Movie Review: Phantasm: Ravager (2016)
It’s kind of amazing that a small movie like Phantasm — which came out in 1979 — had a sequel released in 2016. It’s just as amazing that many of the same people are involved in both.
The movie itself is okay. It’s not that great, though it has some inspired moments of gore.
The shame here is that low budget filmmaking in the digital age just isn’t as charming or entertaining as low budget filmmaking of the ’70s and ’80s. It’s a hard thing to explain, but just look at these two images from these movies:
There’s a clear difference to me in terms of visual style.
Still, the movie is relatively entertaining. At least some of the magic of the Phantasm series is still there.
I like the premise of the movie, with Reggie (Reggie Bannister) being diagnosed with dementia. It goes back to something that I really liked I think in the second one — the idea that one of the two main characters can’t remember or believe what happened in the previous movies, which is reasonable because the original movie was so grounding with its human characters, but surreal otherwise. In Phantasm II, that idea was abandoned pretty early on, but here it’s the bulk of the plot.
The problem really is the visual style. It doesn’t look like a professional movie, and that hurts it all the more. When Reggie finally meets up with Mike (A. Michael Baldwin), it feels triumphant. It’s triumphant in its musical score and its performances. It just isn’t triumphant in its visual style. It looks so bland and cheap.
The script here clearly called for a bigger budget. Supposedly big-time Hollywood screenwriter Roger Avary (Pulp Fiction) had written a big-budget post-apocalyptic future Phantasm sequel, and while Don Coscarelli liked the idea, he wasn’t able to secure the budget necessary. He had hoped the fourth movie would garner enough interest, and that’s why there’s that scene in an empty Los Angeles street as a sort of setup.
But that idea was never able to be fulfilled. This script feels like a scaled-back version of that.
It probably would have been entertaining if it had the budget to pull it off.
Rating: 4/10
