Phantasm: Ravager

And Aging In Prison

Do not ask me to be your “Phantasm” interpreter. For one, I’ll confess to a dirty little secret. “Phantasm: Ravager” is the fifth in the “Phantasm” franchise, and yet, I never got around to parts three or four. I am delinquent, I suppose. Wanted to be a completist for all of these franchise movies I was addressing for this site, but this one was just a bridge too far. As much as my 95 million subscribers would like to think, I do have a day job. Sometimes, you leave a “Phantasm” behind.

But also, maybe don’t ask anyone to be your “Phantasm” whisperer. There’s enough oddness between the first two excellent movies already. As I understand it, the third and fourth films further muddy the waters, recasting people that have already been recast, violating the previously-established mythology, questioning your perspective of earlier films. “Phantasm: Ravager”, the long-in-the-works part five, was long planned as a goodbye to the series, so I figured it would be interesting to just jump in, see if I could get my bearings. An alternate title, with more relevant capitalization, is “Phantasm: RaVager”. Once we’re putting Roman numeral fives in titles, I feel like I’m gasping for air. It’s 2 much, I say. I’m not 4 it.

This is the first of the series not directed by Don Coscarelli. Replacing him is newcomer David Hartman, who previously worked in animation and television, and directed something called “Laser Fart”, and just because it was written by Dan Harmon doesn’t mean I’m going to waste my time Googling that and okay I Googled it and that was completely unnecessary. Compared to the moody look of the first two films (which I understand faded with parts three and four along with the budget), this one is certainly cheaper, just straightforward digital, a couple of notches above a fan film. The movie never really steps it up visually, but maybe it’s a bit too much to hope for strong visuals in part five of a legendarily low budget horror franchise. 

The story begins with Reggie (Reggie Bannister), the hero of earlier films, now lost in a possibly-metaphorical desert. Like in earlier efforts, Reggie almost immediately has an encounter with the flying metal balls released by the villainous Tall Man (Angus Scrimm) while also bedding a woman who normally would not approach his paunchy, balding self. So far, so heroic for our travelin’ man, who at that point has saved the world from the Tall Man and his apocalyptic goals about a dozen times in earlier movies. 

Except that he wakes up in a hospital. The man caring for him is Mike, the boy he protected through the course of the series. In 1979’s “Phantasm”, he’s just a curious troublemaker, a boy who plays hooky at the local cemetery and finds the Tall Man manhandling caskets with supernatural strength, a sight that gradually leads the boy into an inter-dimensional grudge match with the forever-regenerating graveyard ghoul and his minions.  These movies all started with a young boy who saw what he wasn’t meant to see. Now, as he sits over Reggie’s hospital bed, Mike is wrinkled, he’s got crows feet. A. Michael Baldwin reprises the role from the original movie, and while he once had the look of your average plucky child actor, now he seems like the producer wanted to give his therapist a cameo.

While Reggie is still, mentally, in attack mode, Mike is calm, measured. It seems as if Mike has made peace with whatever demons Reggie is battling. He begins what are a series of philosophical conversations with Reggie that ultimately seem like soft-pedaling the notion to him about alternate realities. Consider it the snobbery towards American genre films – if the movie was in French, particularly these scenes, then it would have showed up at film festivals.

As Reggie slips in and out of sleep, moving away from what increasingly looks like an old folks’ home and back, he finds himself in various scenarios facing doomsday, and the seemingly eternal Tall Man. Scrimm, who was 52 in the first film but seemed much older, has always had that terrifying sepulchral look. Now, in his last days (he passed in 2016), he has the wear on his cadaverous countenance of these clashes with Mike and Reggie, the two humans who have given him the roughest time. The Tall Man was once a threat from afar, but in these sequences, he’s physically close to the men, seemingly aware of his own limitations and his growing sense of defeat in a never-ending war.

“Phantasm: Ravager”, thus, becomes a movie about aging. The fan demand for movies like a “Phantasm 5” is based in the suggestion, much like Reggie’s own unrealistic beliefs, that the battle against “evil” can and must continue forever. But now, Reggie’s biggest enemy is the unreliability of his body, and his mind. Clashes like this, that last decades (and, in the Tall Man’s case, considerably longer) never end in anything but self-defeat. Many of the memories Reggie battles are from the earlier films. And as he tries to grasp his slippery reality, he senses the scheme may be a product of the Tall Man’s machinations. I imagine, at the end, the loss of your bearings due to age will feel like the manipulations of a villain, and not the simple passing of time. “Phantasm: Ravager” ends, surprisingly elegantly, with the viewer sitting with the notion as to how much more “Phantasm” would be enough. Instead of ambiguity, the conclusion feels as if it gives enough for the viewer to celebrate what they want to be the end of “Phantasm”.

Aging is something that frightens me, and prison did not change that. At the start of my sentence, I wasn’t certain how long I’d be down. Once I became aware of the years involved, I only thought of how ancient I’d seem at the end. I came into prison as an adult male, but I figured I’d leave as a wizened old man. I knew nothing at the start. I coached the scared and uncertain at the end.

Federal prison is more often than not a young man’s game. When an older person arrives, he engenders an affectionate sort of respect from others, as long as his paperwork is “good” (and sometimes, though rarely, when it’s not). Guys understand that the older men are just trying to finish their time, they don’t want to answer for foolishness or misbehavior. I don’t see it in polite society any more, but in prison, etiquette becomes an actual virtue when it comes to the elderly. They are given extra food, they cut lines, they’re given prime seating arrangements. Some were quite wise, others too dopey to learn from the experience multiple sentences had taught them. These men were not always the purest of heart. It’s likely due to the relationship between prison and mortality. When you’re incarcerated, it becomes a factor exactly how much time you have left. To go home, and to go away forever.