Phantasm: Ravager (2016)

The further and final adventures of Reggie (as always Reggie Bannister) in his fight against the Tall Man (Angus Scrimm) make for a somewhat confusing film. Not only because Ravager’s narrative becomes increasingly disjointed and not exactly logical - quite effectively mirroring the plight of a main character who may or may not have fantasized the other four films in the saga in this directly in a viewer’s brain. Because it is indeed a Phantasm movie, “may or may not” isn’t exactly the correct term to describe what happens to and with our aging hero here. Rather, it’s both at once, the film never quite slipping into the crime of turning the rather beloved films that came before into the nightmares and fantasies of a guy suffering from dementia.

That really is the proper way to do something like this: otherwise, the long-time fan would have to live with a retcon that would be annoying even in a series of films that always preferred to keep their supernatural core strange and illogical – or one might as well just have made movies about the natural all along. This way, the dream-like events in the film turn into something that is at once a fantasy of empowerment (one somewhat 70s male one of dying on one’s feet fighting against actual evil while striking cheesy action hero poses and flirting with women who could be one’s granddaughters) and disempowerment, for at best, the heroes of the Phantasm films hold back darkness for another day, like the more competent Lovecraftian heroes, just applying much more violence; there’s no final defeat of evil possible, and the best you can hope for is apparently to die with early onset dementia, which is only proper for the horrors of dementia (early onset or not).

Unfortunately, even if you’re like me and perfectly happy with the film’s increasing loss of coherence (again, metaphorically a perfectly valid choice), you just might not be absolutely convinced of Don Coscarelli’s decision to not direct the film himself but put it in the hands of David Hartman, a guy with a lot of animated TV experience but little in his filmography that suggests him as a choice for a Weird, dream-like and sometimes apocalyptic horror film. Particularly not one that is so clearly lacking in the budget to realize the surreal apocalypse its final act asks for. While Hartman’s certainly not terrible, he does lack Coscarelli’s eye for making the bizarre and the illogical still look of a piece with the rest of a film, so the strange here tends to feel rather cartoonish, something certainly not helped by the reasonably bad CGI used way too on the nose in the film’s final act.

Having said that, I still found myself enjoying the final Phantasm film quite a bit. In part, it’s certainly a degree of melancholic nostalgia for a series whose approach to horror influenced my own ideas of what horror films can do, how they can feel, how personal their vision can be, and how close they can be to the stranger areas of literary horror. However, the film does have enough strengths that aren’t based on nostalgia alone. While its execution tends to suffer from sometimes shaky direction and the too low budget for its ambitions, there are still so many intelligent (instead of merely clever) ideas on display here, the film does much more than just put the word Phantasm in its title to work for its audience’s enjoyment.


So even though Ravager isn’t exactly how I would have wished the series to finish, it is an ending very much in the spirit of what came before.