But it’s cool how haunted Coscarelli makes the desolate places seem, kind of like we’re watching a Western where the bad guys came in, and the heroes didn’t save the day. He’s scrapping towns for all their parts and leaving empty husks in his wake. It shows us that The Tall Man’s been busy all these years that Mike’s been locked away. The world that opens up in the sequel is amazing. We see the spooky Gravers, the gas mask clad diggers who exhume the corpses for nefarious purposes. It gives us more iconic scenes with the Sentinels, the brain sucking spheres employed by The Tall Man. The way the interiors of churches are shot, all murk and darkness, you can practically smell the places. Perigord feels like a real dead town, and man, it looks amazing given the $3 million budget that Coscarelli was given.
The scene where Reggie and Mike traverse the empty graveyard is epic in scope, (there’s even a crane shot). It takes the claustrophobic suburbia of the first film, the small town surrounding Morningside Cemetery, and opens itself onto the sun-bleached blacktop highways and right into the towns that’ve been exhumed and excavated by The Tall Man and his minions of Hell. It’s with this, that PHANTASM II becomes its own movie. It’s the same theme King adopts and Coscarelli wisely adapts. It hammers home that they’re not soldiers. The way Reggie makes his aforementioned four-barreled shotgun, or how Mike forges a nifty looking blowtorch. It becomes the story of Ben Mears and Mark Petrie at this point, an unlikely pairing and an even more unlikely duo of vampire killers.Īnd isn’t that what PHANTASM II does? Reggie’s our intrepid regular guy hero who exudes swagger while he’s whipping out his badass four barreled shotgun (which as a young viewer was about the coolest damned thing I could think of), and Mike, the psychically troubled youth who will find himself menaced by the dark terror that is ‘The Tall Man.’ It takes the blue collar aspects of the original and magnifies them to a scenario where you can believe our heroes could manufacture the tools to take on the dark forces. In the book’s final act, it switches gears. But beneath that apple’s core, it’s all rot to the root. Sure, Kurt Barlow looks like a man, speaks as one and even owns his own business. But then, hell breaks loose and an evil force takes over, effectively destroying the town forever. Sound familiar? Over the course of Stephen King’s SALEM’S LOT, the overall story was about the town and the minute details of all of its citizens. Their town torn asunder by a man, or something less than a man. Our ice cream vendor finds himself without a friend and our young hero sans a brother. One of them is a blue collar ice cream worker, the other’s just a precocious kid well beyond his years, who cares deeply about his brother. They haunt the same bars and somehow sleep with the same lavender clad women. PHANTASM, the film of literal nightmares, is about a small town filled with real people, just like the Lot. Think about this for a moment and really dig into the gray matter. To understand the brilliant way that Don Coscarelli returned to and expanded upon his PHANTASM universe, it’s important to start with the epic vampire tale, SALEM’S LOT.
0 kommentar(er)
