Phantoms (1998)

If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

I like movies that are aware of what they are selling... without [any] greater aspirations than to make people laugh and that's it.

Entertaining from beginning to end, it maintains the spirit of the franchise while establishing it's own seal with a fun cast

Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

Arriving in a small Colorado town, sisters visiting find the whole area's disappearance to be the work of a race of long-dormant creatures looking to spread the word of their existence to the rest of the world and must rely on a famous scientist to help stop them from leaving.This was an overall solid creature feature. What works most in the film is its spectacular first-half which is a great idea to have such a powerful opening to the film, allowing for the opportunity for a lot of fun to this one. The deserted streets through the town are just simply eerie as the silence and desolation from the walk- through is pretty spine-chilling, while the fact that there's a sinister feeling with the discovery of the bodies and the feeling that there's an unseen presence watching everything going on gives these scenes an added feeling of doom. There's plenty of suspenseful scenes in this as well as there are simply tons of great scenes in the hotel that really stand-out to a big degree. The scenes with the strange tentacles breaking through the walls to launch attacks make for a fine time, and there's the great attack in the kitchen that is home to some of the biggest shocks in the film. The second half does have one memorable sequence, where the creature attacks a military team inside a church with the eerie lighting making the entire thing quite creepy, is blessed with a large amount of kills in here and some pretty great action pieces in here where it begins throwing them around and possessing others in order to turn their weaponry on the others gives this one plenty to like as well. The last big plus is that by keeping it an ongoing mystery as to what's the cause of the disappearances around town, there's a lot of suspense as to what the eventual source actually is making its appearance a nice shock. These are all the points that favor it as there wasn't a whole lot wrong with this one. The biggest flaw is that there's a huge tonal shift halfway through the film that really undermines a lot of these actions significantly. The beginning is a beautifully construed suspense tale that is an eerie, creepy and completely realistic depiction of a mysterious creature preying upon the town, yet the curve thrown as it goes into a normal science fiction film, complete with military scientists, cover-ups and a complete behavior shift from the creature itself is a weird shift. On more than one occasion, it has ample opportunity to attack and get to the characters, yet it lets them go simply for the reason that it wants its existence known. While that in itself doesn't work as a motive, completely demystifying the creature, that it would suddenly stop taking victims despite earlier on actually going to great lengths to get them seems a little off. Beyond one massacre scene that really works, it leaves the creature out of the spotlight and focuses on the hunt to discover what it is, and this is a little hard to swallow following what came before. This shift in tone is what really kills the film.Rated R: Graphic Language and Graphic Violence.

PHANTOMS is a film of two halves; kind of like from FROM DUSK TILL DAWN. Except that in Tarantino's crime/vampire flick both halves are good and gel together well. The horror/sci-fi aspects of PHANTOMS do not go so well together. The first, horror-orientated half is expertly done and one of the creepiest things I've sat through in recent years. The second half descends into science fiction territory and falls apart with lame explanations (unsurprising considering that it's based on a story by overrated writer Dean Koontz), too much action, too many loose ends and a real let-down of a climax, followed by a twist that makes absolutely no sense to anyone.This films would get a top rating if based solely on the first half, right up until the military come in and ruin everything. The pacing is slow but steady, building up unexplained incident after unexplained incident, throwing in a handful of clues and lots of scary tension-building which really works for a change. Lighting, sets, sound effects, and music are just right in creating a creepy atmosphere of suspense and unease which, when combined with the clichéd but effective plot set-up of a place deserted for no reason, makes for unmissable viewing. Every minute something new crops up to entertain the viewer, with weird phone calls, distant voices, gruesomely drained corpses, mysterious piles of metal and the like to entrance the viewer.The second half introduces far too many extraneous characters who just serve as cannon fodder for the film's enemy, which is some kind of huge underground liquid creature which absorbs the intelligence of the people it eats (gee, where have we heard that one before?). Scenes are ripped off from the likes of ALIENS as soldiers investigate deserted buildings and find themselves picked off one by one in repetitive "body snatching" moments familiar from scores of other recent movies. Whilst I did like the Lovecraftian undertones of the giant, godlike underground monster nothing much is made of it and it's killed off far too easily. Once again the creature is animated by unconvincing CGI effects work (which really has come a long way in recent years, in comparison to films made just three years later it looks rubbishy and fake) which dampens the effect. The physical effects by Steve Johnson and the KNB effects group are pretty decent though.The casting isn't bad and in fact Peter O'Toole is the only reason to watch the second half of the film, as he commands it with his presence as a spooky writer of ancient theories. Ben Affleck takes the male lead as the heroic sheriff, but has little to do other than point his gun and shoot (in fact the only characterisation he gets is an interlude when he reveals that he accidentally shot a kid with a toy gun once, which itself is ripped off from DIE HARD). The two female characters are underdeveloped as with the rest of the central characters although Rose McGowan does get a few kooky moments to herself. Liev Schrieber has probably the most interesting role as a sleazy, slightly mad deputy sheriff but he gets killed off early on (as is usually the case with interesting characters in B-movies). I was delighted to see screen veteran Bo Hopkins appearing although it's little more than a cameo as an FBI man.It's difficult to see what kind of audience the makers of this film were hoping for. Certainly with all the gory effects of melted faces, decapitated heads and hands, and weird creatures it's not really suitable viewing for family members. Thrill-seeking teenage crowds are likely to be put off by the slow and effective first half so ironically will miss the more action-orientated second half which is tailor-made for them. Horror fans similarly will find this an underdeveloped film that's not nearly gory enough for a modern horror yarn. I can only say that it starts off a lot better than the same year's SPHERE, before degenerating into much the same dull kind of movie.

Phantoms is probably better known for being a great punchline in Kevin Smith's Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back ("Affleck, you the bomb in Phantoms yo!") than it is as an actual movie. One of the many late 90s horror offering from Bob and Harvey Weinstein's Dimension Films, it was a box office flop when it hit theaters, and unlike several other Dimension releases from the same era, it hasn't become much of a cult favorite. Adapted by Dean Koontz from his novel of the same, Phantoms is Koontz's only screen writing credit. Reportedly, Koontz wasn't crazy about the final cut, blaming the editing in the postproduction process. While Koontz maybe right about the film's editing being messy, and while Phantoms is far from a great movie, I still kind of like it.Like most Dimension horror flicks, Phantoms has an amazing cast. Ben Affleck, Rose McGowan, and Liev Schreiber were regularly cast in Dimension Films, and it's not hard to see why. Their performances don't necessarily elevate the material, but they are a lot of fun to watch on screen, especially Affleck in a role he was especially too young for at the time of filming. Peter O'Toole is one of the most legendary actors who ever lived, and his presence definitely makes Phantoms seem classier than it would have been otherwise, although O'Toole plays his role straighter than I would have liked. Overall, the whole tone is a bit too serious considering how silly everything about the story is, but when Phantoms does show a sense of humor about its ridiculousness, the movie is at its best.Phantoms didn't have a huge budget, though visually it holds up better than a lot of the bigger budget offerings of the era. There seems to be very little CGI, and a lot of cool-looking practical special effects. Whether one likes or hates Phantoms, it's clear that there was hard work put into making the film look slick in a way very few horror flicks actually do. The cinematography looks great, the sets provide the film with the isolated atmosphere the story requires, and the directing is legitimately suspenseful in places. Phantoms is the type of film that almost never gets made anymore: an interesting R-rated horror flick not reliant on computers to make stuff look scary, and not reliant on twist ending after twist ending just for the sake of it. If made today, a movie like Phantoms would be either a limp PG-13 offering, or a much lower-budget, possibly found-footage VOD premiere not worthy of anyone's time.Unlike most horror movies made in the late 1990s and today, Phantoms wasn't made to launch a franchise. It was made to provide audiences with a 90 minutes' worth of scares and adrenaline, and more often than not, it succeeds at doing so. Phantoms may not even be close to the best the late 90s had to offer. With one more try to smooth things out in the editing room and a slightly firmer grasp on tone, Phantoms could have been a better movie, one that wouldn't be remembered just for being a joke (albeit an absolutely hilarious one) in Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back. As it is, the film is still fairly entertaining and worth checking out for genre fans. 6/10

Apparently, Phantoms is based on a book, but, seeing as I haven't read it, I really can't compare it to that. The popular consensus from those that have is that - as usual - the film doesn't compare to the book.It's about two sisters who come to a small town after their mother died, only to find that the whole town has also died, only in more hideous and disturbing circumstances. Luckily, the youngest Sheriff in America (aka Ben Affleck) is on hand to help them out and steer them through the danger. Add into the mix eccentric British academic, Peter O'Toole and you have a rag-tag bunch ready to combat evil. Yes, the American army does try to help, but it's fair to say that Ben and Peter are better at saving the world than any trained military force.Somehow I managed to watch Stephen King's (much maligned) 'Dreamcatcher' before I saw Phantoms and I found the two were pretty similar - both decent enough sci-fi/horror movies, but both also a bit flawed. Neither seems to know really which direction it's going and throws one new element into the mix after the next.If you regularly watch sci-fi/horror B-movies, then Phantoms is definitely a cut above those. It's just a pity that it wasn't a bit more focused, otherwise it might have been a classic.