Phantasm IV: Oblivion (1998)
Studio: Orion Pictures/Anchor Bay
Release Date: August 26, 2008
Directed By: Don Coscarelli
Cast: Michael Baldwin, Reggie Bannister, Angus Scrimm
Review By: Sam Hawken

There have been persistent rumors that a PHANTASM V is coming down the pike, but after nearly twelve years have passed following the release of PHANTASM IV: OBLIVION it would seem the project is about as dead as dead can be. Created to set the stage for an epic fifth part, PHANTASM IV nevertheless stands on its own and does an excellent job of closing the loop opened by the original PHANTASM. Series have had far worse endings than this.

PHANTASM IV was made on a budget of less than a million dollars for the now-defunct Orion Pictures. After meddling with the creation of PHANTASM II and unceremoniously dumping PHANTASM III on the direct-to-video garbage pile, it seems Universal Pictures had done all they wanted to do with the property and were happy to let it crawl off and die elsewhere. Forced back into the guerrilla filmmaking mold from which the first film was crafted, writer/director Don Coscarelli has eliminated much of the filler that marred the last two installments and gotten down to creating dreamlike images and an introspective narrative.

While there are doubtless those who enjoyed the “traveling monster hunter” plotline of PHANTASM II and III, I wasn’t one of them. The tone didn’t seem right in those sequences and didn’t fit together particularly well with what was established in PHANTASM. The first film — as I discussed in my review of it, posted on my web site as part of this PHANTASM retrospective — was about death, loss and abandonment. The fantastic elements were there to satisfy audiences looking for something to make them jump (or just gross them out), but the real meat of the narrative had to do with losing the people we love and coming face to face with the reality of inevitable death.

We get busy distracting ourselves from our deaths with great invention and skill. PHANTASM showed us a young boy — Michael, played by Michael Baldwin both in the original and in PHANTASM IV — whose life is profoundly shaken by the loss of his parents and what we eventually come to learn is the repressed memory of his older brother’s death in a car crash. Death is given a face and a name: Angus Scrimm as the Tall Man. The Tall Man is himself given a strange agenda involving robbed graves, corpses transformed into undersized trolls in brown robes and inter-dimensional travel. In the end, though this is all just another method of distraction from the omnipresent threat of death.

PHANTASM II and PHANTASM III: LORD OF THE DEAD seemed to take a step back from this and gave the audience more of an adventuresome feel. Symbolism was brushed back in favor of action sequences and four-barreled shotgun mayhem and the Tall Man became less of an elemental force than a not particularly skilled evil mastermind. It was too easy for our heroes to get away even as the Tall Man and his minions consumed whole towns in their thirst for new undead slaves.

PHANTASM IV takes us back to basics. The scope and scale of the narrative had been pruned back to something more akin to the original. The credits only list six names in the cast. There’s really only one major action scene and, frankly, it feels out of place in what is thematically and tonally a completely different beast to what the last two pictures were.

The bare bones story of PHANTASM IV involves Michael’s final showdown with the Tall Man. In Death Valley — an appropriate venue for a confrontation with embodies Death— Michael tries to come to grips with just who and what the Tall Man is and how all of this fits together. Because surely it must, right? Meanwhile Reggie (Reggie Bannister) follows Michael’s trail into the heart of darkness, not really knowing if what he’s doing is worthwhile or just suicidal.

Woven into this new footage are many, many outtakes from the original PHANTASM production. Coscarelli famously shot more than an hour of material that was never used in his creation of the classic and he puts this film to good use creating the same sort of floating, dreamlike atmosphere he aspired to in PHANTASM. The thread of continuity — in writing, in direction, in casting — really works to PHANTASM IV’s favor here and lends a portentousness to what might otherwise be considered a cheap way to fill out running time.

The strongest parts of the previous two sequels were those that directly addressed the mythology of the Tall Man. Looking at PHANTASM all by itself there was no reason to consider him as anything more than the personification of Death, but expanding the world as Coscarelli did likewise required an expansion in how Scrimm’s Tall Man was treated. As I mentioned, sometimes the Tall Man came off as a not-very-effective villainous mastermind, but beginning in PHANTASM III and ending with PHANTASM IV he evolved into something deeper and more intriguing.

In PHANTASM IV we see the Tall Man’s evolution from a kindly (if overcurious) Civil War-era doctor into the powerful entity we know. We also see his return to something more in keeping with the first film’s Tall Man-as-Death ethos. At this point Coscarelli seemed incapable of resisting one more exploding car or one more turn with the blade-wielding sentinel spheres, but the conflict Michael and the Tall Man engage in is less physical than it is mental. By the time the final reel unspools clever viewers will have figured out that what we’ve been seeing all this time has actually been a dramatization of the Kübler-Ross model, otherwise known at the “five stages of grief.”

Stripping away all the grotesque special effects and killer dwarfs and Raimi-esque humor/horror hybridization, PHANTASM IV brings us back to what the series has ultimately always been about: dying. Everything and everyone dies regardless of how much they are loved or love in return. Death is the eternal constant: inescapable and implacable. It may seem threatening, but in fact it just is. And in the end, PHANTASM IV wants you to come to terms with that.

Brutal As Hell Rating: 3 out of 5

Check out Sam’s complete coverage of the Phantasm Series via his PhantasMagoria Series:
Phantasm
Phantasm II
Phantasm III