Phantasm 2
"Does it strike you as a little strange that every single corpse in this entire graveyard's missing?" - Mike
release year: 1988
genre: horror
viewing setting: home DVD 3/28/23
synopsis: Mike and Reggie load up their car with weapons and drive away to seek and stop the Tall Man and his nefarious plots.
impressions: More low-budget horror with some novel ideas, but a continuing lack of coherence. Sometimes it's unclear if something's a dream/vision or actually happening; at one point events seem to have happened, then they get explained away as a dream, but it's not clear how that happened. Other notable elements here: it's a direct sequel to the first movie...there's a girl and she has a psychic power of some sort...the mission is laid out before the 15-minute mark...the best hardware store robbery ever...a 4-barrel shotgun!...a random priest...the bad guy letting people live or warning them...the return of the flying metal spheres, now with new weaponry...telepathy...a lady with a bald fetish...no explanation about how the bad guy reached the second-floor window...the spheres attacking allies of the bad guy. All in all, this is interesting but just not slick; I still don't fully understand what the bad guy is up to (he seems to be stealing corpses and turning them into evil Jawas, but to what end...I still don't know.)
acting: James LeGros takes over as the now-grown kid Mike. Reggie Bannister returns as the loyal friend who now has a grudge of his own. Paula Irvine is the new psychic friend, and Samantha Phillips is a helpful hitchiker who joins the group. Angus Scrimm returns as the mastermind behind whatever the hell is going on.
final word: Mildly entertaining, somewhat original, often confusing low-budget horror film.
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