triggered the boy's delusions.
Andy knows what happened, but pretends that it was all just a dream so he can move on with his life and be placed with a foster family. I had the same Go Fish deck when I was little. My favorite was the brown fish.
Chucky overtakes the smarmy business exec who stuffed him in his car, demanding transportation to Andy's new home (the address of which he obtains through an unlikely series of events) before dispatching him in the movie's first outright murder (a machine remaking the doll malfunctions and kills a technician earlier).
He finds his way into the house and sees another Good Guy doll there, a leftover from one of the other foster kids. He dispatches Tommy and takes his place, to Andy's suspicion and the foster family's disbelief.
One by one Chucky kills his way to Andy, with the death of his foster father sending him back to the childcare facility. I recognized the childcare worker he kills in The Big Easy the other day, but I remembered her in this movie, not any of the David Lynch films she's much more renowned for starring in.
The foster sister and Andy escape to the Good Guy factory, where they trap Chucky in the doll-making machine and turn him into his great horrible inoperable mess. It's one of the more creative dispatchings of a bad guy in horror history.
They finish him off with a headful of helium, which seems unlucky since we saw his construction at the start of the film and his head has a metal frame. But oh well.
