Speaker 1: Hey, Hey, welcome to Weird House Cinema. Rewind. My name
Speaker 1: is Joe McCormick, and the ball is back because today
Speaker 1: we are bringing you an older episode of Weird House Cinema.
Speaker 1: It's the one we did on Fantasm. This originally published
Speaker 1: September thirtieth, twenty twenty two. Let's get right in.
Speaker 2: Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 3: Hey, welcome to Weird House Cinema. This is Rob Lamb.
Speaker 1: And this is Joe McCormick. And as we enter the
Speaker 1: Halloween season on Weird House Cinema, one of our favorite
Speaker 1: times of the year. Why would I even say one
Speaker 1: of clearly our favorite time of the year. We are
Speaker 1: going to be doing a series of horror movies on
Speaker 1: Weird House this month, and we're kicking it off today
Speaker 1: with Fantasm. I first saw this movie V projected onto
Speaker 1: a wall when I was in college. I had absolutely
Speaker 1: no knowledge whatsoever about it going in. I just knew
Speaker 1: they're showing a horror movie projecting it on a wall.
Speaker 1: I gotta go see it. And I think it was
Speaker 1: about the time we got to Reggie Banister in his
Speaker 1: ice cream Man outfit that I started to really wonder
Speaker 1: what I had gotten myself into. By the end, I
Speaker 1: was totally amazed. I was, in fact agog and I
Speaker 1: could not tell you if what I had just watched
Speaker 1: was a good movie or a bad movie, but either way,
Speaker 1: I was transfixed.
Speaker 3: Yes, it is a film that tranfixes one. It's a
Speaker 3: film that hypnotizes you. And yeah, I think I you know,
Speaker 3: I have our time remembering when I saw this one
Speaker 3: for the first time, because I think I saw Phantasm
Speaker 3: two first. I think I saw it on Joe Bob
Speaker 3: Briggs Monster Vision on TNT back in the day. I
Speaker 3: think they would show this film quite a lot and that.
Speaker 3: But at that point I was hooked. And then I
Speaker 3: started picking up these other Fantasm films, renting them and
Speaker 3: so forth. But yeah, this is nineteen seventy nine's Fantasm
Speaker 3: we're going to be discussing. This is definitely a film
Speaker 3: with a dream like quality to it. It's really it's
Speaker 3: one we've kind of had in the back pocket for
Speaker 3: a while because it is a quintessential psychotronic film. It
Speaker 3: just all the boxes check off on this one.
Speaker 1: I would say that it is more than just a
Speaker 1: dreamlike quality. So you might compare it to the films
Speaker 1: of Luccio Fulci, or is that you know, this Italian
Speaker 1: filmmaker who made strange, kind of beautiful but gross horror
Speaker 1: films that often many scenes feel like a dream because
Speaker 1: you're like, wait, why are we here? How did we
Speaker 1: get here? Why is the person doing that? There's a
Speaker 1: kind of dream logic connecting everything. Phantasm does have that,
Speaker 1: but I would say it goes a step farther in that.
Speaker 1: Unlike full Chise films, Phantasm is literally a recursive series
Speaker 1: of dreams as best I can tell, I mean, who
Speaker 1: who knows? Like there are at least four times in
Speaker 1: the movie where a character appears to wake up from
Speaker 1: a dream. It is not clear when the dream started
Speaker 1: or when the dream ended. What's a dream and what's reality?
Speaker 3: Yeah? Yeah, I think that's a good way of putting it. Now.
Speaker 3: I want to also note from the get go here
Speaker 3: that this is a film with a both a devoted
Speaker 3: following and multiple sequels that build on its lore to
Speaker 3: varying degrees. We're mostly just going to be focusing on
Speaker 3: the first film on nineteen seventy nine is Fantasm. I'm
Speaker 3: going to bring up the sequel a little bit, But
Speaker 3: for the most part, I haven't seen the other Phantasm
Speaker 3: films in a long while, and I haven't seen the
Speaker 3: final entry in the series twenty sixteens Phantasm Ravager at all.
Speaker 3: So yeah, we're mostly going to be discussing Fantasm from
Speaker 3: seventy nine on its own terms.
Speaker 1: I have not seen any of the sequels. If this
Speaker 1: were years ago, I might try to mount an attempt
Speaker 1: to watch them all, kind of like I did when
Speaker 1: I was like, oh, this is the year I watch
Speaker 1: all the hell Raiser movies. That was a good use
Speaker 1: of my time. But I don't know if I'm going
Speaker 1: to make it now. I don't know if I will
Speaker 1: get past P two.
Speaker 3: Yeah. P two is a good stopping play, so I'll
Speaker 3: discuss P two in a little bit. I think that
Speaker 3: they're both very different films, and they're both very very fun,
Speaker 3: and they're in different ways. But coming back to seventy
Speaker 3: nine's Fantasm, let's hit the elevator pitch on this one.
Speaker 3: I'd like to paraphrase the words of one Shack by saying,
Speaker 3: you can summarize this one as flying balls, dwarves just weird.
Speaker 1: Phantasm does not shy away from the otherworldly imagery, probably
Speaker 1: the most iconic of which is the first thing you mentioned,
Speaker 1: the flying ball. In a way, what Jason's hockey mask
Speaker 1: is to the Friday the Thirteenth series, I believe the
Speaker 1: ball is to the Phantasm series in that it is
Speaker 1: not really the human villain, but it is like the
Speaker 1: symbol of the villain's power, right.
Speaker 3: And also it is something just in terms of like
Speaker 3: elements of the film that cannot just be passively copied
Speaker 3: by another film. Like if you have a character, a killer,
Speaker 3: especially in another movie, put on a hockey mask, well
Speaker 3: you just cross the line. You're in Jason's territory now,
Speaker 3: and not necessarily mean that from a legal standpoint, but
Speaker 3: from just a creative standpoint, like you are now clearly
Speaker 3: in the shadow of Jason. You may have already been
Speaker 3: in the shadow, but now you've stepped entirely within the
Speaker 3: umbral shade there. Likewise, with this film, yeah, flying silver
Speaker 3: balls of Death. You can't just have a flying silver
Speaker 3: ball of death in your film or your story or
Speaker 3: what have you without clearly saying yes, I come in
Speaker 3: the wake of Phantasm.
Speaker 1: Before you even understand the context of the ball, we
Speaker 1: should describe what the ball is. It's a metal ball.
Speaker 1: It flies through the air, flies at your face, It
Speaker 1: attaches itself to your forehead via a couple of little
Speaker 1: hooks I guess, then get in your head, and then
Speaker 1: it drills into your head and then drains your body
Speaker 1: entirely of blood in a jet that shoots out the
Speaker 1: back of the ball.
Speaker 3: Yeah. And they're so great because and I love just
Speaker 3: thinking about what makes them great, because they're and again
Speaker 3: largely keeping things relegated to the original film here, they
Speaker 3: seem to be machines. They are pieces of technology. They're
Speaker 3: very good at what they do, but they can be evaded,
Speaker 3: they can be to certain degrees outsmarted. And then there's
Speaker 3: also something about the way they function that feels not
Speaker 3: only alien in origin, but also maybe alien in function,
Speaker 3: Like it makes me think of parasitic infections where the
Speaker 3: parasite goes awry because it's not supposed to be in
Speaker 3: a human body and it's not supposed to wind up
Speaker 3: in the brain. Like you almost feel like this is
Speaker 3: a machine that was made to interface with a different
Speaker 3: biological form, and what we're seeing here is it executing
Speaker 3: its purpose on a box that it wasn't designed for.
Speaker 1: That's a very good comparison. Yes, this flying metal ball
Speaker 1: is sort of like the toxoplasma Gandhi of the Red
Speaker 1: planet that the aliens in this movie come from. In fact,
Speaker 1: I was reading a bit of trivia about this movie,
Speaker 1: and apparently the idea for Phantasm traces back to a
Speaker 1: dream that the director Don Coscarelli had when he was
Speaker 1: a teenager. He dreamed that he was running down these
Speaker 1: endless corridors, marble corridors that never stopped, and he just
Speaker 1: kept running and running because he was being chased by
Speaker 1: a chrome sphere, a floating chrome ball that wanted to
Speaker 1: penetrate his skull with a needle. And that's a pretty
Speaker 1: scary image. I am surprised how well that worked on screen.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it did, It absolutely does. All right, Well, let's
Speaker 3: go ahead and hear the trailer for Fanfasm Fantasm.
Speaker 4: Is it a nightmare? Phantasm? Is it an illusion? Phantasm?
Speaker 1: Whatever it is.
Speaker 4: If this one doesn't scare you, you're already dead fantasm.
Speaker 3: All right. I love this trailer, great trailer. I love
Speaker 3: the line if this one doesn't scare you, you're already dead,
Speaker 3: because it makes it sound like they should have another
Speaker 3: message at the end of the movie that says like,
Speaker 3: are you alive, then we're pleased to hear you enjoyed Phantasm.
Speaker 1: So we've already compared Phantasm to some Italian horror movies,
Speaker 1: especially ful cheese movies, because of its dream equality and colorful,
Speaker 1: lucid imagery. But another point of comparison I would like
Speaker 1: to raise is that Phantasm kind of reminds me of
Speaker 1: the films of very low budget independent amateur filmmakers, or
Speaker 1: maybe not necessarily amateur, but low budget independent filmmakers even
Speaker 1: going back to the fifties, like Ed Wood and Roger Corman.
Speaker 1: Of course, you know you're gonna have different levels of
Speaker 1: ability to realize one's vision in there, but it has
Speaker 1: that same scrappiness that it feels like an improvised production
Speaker 1: of young people who didn't necessarily always know what they
Speaker 1: were doing or have all the permits they needed, or
Speaker 1: have the money to realize everything in the glossiest possible way.
Speaker 1: And yet it does kind of come together with an
Speaker 1: infectious enthusiasm and a kind of irresistible energy, even though
Speaker 1: it kind of lacks a sense of worldliness or experience.
Speaker 3: Yeah, absolutely, it does have that scrappiness to it. So
Speaker 3: let's get into the individuals behind this scrappiness, because yes,
Speaker 3: this is a Don Cossarelli picture. Don Costarelli was born
Speaker 3: in nineteen fifty four. He is the director, the writer,
Speaker 3: the cinematographer, and the film editor on this movie. He
Speaker 3: was I believe twenty three years old when filming started
Speaker 3: and twenty five years old when it was released, and
Speaker 3: this was his third picture, following nineteen seventy five's Jim
Speaker 3: the World's Greatest in nineteen seventy six is Kinney and Company.
Speaker 1: Phantasm makes so much more sense once you shared this
Speaker 1: fact with me that Coscarelli was twenty three when he
Speaker 1: started making it. It has such early twenties energy, again
Speaker 1: coming back to that lack of wisdom and worldliness, but
Speaker 1: at the same time a thing that makes up for it,
Speaker 1: which is an absolutely like it is a leaky vessel
Speaker 1: of the essence of fun. It's just like kind of
Speaker 1: you feel the excitement about making a movie within this.
Speaker 3: Movie, Yeah, yeah, absolutely, it's there's I think there's a
Speaker 3: lot to this film that does line up perfectly with
Speaker 3: this idea of the twenty three year old filmmaker of
Speaker 3: a early twenties dreamer who's also exploring exploring some familiar topics.
Speaker 3: A lot of horror films deal with sex and death, too.
Speaker 3: Many horror films probably deal with the dichotomy of sex
Speaker 3: and death, but this one does so in a I thought,
Speaker 3: a very fascinating way. Like you get the feeling of
Speaker 3: of of the youth standing, you know, outside of childhood
Speaker 3: but not within the adult world, confronted by the mystery
Speaker 3: of death, of sex, and and just trying to figure
Speaker 3: out what these are and like what and to what
Speaker 3: extent they are threats to him, to what extent they
Speaker 3: are his destiny. We see all of that wound up
Speaker 3: in the character of Mike. Yeah, it's it's really fascinating
Speaker 3: to look back on it and really gaze long and
Speaker 3: deep into the phantasm here.
Speaker 1: So you mentioned that Coscarelli had made a couple of
Speaker 1: movies before Phantasm that were not horror movies, though there
Speaker 1: is a there's a story that I think comes from
Speaker 1: the audio commentary track that he recorded for the movie,
Speaker 1: but anyway, wherever it comes from, the story is that
Speaker 1: he got the idea to make a horror film because
Speaker 1: when he was sitting in an audience that was watching
Speaker 1: his earlier movie Kenny in Company, which I've never seen.
Speaker 1: I don't know what the deal with it is. Apparently
Speaker 1: there's a jump scare moment in it, like a character
Speaker 1: puts on a scary mask and jumps out, and he
Speaker 1: watched the way the audience reacted to this jump scare moment,
Speaker 1: and he is just he was so into it the
Speaker 1: way that they like they literally jumped from their seats
Speaker 1: and screamed, and he was like, I gotta make a
Speaker 1: whole movie of this. I'm doing horror now.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I do like that he came into this after
Speaker 3: having made two non horror films that I think both
Speaker 3: I haven't seen either of them either, but I think
Speaker 3: they both revolve largely around young people in the lives
Speaker 3: of young people, and then he moves on into horror.
Speaker 3: A lot of people yet jump right into the horror,
Speaker 3: and so I think that's another reason that Phantasm works
Speaker 3: so well, is that it's not just obsessed with like,
Speaker 3: let's get some gore up there on the screen, like,
Speaker 3: there is also this attention to the central youth character
Speaker 3: in the film and what he's thinking and how he's
Speaker 3: processing everything.
Speaker 1: Another way that Coscarelli's vision feels as distinctly young to
Speaker 1: me is the way the movie tries to pack in
Speaker 1: a lot of elements that are not necessarily They don't
Speaker 1: necessarily like fit smoothly, but he's just trying to get
Speaker 1: a lot of stuff in there. And I think part
Speaker 1: of that is also explained by another trivia fact I
Speaker 1: read about the movie, which is that he apparently at
Speaker 1: one point talked about how he remembered when he was
Speaker 1: a kid, he would see ads and trailers for horror
Speaker 1: movies that would seem really exciting, but then when you
Speaker 1: would go watch the actual movie, it would just be
Speaker 1: people sitting around talking for most of the movie. There
Speaker 1: were actually very few scares in them. The scares were
Speaker 1: already in the trailer, and he wanted to make a
Speaker 1: movie that had a scary moment at least every five minutes,
Speaker 1: that is just packed with little scares and weird things.
Speaker 1: And it kind of reminds me of the story of
Speaker 1: Roger Korman telling Charles B. Griffith, Okay, when you ride
Speaker 1: to Tack of the Crab Monsters, the important thing is
Speaker 1: it has to have action or horror on every page.
Speaker 3: Yeah, phantasm doesn't really hold anything back, and it keeps
Speaker 3: you on your toes that way it is, and I
Speaker 3: think also builds into that dreamline quality. If things are
Speaker 3: making sense and seeming normal, how long are they going
Speaker 3: to do that? What can happen? And eventually you feel
Speaker 3: like anything can happen at any moment. Now, this film,
Speaker 3: like we said, the scrappiness of it, it was made for.
Speaker 3: I think it's been estimated for around three hundred thousand,
Speaker 3: though I think the estimation there is kind of rough
Speaker 3: because I don't think they were really keeping super accurate records.
Speaker 3: Ended up grossing millions, though with a success with audiences
Speaker 3: and some critics. I was looking back, I noticed that
Speaker 3: Ebert was not a big fan of Phantasm and liked
Speaker 3: Phantasm too even less. But Michael Weldon of the Psychotronic
Speaker 3: Film Guides, he loved it. It's one of his favorites.
Speaker 3: He celebrated it as quote a unique and fascinating horror
Speaker 3: hit with more satisfying surprises than you could find in
Speaker 3: a dozen other recent offerings. And that was written in
Speaker 3: I think eighty three, So this film really established Cossarelli
Speaker 3: within the horror realm. He followed this up with nineteen
Speaker 3: eighty three's beast Master, which I think is also a
Speaker 3: pretty solid film in my opinion anyway, and certainly one
Speaker 3: that has achieved cult status.
Speaker 1: He got some stars for that one, right, Who's in it?
Speaker 3: Rip Torn, Rip Horn is in it? The beast Master.
Speaker 3: They got the beast Master for it, which is id
Speaker 3: all since it's about the beast Master. What Mark Singer? Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: so yeah. We talked about beast Master two on a
Speaker 3: past episode of Weird House, So if you want more
Speaker 3: beast Master action, go back to that one. But again,
Speaker 3: I think eighty three's beast Mastered pretty solid.
Speaker 1: In Coscarelli's defense, he did not direct beast Master two.
Speaker 1: That was somebody else, right now.
Speaker 3: Colgarelli did come back to direct and write Phantasm two
Speaker 3: in nineteen eighty eight, Phantasm three, Lord of the Dead
Speaker 3: in nineteen ninety four, and Phantasm four Oblivion in nineteen
Speaker 3: ninety eight. His non Fantasm directional credits also include Survival
Speaker 3: Quest in eighty eight, Bubba Hotep in two thousand and two.
Speaker 3: He did a Master's of Horror episode titled Incident On
Speaker 3: and Off a Mountain Road From two thousand and five,
Speaker 3: both that and Bubba Hotep are based on Joe Lansdale stories.
Speaker 3: He did John Dies at the End in twenty twelve,
Speaker 3: and he also directed the Doo music video The Last
Speaker 3: in Line in nineteen eighty four.
Speaker 1: A Doo music video. I got to look that up
Speaker 1: after this.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm not familiar with their music videos.
Speaker 1: So I read a few more Internet trivia anecdotes about
Speaker 1: Don Coscarelli in the making of this movie, one of which,
Speaker 1: again contributing to the general idea of budgetary scrappiness. Apparently
Speaker 1: they really juiced every last drop they could get out
Speaker 1: of their camera and equipment rentals. So one of the
Speaker 1: stories is that they would shoot on the weekends. I
Speaker 1: think that took them like over a year to shoot
Speaker 1: this movie because they were pretty much just shooting on
Speaker 1: weekends and they would rent their camera equipment on Fridays
Speaker 1: and return it on Mondays. So they're technically only paying
Speaker 1: for one business day of rental, but then they would
Speaker 1: use it allkend. Another thing is some of the stories
Speaker 1: about the production make it sound like they were not
Speaker 1: practicing what industry safety standards for, say stunts and kind
Speaker 1: of dangerous the achievement of dangerous shots. So there are
Speaker 1: stories of the director like personally doing camera work for
Speaker 1: like filming some of the car chase sequences in not
Speaker 1: the best way. Like one thing they did is, you know,
Speaker 1: usually when you see characters inside a car and a
Speaker 1: movie talking, the car's not actually moving. They'll have you know,
Speaker 1: them sitting in a stationary car, and then they will
Speaker 1: somehow simulate the movement of the outside world around the car.
Speaker 1: If it's at night, they might just like move lights around,
Speaker 1: or they might have a rear projection or something like that.
Speaker 1: That's often how they do it. In this movie, they
Speaker 1: just they just actually had characters driving the cars and
Speaker 1: they were acting at the same time. That's not usually
Speaker 1: a great idea. But another story is that there's a
Speaker 1: scene in the movie where there's like a car chase
Speaker 1: where one of the characters, Jody, is shooting a gun
Speaker 1: at another car that's chasing them. And I think they
Speaker 1: actually did film this with moving cars, with the director
Speaker 1: sort of like sitting on the trunk of a moving
Speaker 1: car filming, you know, the actor playing Jody popping up
Speaker 1: out of the window and shooting at the car behind.
Speaker 3: Them with a shotgun.
Speaker 1: Right, I think it had lengths, But even that can
Speaker 1: be dangerous that.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I love realistic effects too, but a movie production, you know,
Speaker 1: no movie is worth somebody actually getting hurt or killed.
Speaker 1: You know, practice safety on sets people.
Speaker 3: Now, this was very much a Costarelli family labor of
Speaker 3: love here because the producer on this was Dat Cossarelli,
Speaker 3: who was also dad investment counselor at the time, who
Speaker 3: helped his son fund the film and later served as
Speaker 3: EP on Don's other films. And then Mom was also involved.
Speaker 3: Kate Cossarelli, who lived nineteen twenty seven through nineteen ninety nine.
Speaker 3: She did makeup, production, design, wardrobe. She she also this
Speaker 3: is super interesting. She was already a novelist apparently, if
Speaker 3: I'm understanding this correctly, She wrote books like Leading Lady,
Speaker 3: Fame and Fortune, but she herself wrote the novelization of
Speaker 3: Fantasm based on her son's screenplay, which I think is
Speaker 3: that's that's adorable.
Speaker 1: I love that she had to knife fight Alan Dene
Speaker 1: Foster for the rights, so.
Speaker 3: I don't know how that went down, but it's yeah,
Speaker 3: it's apparently I was looking around for any signs of
Speaker 3: apparently a very sought after book for diehard Phantasm fans,
Speaker 3: but I did run across a few quotes here and
Speaker 3: there of her talking about at adapting it and you know,
Speaker 3: picking up on little details in the film and working
Speaker 3: those out. So uh yeah, it seemed like a labor
Speaker 3: of love for her. All right, Let's get into the cast.
Speaker 3: We mentioned Mike. Mike is the youth. Mike is the
Speaker 3: central character and Phantasm, and Mike was played by A.
Speaker 3: Michael Baldwin born in nineteen sixty three, apparently son of
Speaker 3: animator Gerald Baldwin, who will work on a number of
Speaker 3: older animated shows. So A Michael Baldwin was a child
Speaker 3: actor who appeared as early as nineteen seventy six in
Speaker 3: episodes of Starsky and Hutch and Eight Is Enough. Later on,
Speaker 3: he starred as Doug and Kenny and Company from seventy six.
Speaker 3: That's Done's one of Don's previous films, and his post
Speaker 3: Phantasm acting career is is pretty fantasm heavy, and I
Speaker 3: believe he went on to teach acting. None of this
Speaker 3: matters though, because he's I think he's absolutely perfect in Phantasm.
Speaker 3: He's just believably awkward and childlike, but still, you know, clearly,
Speaker 3: you know, beyond the limits of childhood. He's but he's
Speaker 3: also even though he's awkward, he's still charismatic enough to
Speaker 3: serve as the hero of the film, and you know,
Speaker 3: to be this action based character when it's right. So yeah,
Speaker 3: I absolutely love a Michael Baldwin's performance here, and and
Speaker 3: I can understand why fans were disappointed that his role
Speaker 3: was recast in Phantasm too.
Speaker 1: I'm going to ask a question about Mike, but this
Speaker 1: also applies to Jody and especially Reggie. How old is
Speaker 1: anybody in this movie supposed to be?
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's a little little foggy, right, because Mike, for instance,
Speaker 3: I you know, I think it would be reasonable to
Speaker 3: think of him as like a as being a high
Speaker 3: school graduate. We have, but we have no idea like
Speaker 3: where he is in terms of high school. I assume
Speaker 3: he's done. Like we don't see we don't I don't
Speaker 3: think we really see much in the way of friends.
Speaker 3: There are a few people here and there. There's no
Speaker 3: I don't think mentioned of school. I don't remember anything
Speaker 3: about like his plans for the future. But in a
Speaker 3: way that's kind of perfect, like that it's perfect for
Speaker 3: this this kind of character who is adrift in the
Speaker 3: very early stages of adulthood, that has no concept of
Speaker 3: like what the future means for him, and is already
Speaker 3: a feeling himself attached or partially detached from the protective
Speaker 3: aura of childhood.
Speaker 1: That's interesting. You read him as a high school graduate,
Speaker 1: I don't know. So he drives a car that you
Speaker 1: can't tell if he's supposed to be doing that legally,
Speaker 1: and he knows how to fix cars and things like that,
Speaker 1: and there are other things that would suggest he's older,
Speaker 1: but sometimes also he actually his character is supposed to
Speaker 1: be twelve.
Speaker 3: Yes, definitely, But how much of that is he like
Speaker 3: just kind of an immature, you know, young adult, but
Speaker 3: it is very vague, And I think that's one of
Speaker 3: the things that works about it, Like he's he's a child,
Speaker 3: but he's he's a youth, but he's he's not he's
Speaker 3: certainly I don't think we would say that he's fully
Speaker 3: in the area of adulthood yet, because on one level,
Speaker 3: I don't think he has a job or anything. And
Speaker 3: his room, as we'll discuss in a bit, is still
Speaker 3: very much feels like a fortress of childhood. It feels
Speaker 3: like a place where you were safe, where you should
Speaker 3: be safe from from sex and death and other complexities
Speaker 3: of the grown up world.
Speaker 1: I love Mike's room, especially because he's got I don't
Speaker 1: know how they achieve this. He's got like a wall
Speaker 1: sized poster of the surface of the moon with the
Speaker 1: Earth in the background. Is that supposed to be just
Speaker 1: a single poster that you buy somewhere. I don't know
Speaker 1: how they achieve now, but it's it's Florida ceiling.
Speaker 3: It's gigantic, it's absolutely dope. And then he has this
Speaker 3: this seventies crocheted blanket. It's like yellow and green, and oh,
Speaker 3: I love those things. I think I've napped with that
Speaker 3: very blanket before. You're wrong.
Speaker 1: It's not yellow and green. It is white, brown and gold.
Speaker 3: Ooh, that's very good.
Speaker 1: Seventies colors.
Speaker 3: All right, So that's Mike. But Mike has a brother.
Speaker 3: Jody's Mike's brother, right, yeah, yeah, all right, I'm pretty
Speaker 3: sure on that. But you know, you know how it goes, Okay,
Speaker 3: So Jody is played by Bill Thornbury born nineteen fifty two,
Speaker 3: actor and musician. Prior to Phantasm, he appeared in nineteen
Speaker 3: seventy five Summer School Teachers and an episode of The
Speaker 3: Oxford Files. Afterward, he appeared in the TV series Secret
Speaker 3: of Midland Heights, the Lost Empire, and also in Phantasms
Speaker 3: three through five. He also wrote the song in Phantasm
Speaker 3: sitting Here at Midnight. This is a perfectly fine performance.
Speaker 1: No notes always is this when we talk about sitting
Speaker 1: here at midnight? Or should we save that for the
Speaker 1: scene in the movie.
Speaker 3: Oh, we should save that because it involves characters and
Speaker 3: actors we haven't introduced yet. Okay, all right, but really
Speaker 3: one of the true stars of this film and Phantasm
Speaker 3: films in general, is the character Reggie, played by the
Speaker 3: actor Reggie Banister born nineteen forty five. Horror action icon
Speaker 3: and musical legend Reggie Banister. Reggie is great in this
Speaker 3: and all subsequent Phantasm films. He's the perfect mix of
Speaker 3: the improbable and the believable. He's cool, but he's like
Speaker 3: every day cool. He's relatable but can sell the extreme
Speaker 3: situations and threats happening all around him.
Speaker 1: A story is such a weird and wonderful presence. I
Speaker 1: could not imagine this movie without him, but every scene
Speaker 1: where he shows up, it adds an additional level of humor.
Speaker 1: Just like because of I don't mean to be insulting
Speaker 1: in this way, but like the way he looks and
Speaker 1: the way he's dressed and everything is almost always funny
Speaker 1: in this movie. It's that they give him this ice
Speaker 1: cream man outfit that we'll have to discuss later, but
Speaker 1: he also brings a very strange kind of winking attitude
Speaker 1: to things. For the longest time after I saw this movie,
Speaker 1: I did not realize this actor was a different guy
Speaker 1: from Dean Norris. I used to think that Dean Norris
Speaker 1: was in Phantasm and he was playing Reggie.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they had similar looks. He kind of looks like
Speaker 3: Dean Norris with a ponytail and sideburns. Yeah. I feel
Speaker 3: like the character of Reggie here is kind of again
Speaker 3: coming back to this youthful energy. It is like a
Speaker 3: child or a young person's eye of an adult who
Speaker 3: has it all together, you know, where they're like, oh,
Speaker 3: look at look at uncle Reggie. Man, he's got it.
Speaker 3: Not he's He's got this cool job as the ice
Speaker 3: cream Man, and he still has time to jam on
Speaker 3: front porches. I want to be like Reggie when I
Speaker 3: grow up and work. Of course, when you grow up,
Speaker 3: you realize, like, oh, man, Reggie's life was kind of
Speaker 3: a mess at the time he was going through some stuff.
Speaker 3: You know, a good guy, but you know, he did
Speaker 3: not have it all together.
Speaker 1: But he seemed so cool.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and he is within the context of this movie. Yeah,
Speaker 3: Reggie's cool. Yeah, and part of it is Yet you
Speaker 3: don't know anything else about him, really, I mean, you
Speaker 3: know a little stuff, but yeah, you don't. You don't
Speaker 3: have all these other details. In subsequent films, they have
Speaker 3: to make him more like tragic and you know, revenge
Speaker 3: focused and so forth. But this, in this one, he's
Speaker 3: just a He's just a dude going about his life
Speaker 3: and then some stuff starts going down around him and
Speaker 3: he gets involved.
Speaker 1: Is Reggie supposed to be twenty or fifty?
Speaker 3: I don't know. It's it's unknown. It's as unknown as
Speaker 3: the as it would be to the youth who is
Speaker 3: looking up to him, I guess. But I don't think
Speaker 3: he's supposed to be too old, right.
Speaker 1: No, he's just generally adult. But like within the range
Speaker 1: of adults, that's it's it's up for grabs.
Speaker 3: Yeah. So the real Reggie Banister was Slash is a
Speaker 3: Vietnam that turned actor who started out in these early
Speaker 3: Cosarelli films. I think he was in all of his
Speaker 3: films except for Beast Master and the Masters of Horror
Speaker 3: episode that I mentioned earlier, like at least had some
Speaker 3: sort of small role. He branched out into some other
Speaker 3: works such as La Law, Silent Night, Deadly Night four,
Speaker 3: Wish Master, and many other horror titles over the years.
Speaker 3: I think a lot of it is like he had this.
Speaker 3: He cemented his status as an icon in the Phantasm films,
Speaker 3: and that got him a lot of work. He's apparently,
Speaker 3: you know, does a lot of conventions or has over
Speaker 3: the years. He also put out an album in two
Speaker 3: thousand and eight titled Naked Truth by the Reggie Banister Band,
Speaker 3: and yeah, Reggie Rocks. There needs to be an official
Speaker 3: action figure of him, because we have action figures of
Speaker 3: less noble characters.
Speaker 1: Oh well, I wasn't going to say less noble about this,
Speaker 1: but I've got a great action figure of Tom Atkins
Speaker 1: from Night of the Creeps. If we've got that, we
Speaker 1: should get a good Reggie Banister action figure.
Speaker 3: Get Reggie on the Horn. I'm sure you can work
Speaker 3: out the licensing on this all right. Since we're talking
Speaker 3: about a Phantasm film, we are of course also talking
Speaker 3: about the Tall Man played by Angus scrim who lived
Speaker 3: nineteen twenty six through twenty sixteen.
Speaker 1: I love the vibe of Angus Scrim as the tall
Speaker 1: Man because it is once again not It doesn't just
Speaker 1: totally go down smooth. It doesn't feel like, yes, this guy,
Speaker 1: you know, he's not Doug Bradley's pin head or something.
Speaker 1: He just feels like born to play this character. There's
Speaker 1: a kind of occasional awkwardness to him, an awkwardness in
Speaker 1: the way like his posture or the way he'll like
Speaker 1: reach out for a character in a you know, jump
Speaker 1: scare or something. But that awkwardness fits like it almost
Speaker 1: makes the movie better.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I think part of it to the awkwardness is
Speaker 3: that he the real Angus Scrim was six ' four
Speaker 3: and they made him seem even taller, you know, by
Speaker 3: various very practical effects, but one of them was by
Speaker 3: putting him in a smaller suit. So he looks a
Speaker 3: little awkward just in the way he's wearing his clothing,
Speaker 3: and it makes him feel like he's not six '
Speaker 3: four but like seven to four or something. So Angus
Speaker 3: Scrim was his acting name, but his real name was
Speaker 3: Lawrence Rory Guy. He adopted the Angus Scrim name for
Speaker 3: this film. He'd previously been in some other works, including
Speaker 3: Cossarelli's Jim the World's Greatest, and went on to star
Speaker 3: in all subsequent Phantasm films, as well as appearing and
Speaker 3: I think often smaller roles in films like The Lost
Speaker 3: Empire Chopping Mall. He has a very brief cameo in that.
Speaker 3: I think he's just present. I think he's like a
Speaker 3: new reporter at a news conference about the new mall robots.
Speaker 1: I don't remember that at all.
Speaker 3: Even if you know it's coming, you can miss it.
Speaker 3: It's such a small role. He is also in Subspecies Mindwarp, Munchie,
Speaker 3: I Sell the Dead and John dies at the end.
Speaker 3: He was also the opening narrator on Wes Craven's wish Master,
Speaker 3: So if you check out the first ten to fifteen
Speaker 3: minutes of wish Master, which is all you need, you'll
Speaker 3: get a little audio from him. He was also a
Speaker 3: five time Grammy nominated and one time Grammy winner for
Speaker 3: writing liner notes on classical albums Huh yeah. He began
Speaker 3: his career as a writer and a journalist, though his
Speaker 3: degree was apparently in drama.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and apparently the stage name Angus Skrim goes back
Speaker 1: to his college days when he was getting a drama degree.
Speaker 1: I read that he was doing plays off campus when
Speaker 1: he technically was not allowed to do that by the
Speaker 1: theater department that he was studying at. So he tried
Speaker 1: to keep his off campus theater work secret by using
Speaker 1: a different name, using a stage name, so in case
Speaker 1: he got mentioned in a review or something, they wouldn't
Speaker 1: be able to trace it to him.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's a great Moniker. I love it, And yeah,
Speaker 3: I mean Angus scrim was ultimately like, this dude is
Speaker 3: a horror icon. Like he's as much a part of
Speaker 3: these phantasm films as Flying silver Balls and Killer Dwarfs.
Speaker 1: So you mentioned he's in Munchie. Is that a Groblins movie.
Speaker 3: Yes, I don't think it's one I've seen, but there
Speaker 3: were at least a couple of Munchet movie. I think
Speaker 3: Munchie and then Munchies or Munchi's too. Don't take me
Speaker 3: to the bank on that one, but yeah, those are
Speaker 3: Gromblins movies. Okay. A couple of other humans involved in this.
Speaker 3: We have the Lady in Lavender, who is the tall
Speaker 3: Man's female form slash sex incarnation. She's played by Kathy Lester.
Speaker 3: Lester is an actor and a musician, but her main
Speaker 3: roles are this nineteen ninety four's Phantasm three Lord of
Speaker 3: the Dead, and I think she also came back in
Speaker 3: the twenty sixteen Phantasm movie Ravager, and then Sally is
Speaker 3: a character that pops up in this play by Lynn
Speaker 3: Eastman Rossy. She was only active for nineteen ninety four,
Speaker 3: but during that time she appeared in a number of notable,
Speaker 3: at least notable to US films, the Savage Sasquatch film
Speaker 3: Night of the Demon from nineteen eighty.
Speaker 1: Night of the Demon I remember, I think we watched
Speaker 1: that one for Trailer Talk years ago.
Speaker 3: Yeah, definitely. There are two types of sasquatch movies, as
Speaker 3: we've discussed, there's the noble Squatch and the savage Squatch.
Speaker 3: And this is a savage Squatch film. This is where
Speaker 3: Bigfoot is killing people.
Speaker 1: I think I've been torn on whether Night of the
Speaker 1: Demon is worth covering on this show, because it's got
Speaker 1: some really funny fun stuff in it, but I think
Speaker 1: it's also got some really gross bummer stuff too, as
Speaker 1: a lot of Sasquatch movies do.
Speaker 3: Lynn Eastman Rossi was also in Project X this is
Speaker 3: the Matthew Broderick eight movie from nineteen eighty seven, and
Speaker 3: she was also in nineteen ninety two's Unlawful Entry featuring
Speaker 3: Kurt Russell, Ray Liota, and Sonny Carl Davis aka Rabbit.
Speaker 1: Oh we took a minute to figure this. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: know what you're talking about.
Speaker 3: Trancers, Yes, okay, yeah, transfers to Rabbit. Notable performance. All right.
Speaker 3: Getting into the effects here, I mainly wanted to commun
Speaker 3: the effects are mostly really good in this and hold
Speaker 3: up with one notable exception, but all the stuff with
Speaker 3: like the flying silver balls and so forth, I think
Speaker 3: still look really good. But I want to call out
Speaker 3: the fact that Gene Corso, who lived nineteen thirty two
Speaker 3: through nineteen ninety six, has sound effects credit on this,
Speaker 3: shared with Lorraine Mitchell. But yeah, the sound effects and
Speaker 3: phantasm are really great and I think certainly helps sell
Speaker 3: that weird aura of the film, especially the weird r
Speaker 3: of the flying death spheres. As a sound editor, Corso
Speaker 3: worked on such films as Queen of Blood, Star Wars,
Speaker 3: The China Syndrome, Mutant, Predator, Deep Star six, and The Rift.
Speaker 3: And then Loraine Mitchell, who also worked on this, worked
Speaker 3: on some of these films as well, along with Conan
Speaker 3: the Destroyer and Rambo three.
Speaker 1: I think in general audiences really underestimate how much difference
Speaker 1: a good audio element makes in a horror movie. Good
Speaker 1: good sound effects, atmospheric sound design, and good music. Would
Speaker 1: this movie be remembered anything like the way it is
Speaker 1: if it did not have the quality of sound effects
Speaker 1: and music that it does.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think that's a great question, and I'm not
Speaker 3: sure it would have, because, yeah, the sound effects are great,
Speaker 3: but yeah, music is wonderful as well, iconic really. The
Speaker 3: music is credited to fred Mero, who lived nineteen thirty
Speaker 3: nine through nineteen ninety nine, and Malcolm Segrave, who lived
Speaker 3: nineteen twenty eight through two thousand and one. Sea Gray's
Speaker 3: only film credits are for the Phantasm theme, but Myro
Speaker 3: has more of a history as a well. First of all,
Speaker 3: a third generation musical professional, his father Joseph Meiro wrote
Speaker 3: you make Me Feel So Young that song, Yeah, and
Speaker 3: Myro also worked on Phantasm two and Phantasm three, but
Speaker 3: his other school include nineteen seventy three's Soilent Green and Scarecrow.
Speaker 1: You Got the Gears turned in on some mild thematic
Speaker 1: connections between Phantasm and Soilent Green. Both involve a discovery
Speaker 1: of a secret science fiction manufacturing process where one of
Speaker 1: the ingredients is people.
Speaker 3: That's an interesting you know, it's interesting. You can think
Speaker 3: of these various films. You can think of Season of
Speaker 3: the Witch, Halloween three films about at least slightly about
Speaker 3: industrial malfeasance, some sort of like evil industrial plot to
Speaker 3: mass produce something that is destructive to humanity. Yeah, but anyway,
Speaker 3: the Phantasm score absolutely great. I have no reservations about
Speaker 3: saying that the theme is catchy and creepy, perfectly matching
Speaker 3: the dreamlike quality of the film. And even outside of
Speaker 3: the main Fantasm theme song, there are all these wonderful
Speaker 3: hypnotic soundscapes as well. So you have synth and guitar
Speaker 3: in there, but we also have gongs and chimes and
Speaker 3: cymbals and bells creating this wonderful hallucinatory effect.
Speaker 1: I agree, love all that stuff. There is one thing
Speaker 1: I noticed. I didn't compare them side to side to
Speaker 1: see exactly how similar they are, but I did hear
Speaker 1: some strong overlap between I think it was the main
Speaker 1: synth theme from Phantasm and one of the tunes that
Speaker 1: is used in John Carpenter's The Fog, though of course
Speaker 1: I'm not alleging musical plagiarism or anything. You know, there
Speaker 1: are only so many notes, so you're gonna get some
Speaker 1: similar eerie tunes. But I heard that kinship.
Speaker 3: Of course, The Fog didn't come out till nineteen eighty.
Speaker 1: Wait, what my god, you're right. I had the order
Speaker 1: inverted in my head, so if there is any inspiration,
Speaker 1: it would have gone the other way.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but like I said, there are only so many
Speaker 3: notes you can play. All right, well, let's jump into Phantasm.
Speaker 1: Well, mercifully breaking our streak of movies that begin by
Speaker 1: looking at the stars in space, this film does not
Speaker 1: begin in space. Instead, it's just phantasm in red letters
Speaker 1: on a black background, and then we cut to an
Speaker 1: establishing shot of a mansion. It's a oh, I did
Speaker 1: not look up architectural styles. Do you know what style
Speaker 1: of house this is? It's like a big white mansion
Speaker 1: with columns out front, three columns and sort of a
Speaker 1: wrap around veranda.
Speaker 3: I believe. Yeah, old American, I think is the architectural
Speaker 3: styling here.
Speaker 1: And then we're just straight on from this to an
Speaker 1: absolutely hilariously awkward sex scene in a cemetery featuring a
Speaker 1: dude who looks like Lemmy from Motorhead and a lady
Speaker 1: with blonde hair and purple eye makeup, and.
Speaker 3: This would be our lady in Lavender.
Speaker 1: We find out, yes, she's a recurring character. In fact,
Speaker 1: we find out she is just a sort of a
Speaker 1: glamour a mirage, and in fact she is Anga Skrim,
Speaker 1: but just in a different form. And we see that
Speaker 1: because Okay, they're having sex in the cemetery. And then
Speaker 1: suddenly the lady pulls out a dagger and she stabs Lemmy.
Speaker 1: She stabs the dude, and then through the magic of
Speaker 1: film editing, she transforms into an old man and it
Speaker 1: is Angus Grimm. We will see him many more times
Speaker 1: in the film. The soundtrack in the scene is symbols
Speaker 1: and whooshing wind noises, so it's this weird mix of
Speaker 1: like kind of cool atmosphere. But the staging of the
Speaker 1: sex scene is so funny.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's absurd. I mean, obviously, depictions of human sex
Speaker 3: and film should always be considered it with a grain
Speaker 3: of salt, but this one feels like it was constructed
Speaker 3: via youthful hearsay about what the grown up world of
Speaker 3: sexuality actually consists off. You know, it's one of these
Speaker 3: where it's like full clothing, strange positioning. If you were
Speaker 3: to try and figure out the details of human sexuality
Speaker 3: based on this scene, you would be left with just
Speaker 3: a lot of questions about how everything lines up.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I don't want to get I'm not gonna get gross.
Speaker 1: I don't want to get too specific about the mechanics
Speaker 1: of horror movie sex. But it is greatly confusing at
Speaker 1: what angles these two people's bodies are supposed to be positioned.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it just it makes you It feels like something
Speaker 3: like Ralph Wigham would explain, you know. And then the
Speaker 3: baby looked at me. Yeah, I have no idea. Yeah,
Speaker 3: it's absurd, but it also, again, I think it falls
Speaker 3: in line with that youthful energy of the film. You know.
Speaker 3: It's like, like, what is sex? What is death? Mike
Speaker 3: doesn't know, and part of this film is Mike's dream
Speaker 3: quest to try and figure that out.
Speaker 1: But okay, Lady in Lavender is actually anger scrim she
Speaker 1: kills Lemmy and then it's morning in the cemetery and
Speaker 1: we're back at the mansion. But it's daylight and we
Speaker 1: hear we meet two of our main characters. By the way,
Speaker 1: we see a science says it's morning Side Morningside Cemetery,
Speaker 1: and we meet our main characters, Jody and Reggie. Jody
Speaker 1: is tall, handsome, big mane of messy hair. Reggie is
Speaker 1: he's shorter, He's wearing cool sun glasses. And I was
Speaker 1: gonna say, so he's like bald in front with a
Speaker 1: horseshoe of hair and then a ponytail. So I was
Speaker 1: going to say it's like business in front, party and back,
Speaker 1: but really it's more like closed for business in front, party.
Speaker 3: And back and close for business mostly on the top
Speaker 3: as well. It's a substantial bald pattern there, but still
Speaker 3: very very cool. Look. He's got some nice sideburns there
Speaker 3: that come to a nice little goring point.
Speaker 1: I mean, there's no denying Reggie's cool.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So they meet up and they say, hey, Tommy's gone
Speaker 1: hell of a way to end a trio. So Tommy,
Speaker 1: I think, meaning the guy from the opening scene who
Speaker 1: got stabbed was their friend. They believe he committed suicide.
Speaker 1: I don't know why they think that, but that's what
Speaker 1: they have been led to believe. Do you Rob, did
Speaker 1: you detect that they were supposed to all be in
Speaker 1: a band together.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I kind of got that vibe, but I don't
Speaker 3: remember if there was a specific line that actually nted
Speaker 3: that concept. I mean, clearly Jody looked like a dude
Speaker 3: that was in a band. It's just a question of
Speaker 3: was he in the band with these two.
Speaker 1: Jody looks like he would fit right in in a
Speaker 1: one piece disco jumpsuit doing a musical number and like
Speaker 1: a variety show.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Anyway, we go into a nice creepy atmospheric scene where
Speaker 1: Jody walks around alone in the halls of the funeral home,
Speaker 1: and the halls are lined with white marble covered in
Speaker 1: a weird pattern of blue veins. I love the atmosphere
Speaker 1: of the inside of the funeral home.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean it's in many ways, it's an obvious set,
Speaker 3: and yet the uniformity I think gives it a nice
Speaker 3: otherworldly vibe. And you know this, it feels sterile and
Speaker 3: like a place between and at the same time it
Speaker 3: does feel authentically like a mausoleum, like a mini mausoleums
Speaker 3: also have that vibe, except I don't think it's quite
Speaker 3: as the ones I've been in anyway, it doesn't feel
Speaker 3: quite as monotonous, it's not quite as uniform. You do
Speaker 3: have some little details that are that differentiate one area
Speaker 3: from another. It might be flowers in front of these remains,
Speaker 3: et cetera. But yeah, this whole vibe here. It feels
Speaker 3: just enough like a mausoleum that it doesn't feel like
Speaker 3: they're on a spaceship, but it also kind of feels
Speaker 3: like they're on a spaceship.
Speaker 1: I have questions about how this mausoleum is supposed to work,
Speaker 1: because I think we see later that, like many mausoleums,
Speaker 1: it has these vaults. They're built into the walls, they
Speaker 1: have like a name on them, and then what appears
Speaker 1: to be some kind of covering or door. But later
Speaker 1: we see that you can just open them up like
Speaker 1: a file cabinet, and there is a like a file
Speaker 1: cabinet drawer, and then there's a coffin inside which you
Speaker 1: could presumably just open up and see the body.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, I'm not sure. I've never opened one up,
Speaker 3: but this, if you take this movie at face value,
Speaker 3: it's telling you that, yeah, these are just like more
Speaker 3: drawers you can just roll on open and look at
Speaker 3: the body.
Speaker 1: I am not an expert in the funerary arts and sciences,
Speaker 1: but I think there would be problems with that design anyway.
Speaker 1: So Jody's walking around and here's these strange sounds that
Speaker 1: in the subtitles for the version of the movie I
Speaker 1: watched it called the sounds warbling. I would call it
Speaker 1: squawking or growling, maybe snarling.
Speaker 3: And of course in a bit we'll find out what
Speaker 3: is making that sound.
Speaker 1: Right, and we see that. Let's see Jody visits the
Speaker 1: grave of his parents, we find out they've passed away,
Speaker 1: and then we meet Mike, Jody's little brother, who is
Speaker 1: just tearing through the grass of the cemetery on a
Speaker 1: dirt bike. It's like he's riding a chainsaw. Trivia fact
Speaker 1: I found is that the motorbike used here is called
Speaker 1: a Hodaka road toad. But he's literally just driving like
Speaker 1: between the grave markers.
Speaker 3: Yeah, some kind of psychomania vibes to this motorcycle ride here.
Speaker 1: And he also hears the weird chittering and snarling sounds.
Speaker 1: And we see a few glimpses of what appear to
Speaker 1: be little figures in art cloaks dashing behind gravestones. Ooh,
Speaker 1: the dwarves, and I think we're supposed to understand that
Speaker 1: Mike is sort of a little engineer, like he has
Speaker 1: an affinity for machines. We see him later repairing Jody's
Speaker 1: muscle car at multiple points, and like there's a part
Speaker 1: where he's working on the engine while Jody is just
Speaker 1: standing there talking to a friend like, Yeah, I'm gonna
Speaker 1: ditch this kid and get out of town anyway. Jody,
Speaker 1: inside the funeral home goes investigating the weird sounds, but
Speaker 1: he doesn't quite figure it out. Instead, there's a great
Speaker 1: jump scare where we first hear Angus scrim talk. He
Speaker 1: comes up behind him and slaps down on his shoulders says,
Speaker 1: the funeral is about to begin.
Speaker 3: Yes, now I.
Speaker 1: Started noticing a pattern. I don't know if you picked
Speaker 1: up on the same thing, Rob, Like in the funeral scene,
Speaker 1: there's a very symmetrical shot where we see the church
Speaker 1: service filmed from straight down the back of the aisle
Speaker 1: where it's like a perfectly balanced frame. There are people
Speaker 1: sitting in the pews on both side and the columns
Speaker 1: lining on both sides, so it's totally symmetrical. We already
Speaker 1: saw shots like that when Jody was walking through the mausoleum.
Speaker 1: You know, he'd be framed in the doorway with all
Speaker 1: these decorations that are exactly symmetrical on both sides. The
Speaker 1: movie seems to be fond of shots like this where
Speaker 1: the subject is in the middle and then it's just
Speaker 1: mirror images on both sides of the screen.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, And I think especially with this scene, but
Speaker 3: also with the mausoleum scenes as well, there is this
Speaker 3: impression of narrowing, you know, as if narrowing towards the
Speaker 3: death point, which I think lines up nicely with the
Speaker 3: theme of the movie and the idea that you know,
Speaker 3: we're propelled through it, that Mike is propelled through this
Speaker 3: world and you know it keeps the pacing contributes to
Speaker 3: that as well. Also, I want to point out, I
Speaker 3: don't know if you noticed this, but in this particular,
Speaker 3: I see this is a like an actual church, an
Speaker 3: actual location, and they didn't build any of this or
Speaker 3: or decorated a lot. But there's a weird painting above
Speaker 3: the altar in this scene that again I assume it's
Speaker 3: just a legit in church painting, but it has kind
Speaker 3: of zombie Jesus vibes to it, like Jesus has his
Speaker 3: arms up like Frankenstein.
Speaker 1: A bit oh interesting. I didn't notice that. I was
Speaker 1: just thinking, what church let phantasm shoot inside?
Speaker 3: I mean maybe they. I don't know how it went down.
Speaker 3: Maybe they didn't tell him what the film was about,
Speaker 3: or maybe they explained the theme and the church was like, yeah,
Speaker 3: works for us, as long as you get the Jesus
Speaker 3: painting in there. We're very proud of this. Okay.
Speaker 1: Anyway, So Reggie and Jody are there for the funeral
Speaker 1: of their friend, their I guess, their bandmate maybe. And Mike,
Speaker 1: the younger guy, is trying to peep on the funeral
Speaker 1: with binoculars. I didn't understand this at all, Like, why
Speaker 1: isn't he just there instead, he's like in the bushes
Speaker 1: with binoculars watching them carry the coffin.
Speaker 3: Mike is a consonant voyeur. He is just he's just
Speaker 3: constantly spying on sex and death, as is the you know,
Speaker 3: the very definition of the of the voyeuristic imput Like
Speaker 3: his brother's meeting some lady. Well, Mike's in the bushes.
Speaker 3: He's going to see what's happening here. Somebody's moving a
Speaker 3: casket around. Mike's in the bushes. He's got the binoculars out.
Speaker 3: He wants to see how these worlds work, these worlds
Speaker 3: that he is not yet entered into but seems destined
Speaker 3: to be a part of.
Speaker 1: But because he's spying on the funeral, he's still watching
Speaker 1: after all of the mourners leave, and he gets to
Speaker 1: see something very odd happen the tall Man and Gus
Speaker 1: scrim after everybody's gone. Instead of, you know, like letting
Speaker 1: the workers bury the casket, he picks up the casket,
Speaker 1: takes it back to the hearse and puts it inside.
Speaker 1: And he's carrying the entire thing by himself.
Speaker 3: Not only is he most probably evil, he's also cheap.
Speaker 3: He's not hiring anybody else to carry these for him.
Speaker 3: He's just picking it up himself. We also get a
Speaker 3: sense of this when we see Jody's body in the casket.
Speaker 3: Jody looks a little gooolish. It's like the tall Man
Speaker 3: is not doing a good job, and Jody, I'm not sorry,
Speaker 3: not Jody. What's his name, tom good friend? Tommy. Yes,
Speaker 3: Tommy looks gholish, does not look like he's been embalmed
Speaker 3: like a to the degree that you would want your
Speaker 3: loved one embalmed, that would say, but he looks like
Speaker 3: a movie corps. So yes, mission accomplished.
Speaker 1: Right, Okay, so we got the setup. Mike has seen
Speaker 1: something very weird at the Morningside Cemetery, and after that
Speaker 1: weird reveal, Mike walks around alone with excellent theme music
Speaker 1: playing some great seventies horror movie atmosphere. You know, a
Speaker 1: lot of great horror movies from from this time get
Speaker 1: so much mileage, like they stick in your mind, not
Speaker 1: just because of the scary scenes, but because of the
Speaker 1: eerie scenes where a character is merely sort of walking
Speaker 1: through the landscape and the music is playing. I think
Speaker 1: about the early scenes of going down the sidewalks in Halloween,
Speaker 1: or the way Mike is just walking around, maybe going
Speaker 1: to visit the Reverend mother guy Helen Mohayam in this movie.
Speaker 3: Yes, yeah, this is where we get to our wonderful
Speaker 3: Benajessa Itt scene.
Speaker 1: Straight Dune ripoff, and I love it. Clearly Don was
Speaker 1: a fan of Dune. In fact, it's explicit later when
Speaker 1: Jody goes to a bar. Did you notice this in
Speaker 1: the bar is called Dune's Bar.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, he was obviously a big fan of the book.
Speaker 3: The Lynch adaptation wouldn't come out to eighty four, So yeah,
Speaker 3: definitely a written sci fi fan. In fact, we see
Speaker 3: there's another scene where we see a sci fi paperback
Speaker 3: on Mike's desk or bedside table, and I looked it up.
Speaker 3: I forget what it is offhand, but it is a
Speaker 3: particular sci fi novel that was included. I guess to
Speaker 3: let you know that Mike's into sci fi, that maybe
Speaker 3: he's a little more creative than other people in the
Speaker 3: community around him.
Speaker 1: The book was I Am Legion by Rogers Alasni Oh
Speaker 1: is it?
Speaker 3: Oh good?
Speaker 1: My name is Legion? Maybe I don't know.
Speaker 3: I've never read it, okay, but that sounds right. Yeah.
Speaker 3: I looked it up and then forgot promptly forgot it.
Speaker 3: But it has had very cool little late seventies paperback
Speaker 3: sci fi cover art.
Speaker 1: I love it so clearly. This scene is just taken
Speaker 1: from from Doune the book. But what would you say
Speaker 1: is literally supposed to be happening here? Is this lady
Speaker 1: supposed to be a fortune teller. She's like dressed in
Speaker 1: all black, wearing dark sunglasses inside and in a room
Speaker 1: full of candles, and she speaks through her granddaughter.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, and it's you know, it's already got a
Speaker 3: creepy vibe though you probably, if you've not seen the film,
Speaker 3: you're thinking, well, it's not like then they make him
Speaker 3: put his hand in a box and experience phantom pain
Speaker 3: and then tell him that fear is the mind killer. Well,
Speaker 3: actually all of that happens. That's exactly what happens in
Speaker 3: the scene.
Speaker 1: They don't say mind killer. She says, fear is the killer. Yes,
Speaker 1: doesn't quite have the same ring.
Speaker 3: No, And then I think the box vanishes, right, It
Speaker 3: like straight up vanishes in front of our eyes, the
Speaker 3: viewer's eyes on the table.
Speaker 1: Yes, suggesting that not only in the pain is the
Speaker 1: pain in the box an illusion created telepathically by the
Speaker 1: reverend mother here, but that the box itself is there
Speaker 1: wasn't even a box.
Speaker 3: Now what does all this mean within the context of
Speaker 3: the film. I don't know it.
Speaker 1: Well, Mike is told not to fear, he said, The
Speaker 1: granddaughter says, fear is the killer. Don't fear. That's what
Speaker 1: grandmother wants you to learn. It was all in your mind.
Speaker 1: And then Mike says, oh, yeah.
Speaker 3: I guess it will come. We will come back around
Speaker 3: to this later. This film does do a pretty good
Speaker 3: job of if it establishes something, it will come back
Speaker 3: around to it.
Speaker 1: Okay, I think it's time to talk about sitting here
Speaker 1: at midnight. So at Jody and Mike's house, Jody is
Speaker 1: sitting there on the front porch playing a playing a
Speaker 1: stratocaster plugged into a Fender amp, and then Reggie pulls up.
Speaker 1: Reggie now is in his workoutfit. He is wearing an
Speaker 1: ice cream suit. I don't know. He's wearing like a
Speaker 1: white shirt and white pants with a black bow tie.
Speaker 1: And he's driving a truck that says Reggie's ice Cream.
Speaker 1: And it's got a guitar tucked into one of the
Speaker 1: I don't know, the cooler boxes, I guess. And so
Speaker 1: Reggie gets out of the car, comes up and plays
Speaker 1: guitar alongside Jody. They play a song called Sitting Here
Speaker 1: at Midnight, where the lyrics are I'm just sitting here
Speaker 1: at midnight, and I'll be sitting here till noon. You see,
Speaker 1: my lady left me lonely, Yes she did. My baby
Speaker 1: left me blue. And then they both go oh and
Speaker 1: then play a riff. It's and I will give him credit.
Speaker 1: Both actors are actually playing guitars here nice just like
Speaker 1: moving their hands while the soundtrack plays.
Speaker 3: Ill also say that a lesser movie would have only
Speaker 3: played part of the song, or would have cut away
Speaker 3: and done some sort of a montage or something. But
Speaker 3: now we get the full short performance of this song
Speaker 3: right here on the porch, and I dig it. Also,
Speaker 3: you mentioned that the ice cream truck says Reggie's ice
Speaker 3: cream somehow that I missed out on that when i've
Speaker 3: every time I watched it. That's an interesting detail, Like,
Speaker 3: not only is Reggie the ice cream man, he's apparently
Speaker 3: a business owner.
Speaker 1: Yes, he owns his own business. He's really plugged in
Speaker 1: at the local chamber of commerce.
Speaker 3: Now we do get a nice weird moment there at
Speaker 3: the end of the performance with a tuning fork.
Speaker 1: Though, yes we do well. First of all, after they play,
Speaker 1: I think Jody goes not bad, and then Reggie says
Speaker 1: we're hot is Love, you know, which makes me think
Speaker 1: Hot as Love was the name of their band.
Speaker 3: Oh man, that's a good that would have totally fit.
Speaker 1: But so Reggie pulls out a tuning fork, I guess
Speaker 1: to tune his guitar, but instead we just really zone
Speaker 1: in on the fork and we listen to it it
Speaker 1: humming out a tune until Reggie mutes it by putting
Speaker 1: his two fingers on the end of the fork. Times.
Speaker 3: We will come back to this detail as well.
Speaker 1: Some more stuff happened. We see random like a random
Speaker 1: blonde lady walk into the funeral home and then open
Speaker 1: a door and light shines on her and she screams.
Speaker 1: There are a few things in the movie that are
Speaker 1: just like random things happen and I can't really connect
Speaker 1: them to anything else, So you know, something like that happens.
Speaker 1: But hey, let's go to the bar with Jody. He's
Speaker 1: gonna go to Dune's Cantina, have a beer and try
Speaker 1: to make some friends.
Speaker 3: And Mike is here for this. Mike is watching the
Speaker 3: whole time.
Speaker 1: Yes, Mike of course follows Jody everywhere, so he's outside
Speaker 1: peeping through the window of the bar as Jody's like
Speaker 1: chatting up a lady, chatting up a blond lady who
Speaker 1: they're hitting it off, and he doesn't know who she is,
Speaker 1: but we do because we saw that horribly awkward opening scene.
Speaker 1: It's the lady who stabbed Tommy and turned into Angus
Speaker 1: scrim So Jody don't go home with Angus Grim, but
Speaker 1: it looks like he's gonna. She leads him off to
Speaker 1: the cemetery. I guess the goal is to kill him.
Speaker 1: Mike is still following them, peeping on everything, and then
Speaker 1: suddenly everything is interrupted because snarling, warbling noises start up again,
Speaker 1: and some little creature that looks like a Jawa, like
Speaker 1: a short figuring brown robes, charges out at him from
Speaker 1: the darkness, and Mike runs away, screaming. This interrupts everything.
Speaker 1: Everybody runs off, and Jody runs after Mike. There are
Speaker 1: some really goofy sex jokes in the sea, and I
Speaker 1: don't feel like describing, but anyway, so Jody ends up
Speaker 1: running off after Mike.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it seems a little bit bit cringy in some respects,
Speaker 3: but yeah, this is our first glimpse of the dwarves
Speaker 3: actually scampering about and causing mischief, one of the key
Speaker 3: aspects of the Phantasm films.
Speaker 1: Now, is this a good place to talk about the
Speaker 1: connection between the dwarves in this movie and the jawas
Speaker 1: in Star Wars, because we got to admit there in
Speaker 1: the brown robes with the pointy hoods, they look extremely similar.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there is a strong comparison to be made. Very
Speaker 3: similar vibes and of course different ultimately different energy is involved.
Speaker 3: Like Jawas and Star Wars, they are just technological scavengers
Speaker 3: looking to pick up the pieces and make a few
Speaker 3: deals here and there. They're not evil. They're very neutral
Speaker 3: creatures and as we've seen in later installments of Star Wars,
Speaker 3: and you can have quite good relations with the Jawas.
Speaker 3: They're they're they're non indecent folk. Uh. These creatures the
Speaker 3: dwarves of phantasm. These are little monsters.
Speaker 1: That are snarling, little zombies.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they are up to no good. They will attack you,
Speaker 3: they will do god knows what.
Speaker 4: Now.
Speaker 1: I think a lot of people have assumed that these
Speaker 1: creatures were inspired by the design of the Jawas, But
Speaker 1: in Don Coscarelli's defense, they had apparently they had this
Speaker 1: idea and started shooting the movie before Star Wars came out,
Speaker 1: So I think it looks like this is just a coincidence.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and and we do, unlike the Jawas, which in
Speaker 3: which we never see the Jawa's face, we will get
Speaker 3: to see the face of one of these dwarfs later on.
Speaker 3: And I should also point out that by the time
Speaker 3: they make Phantasm two, in which they had a much
Speaker 3: bigger budget. By the way, one of the things they
Speaker 3: use that budget on is always showing the dwarves faces.
Speaker 3: So the dwarves look extra evil and nasty in that
Speaker 3: film because their faces are never really Oh they may
Speaker 3: their faces may be obscured in some scenes, but there
Speaker 3: are whole lot of scenes where you get to see
Speaker 3: their little snarling faces.
Speaker 1: So anyway, coming back to the plot, here's what some
Speaker 1: weird stuff happens. So Jody runs off after Mike because
Speaker 1: Mike was scared and screaming chased by a necro dwarf,
Speaker 1: and Mike tries to explain to Jody what happened, and
Speaker 1: Jody says it was probably just a gopher in heat, okay,
Speaker 1: And then and then Jody sends Mike home with his car,
Speaker 1: and then Mike wakes and then Mike like wakes up
Speaker 1: and he's in his bed with the groovy blanket with
Speaker 1: the brown, white and gold stripes, but the tall man
Speaker 1: is standing over his bed and his bed is in
Speaker 1: the middle of a cemetery. And then zombies like scream
Speaker 1: and grab him. So I guess this is a dream
Speaker 1: and then he wakes up. But like, if this was
Speaker 1: a dream, how far back does that go? Like how
Speaker 1: much of it was a dream? We don't know when
Speaker 1: the dream sequence started.
Speaker 3: Yeah, or when does it end? Is it still going?
Speaker 3: Is the tall man about to do a jump? Scare
Speaker 3: right behind you right now, Joe, It might happen. But
Speaker 3: those questions aside, this is a fabulous scene. This is
Speaker 3: one that I think has used in the trailer as well,
Speaker 3: just the symmetrical shooting of it, the way it's all
Speaker 3: framed up, the darkness, and it also just like it
Speaker 3: sums up a lot of the attitude of phantasm. Like
Speaker 3: here is Mike the youth in bed, clearly troubled, and
Speaker 3: like Death, the personification of Death is like literally at
Speaker 3: the head of his bed, leering over him, and then
Speaker 3: these things jump out and start, you know, presumably about
Speaker 3: to just tear him in half.
Speaker 1: Then one of the funniest things is it goes from
Speaker 1: He's waking up from a dream sequence and then it
Speaker 1: goes straight to another scene that feels so dream like.
Speaker 1: He's it's it looks kind of gauzy, and Mike is
Speaker 1: wandering down the sidewalk like sucking on a lollipop and
Speaker 1: checking the change tray and payphones for change, and then
Speaker 1: he looks across the street and there's the tall Man
Speaker 1: just walking past like a clothing store. And then there's
Speaker 1: Reggie's ice cream truck in the foreground, and Reggie is
Speaker 1: opening up the freezer and pulling ice cream out, and
Speaker 1: there is fog emanating from the freezer. And then the
Speaker 1: tall Man stops right behind Reggie and stands in the
Speaker 1: freezer fog and turns and looks at Mike and does
Speaker 1: this monstrous sniff. He's like, you know, breathing in uh
Speaker 1: in some kind of weird agony or something. And what
Speaker 1: the heck is going on here? Did this really happen?
Speaker 1: Is this a dream? What is the tall man doing
Speaker 1: when he's sniffing the freezer fog? I don't know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's definitely another great scene that has dreamlike qualities,
Speaker 3: and I think has that strong youth vibe of like
Speaker 3: here here the youth is seeing the true creepy nature
Speaker 3: of reality. It's lost to all the other adults, like
Speaker 3: here's Reggie, Reggie to notice this going on at all.
Speaker 3: Reggie's just doing his thing, doing his job. I also
Speaker 3: love how the scene it seems to imply, or it's
Speaker 3: always struck me this way, as being a moment where
Speaker 3: the tall Man is looking right at us the viewer.
Speaker 3: He's looking right back at Mike. So it's like the
Speaker 3: abyss staring back. It's game recognizing game here, it's like
Speaker 3: Mike and the tall Man have a connection. And we'll
Speaker 3: see another version of this later on in the picture.
Speaker 1: Yes we will. But I just want to flag again
Speaker 1: that I have completely lost track of what's the dream
Speaker 1: and what's reality by this point in the movie.
Speaker 3: This is This is probably a good point to mention.
Speaker 3: In Phantasm Too. Again, Universal comes in gives them a
Speaker 3: bunch of funding to finally make a sequel to Phantasm,
Speaker 3: and apparently they made some demands, as you might expect
Speaker 3: when a big studio comes in and gives you a
Speaker 3: whole bunch of money. They said, well, we need some
Speaker 3: romantic interests for our characters, especially for Mike. You can't
Speaker 3: bring back Baldwin and Reggie Banister. You get to bring
Speaker 3: back one and the other one you have to recast.
Speaker 3: So in Fantasm Too they recast Mike, which, given the choice,
Speaker 3: was the correct choice to make. Like you don't recast Reggie.
Speaker 3: You got it. You can't recast Reggie.
Speaker 1: Must have Reggie Banister.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: But one of the other apparently, apparently one of the
Speaker 3: other studio demands was no dream sequences. Nobody's dreaming in
Speaker 3: this film. It's I guess they thought it was too confusing,
Speaker 3: and they're like, everything needs to be linear, nobody has
Speaker 3: any dreams, which is a weird demand to make on
Speaker 3: a sequel to this film, a film that, like you said,
Speaker 3: on one hand, like that's the whole quality of it.
Speaker 3: It's like, we don't know when it's a dream and
Speaker 3: when it's not. Even the title of the film is phantasm.
Speaker 3: It is supposed to be like an illusion, something you're
Speaker 3: not sure about. But you also understand where the studio
Speaker 3: is like, look, this is too much. We needed to
Speaker 3: be nice and linear. No dreams, that's a tragedy. I'm
Speaker 3: gonna have to I wonder if I'll get mad when
Speaker 3: I watch P two. Oh. P two is still a
Speaker 3: lot of fun. It's very much an action film. It's
Speaker 3: kind of like Aliens to this film's Alien, but without
Speaker 3: the consistency of quality. Like Phantasm two is a dumber film,
Speaker 3: but also a film that clearly had more money to
Speaker 3: throw at killer ball effects and dwarf effects, and also, yeah,
Speaker 3: Reggie is transformed into a pure action hero and so
Speaker 3: it's a lot of fun as well. But it's very
Speaker 3: different and definitely there's something to be said for it.
Speaker 3: It's moving away from the dream imagery for the most part.
Speaker 1: So the next thing is we're going to spend some
Speaker 1: time with Mike and Jody in their house. I love
Speaker 1: their house. There's a part where Mike is like underneath
Speaker 1: Jody's muscle car doing repairs on it again because apparently,
Speaker 1: you know, he's got full mechanic training even though he
Speaker 1: is only twelve or nineteen and he's and he is
Speaker 1: attacked by the necro dwarves while he is under the car,
Speaker 1: but then in trying to defend himself, he ends up
Speaker 1: bonking Jody on the toe with a hammer. But anyway,
Speaker 1: this is when we finally get a really good look
Speaker 1: at their house and all of the the length of
Speaker 1: the carpet fibers will amaze you.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there's the see the scene where I think this
Speaker 3: is later on, but there's a scene with the stairs
Speaker 3: in the house. We have these like floating stairs and
Speaker 3: they're all carpeted, and man, you just want to you
Speaker 3: just want to take your shoes off and walk on those.
Speaker 1: Things, except they also look like they would have protruding
Speaker 1: hidden nails.
Speaker 3: Well, it is in nineteen seventies, so it's like everything's
Speaker 3: everything in the house looks comfy and yet possibly dangerous.
Speaker 1: Anyway, Mike chills out for a bit in his glorious
Speaker 1: bedroom with the shot of the moon on the wall
Speaker 1: and like a John Lennon poster, I think one of
Speaker 1: those maps of the world that cuts Asia in half
Speaker 1: instead of dividing in the Pacific Ocean. And we see
Speaker 1: him tuck a gigantic bowie knife into a sheet strapped
Speaker 1: to his calf, and the knife is as thick as
Speaker 1: his leg, so when he pulls his pants leg down
Speaker 1: over it, it looks really funny. He also packs a crucifix,
Speaker 1: but this is your classic suiting up scene. It's like
Speaker 1: when Van Helsing is packing his steaks in his holy
Speaker 1: water into the kit. But it's time to head off
Speaker 1: to the Morningside Cemetery at night for some reason, I
Speaker 1: guess to figure out what's going on with the tall
Speaker 1: man and the jawas so Mike Head's over he breaks
Speaker 1: through a window to sneak in, and he's walking around
Speaker 1: in the dark with a lighter. He ends up hiding
Speaker 1: in a coffin in a classic horror movie trope, somebody's
Speaker 1: got to hide in a coffin because somebody's looking for them,
Speaker 1: while a very blank faced man in a white hat
Speaker 1: creeps around looking for him. Rob, did you understand that
Speaker 1: this man in the white hat is supposed to be
Speaker 1: of the same species as Angus scrim.
Speaker 3: I think he's more well, you know, it's it's hard
Speaker 3: this one. This is a point where it's difficult to
Speaker 3: sort of think about this film completely on its own terms,
Speaker 3: because knowing what we know about later installments, I feel
Speaker 3: like it's clear that this guy's just an underling. But
Speaker 3: if I were just watching this film for the first time, yeah,
Speaker 3: I might think this must be this being must be
Speaker 3: of the same species or origin as the tall man,
Speaker 3: because they're both they like, I don't think they exchange
Speaker 3: any words. They have this kind of like wordless correspondence energy.
Speaker 3: But the scene here is really cool though, you know,
Speaker 3: with him hiding in the casket, I feel like it
Speaker 3: has genuine tension to it, and it's this cool bit
Speaker 3: where he's used the lighter that he was showing off
Speaker 3: earlier to keep the casket from closing completely because I
Speaker 3: don't know, maybe it would self lock and then he
Speaker 3: would be stuck in there and buried or found later.
Speaker 1: I wonder if there's there are unused scenes that describe
Speaker 1: who the man in the white hat is, like maybe
Speaker 1: he's a human wren Field to the tall man. Because
Speaker 1: did you read the same thing I did Rob about
Speaker 1: how the original cut of Phantasm was over three hours long?
Speaker 3: Oh wow, Well, I guess. I mean that's not out
Speaker 3: of character with a lot of films where the initial
Speaker 3: cut is just really bloated. But if that's the case
Speaker 3: with this film, I mean, good job on them cutting
Speaker 3: it down and it being this consistently entertaining. There's not
Speaker 3: a dull moment in the film.
Speaker 1: It's like an hour and twenty something. So if that's true,
Speaker 1: that would mean that would have meant we lost half
Speaker 1: the movie.
Speaker 3: I think they pull some stuff out later in some
Speaker 3: of the sequels, and like pretty decades later in some
Speaker 3: of the sequels, they were able to pull out whole
Speaker 3: sequences that they didn't use.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Well, anyway, Mike is attacked by the man in the
Speaker 1: white hat, but at the same time he is being
Speaker 1: pursued by the ball. This is when we first really
Speaker 1: meet the ball. There is a shiny metal sphere that
Speaker 1: flies through the air at Mike and it's coming at
Speaker 1: him to drive into his face while the man in
Speaker 1: the white hat is holding him. But Mike bites the
Speaker 1: guy on the arm and then ducks down and then
Speaker 1: the ball hits the guy in the white hat instead.
Speaker 1: And I remember when I first saw this, the entire
Speaker 1: room was just in shock watching what the ball did.
Speaker 1: It's a roll that beautiful ball footage moment where the
Speaker 1: drill goes in between the eyes and then it just
Speaker 1: squirts out a jet of blood from the back of
Speaker 1: the ball.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Like it's not trying to keep the blood, it's
Speaker 3: just take the blood out of the thing that it
Speaker 3: is embedded in. It's just absolutely glorious sequence. One of
Speaker 3: the coolest, weirdest horror movie deaths you'll ever find in
Speaker 3: a horror movie.
Speaker 1: To take it out of the context of horror movie violence,
Speaker 1: this device, if it existed, would be a wonderful fruit juicer.
Speaker 1: It looks, you know, flying to the side of a
Speaker 1: watermelon and then just drain all the watermelon juice straight out.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I mean you'd have to stand behind it and
Speaker 3: I guess catch it all in your mouth or something.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you'd need a receptacle.
Speaker 3: Yeah, But that's again that's another quality of the sphere
Speaker 3: that I like because it doesn't feel like it was
Speaker 3: designed to function in this world or in these circumstances.
Speaker 3: You know, just attaching to things and sucking all the
Speaker 3: liquid out of them and just blasting the liquid over
Speaker 3: what's whatever's behind it. I love it. It's so weird.
Speaker 1: But there are a lot of effects in this movie
Speaker 1: that are great low tech, low cost effects. And the
Speaker 1: ball effects. I think this is a great example because
Speaker 1: there are scenes where this metal sphere is actually flying
Speaker 1: through the air toward the camera. Don't necessarily see any
Speaker 1: wires or anything. So how did they do this? I
Speaker 1: think what they did is they just had somebody stand
Speaker 1: behind the camera and pitch the ball, or they might
Speaker 1: have used a pitching machine. In any case, the ball
Speaker 1: was being a thrown or ejected down the hall past
Speaker 1: the camera, and then they just used the shot in reverse.
Speaker 1: So the ball is just flying toward the camera from
Speaker 1: out of nowhere.
Speaker 3: It looks good. It looks good. However they did it
Speaker 3: like these are sequences that that hold up absolutely you
Speaker 3: know that these these totally buy this flying silver sphere
Speaker 3: from another world.
Speaker 1: Well, anyway, there's a big chase scene. The tall Man
Speaker 1: chases Mike. At one point Mike manages to.
Speaker 3: Before the chase. Before the chase, Joe, you have one
Speaker 3: of my favorite moments. This is the showdown between Mike
Speaker 3: and the tall Man. This is the moment, another game
Speaker 3: recognized game moment. They both they freeze. They kind of
Speaker 3: Mike kind of like cautiously walks up, the tall Man's
Speaker 3: cautiously walking up, and then in their kind of mirror
Speaker 3: images of each other, but kind of you know, like
Speaker 3: one to one side, one to the other, and then boom,
Speaker 3: Mike runs for it and the tall Man chases after him.
Speaker 3: And the tall Man he's got a lot of he's
Speaker 3: got a lot of go, he's got some energy. He
Speaker 3: may look like he's somewhere between the ages of fifty
Speaker 3: and eighty. Again, his age is also suitably vague, And
Speaker 3: of course he's probably he's not of this world anyway,
Speaker 3: so it doesn't matter, but yeah, he can move.
Speaker 1: This leads to the finger sequence which is a whole
Speaker 1: like series of scenes which are so so. Mike manages
Speaker 1: to escape from the tall Man and cut off some
Speaker 1: of his fingers. It squirts out yellow blood and his
Speaker 1: fingers are like still moving around on the floor. Mike
Speaker 1: takes one of the fingers, takes it home, keeps it
Speaker 1: in a box, falls asleep on the floating shag carpet
Speaker 1: stairs with a shotgun in his hand. That's not safe.
Speaker 1: Then Jody finds him asleep on the stairs. Mike explains
Speaker 1: it to Jody. He's like, here's what happened. I'm going
Speaker 1: to show you a finger in a box. And then
Speaker 1: he shows him the finger, and then Jody's like, okay,
Speaker 1: I am convinced. I appreciated that that he didn't persist
Speaker 1: in denying it once he saw the finger and the
Speaker 1: yellow blood in the box. And then the finger turns
Speaker 1: into a beatle demon which attacks Jody and Mike, and
Speaker 1: then they try to kill it in the garbage disposal
Speaker 1: in the sink, and then Reggie arrives to witness this,
Speaker 1: so now Reggie's in on the whole demon conspiracy. And
Speaker 1: then after this, Jody starts giving Mike a gun safety
Speaker 1: lesson and then Jody heads off to the funeral home
Speaker 1: to investigate things for himself.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and I love the love how we go from
Speaker 3: this scene where Jody's giving Mike the gun safety lesson
Speaker 3: and then Jody Bray goes into the basement of the
Speaker 3: mausoleum at night is immediately attacked by dwarf And there's
Speaker 3: a scene where a dwarf is on Jody's back and
Speaker 3: Jody is trying to shoot the dwarf off of his
Speaker 3: back with a handgun by essentially aiming the gun at
Speaker 3: his own head. Like it's just so dangerous. It's like, really,
Speaker 3: you were just given pointers on gun safety and now
Speaker 3: you're doing this.
Speaker 1: That scene is so funny. Yeah, but anyway, Jody. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so Jody has this fight with one of the necro
Speaker 1: dwarfs in the funeral home and then he flees, and
Speaker 1: then this leads into a car chase where Jody and
Speaker 1: Mike are driving around shooting at a hearse I think
Speaker 1: that's being driven by one of the creatures, and then
Speaker 1: they crash. They get the other car to crash, and
Speaker 1: they go up to the creature and they pull back
Speaker 1: its hood and you're wondering, what's its face? Going to
Speaker 1: be like and they realize, oh no, this was our friend.
Speaker 1: Tommy is the Lemmy guy, but he's covered in yellow slime.
Speaker 3: Oh, and this is great. The reveal that the dwarves
Speaker 3: are the bodies of the dead that have been like
Speaker 3: compressed down into into little necro dwarves like this. I
Speaker 3: remember when I when I when I watched one of
Speaker 3: these films for the first time and realized this, and
Speaker 3: I was like, oh, my goodness, that's that's genius. That's
Speaker 3: so beautiful.
Speaker 1: So they summoned Reggie's ice cream truck, which is now
Speaker 1: doubling his body removal truck. So they're putting it in
Speaker 1: the in the freezer and Reggie, by this scene, I
Speaker 1: think he was dressed like this earlier, but he looks
Speaker 1: so funny because he's wearing a black vest over his
Speaker 1: ice cream outfit, so he looks like a combination of
Speaker 1: a milkman and a riverboat casino dealer.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So Reggie, Jody, and Mike go back to their house
Speaker 1: and they have a strategy session. Jody's going why why,
Speaker 1: why why are they taking people's bodies and crushing them
Speaker 1: down to half size. And then Reggie suggests, well, we
Speaker 1: got to catch the tall man and drive a steak
Speaker 1: through his heart. I don't know why they think that
Speaker 1: would work. And then Mike, Mike is incredulous. He's like,
Speaker 1: how do you think we could drive a stake through
Speaker 1: his heart? That mother's strong. Many times in this movie
Speaker 1: people use the word mother as a general noun to
Speaker 1: refer to a person or a thing.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it work. Gives a looking so nicely with Mike
Speaker 3: here though, because because it's like Mike's talking tough, He's
Speaker 3: talking like like like he thinks an adult should be
Speaker 3: talking in the situation. I love it.
Speaker 1: Okay, Well, we're heading into the final sequence here, so
Speaker 1: I think Reggie and Jody are going to go investigate
Speaker 1: the funeral home again, and they're going to make Mike
Speaker 1: stay at Sally's an antique store. I think these are
Speaker 1: characters who we should have met before but we haven't. Actually,
Speaker 1: maybe maybe that got cut.
Speaker 3: The antique store is a nice sequence though, because it's
Speaker 3: just Mike wandering around looking at strange things in an
Speaker 3: antique store and we get some fabulous percussion, like all
Speaker 3: the gongs and bells. It's a scene that I, yeah,
Speaker 3: without the me I guess it might be a little boring,
Speaker 3: but with the music it's it's really cool and creepy.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And he just wanders around looking at things until
Speaker 1: he finds an old photograph of the Tall Man in
Speaker 1: the nineteenth century driving a horse drawn carriage. And then
Speaker 1: from here he's like, you must take me home immediately.
Speaker 1: I don't know what this changes. Why does that mean
Speaker 1: he must leave?
Speaker 3: You're like, didn't they's nine?
Speaker 1: Yeah, didn't they already know that the Tall Man was otherworld? Like,
Speaker 1: why would he be that surprised? I don't know. So
Speaker 1: they're driving around and the car gets attacked by the
Speaker 1: creatures again. Uh, and then let's see Mike goes back
Speaker 1: home and then Jody locks Mike in his bedroom where
Speaker 1: he's like, I'm going to go go to the funeral home.
Speaker 1: You have to stay here. And then we get one
Speaker 1: of the moments that actually stuck in my mind the
Speaker 1: most from when I first saw this movie. It is
Speaker 1: when Mike comes up with a system to escape being
Speaker 1: locked in his room, and it is an improv explosive
Speaker 1: device that he makes out of a shotgun shell, a hammer,
Speaker 1: a tack, and some tape.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Absolutely do not do this at all.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So he like yeah. He puts a tack in
Speaker 1: the back of a shotgun shell and then tapes it
Speaker 1: to the end of a hammer and then like and
Speaker 1: then swings it at the door, and this makes the
Speaker 1: shell explode and it shoots its shot through the door,
Speaker 1: and then he's able to reach through and open up
Speaker 1: the knob or dislodge a screwdriver. I think that Jody
Speaker 1: jammed in there to prevent the door from opening. I
Speaker 1: was trying to figure out would this technique actually work.
Speaker 1: I have no idea. All I could find was people
Speaker 1: doing forum posts on it, so can't vouch for this
Speaker 1: at all, but people on the forum posts, so some
Speaker 1: people were saying, yeah, it seems like this would work,
Speaker 1: except the shot would not explode, you know, going straight
Speaker 1: forward like it would if it were coming out the
Speaker 1: barrel of a shotgun. It would explode in all directions
Speaker 1: because of the lack of a barrel.
Speaker 3: Please do not try this out. We are not asked
Speaker 3: to anybody to experiment and create and generate an answer
Speaker 3: on this. Do not attempt.
Speaker 1: But it was all for nothing, really, because Mike gets
Speaker 1: out and then immediately runs into Anga scrim Ambush at
Speaker 1: the door. Angus Scrim's like, I've been waiting for you.
Speaker 1: So he takes him. Tall Man takes him to the
Speaker 1: funeral home, where he escapes a hearse by shooting out
Speaker 1: a window. Meanwhile, Jody's already there. We get a bunch
Speaker 1: of action. There's like the ball attacks again and we
Speaker 1: get ball cam. Jody comes to the rescue with a
Speaker 1: shotgun and blows up the ball. And now they got
Speaker 1: to check out the scary door. So they're they're creeping
Speaker 1: over to the scary door that we saw the blonde
Speaker 1: girl open earlier. She sees the light and then she
Speaker 1: screams yeah.
Speaker 3: And this this is the point in the film where
Speaker 3: you've never seen it before. You might wonder, like, how
Speaker 3: did they keep it going? How do they up the
Speaker 3: ante here? But they do, Like the weirdness intensifies in
Speaker 3: this scene.
Speaker 1: Well, first of all, we get jump scare Reggie. Reggie
Speaker 1: just comes out to Reggie and the Yeah. He's like hey,
Speaker 1: and they're like, oh, we thought you were but no,
Speaker 1: he's good. And he reveals that he found Sally and
Speaker 1: Susie and some other people in there and they're not dead.
Speaker 1: They're all okay. And he's like, yeah, I snuck him
Speaker 1: out a window. Just a whole other story was happening
Speaker 1: while we were watching. The characters we barely knew are
Speaker 1: also now safe, so don't They're fine? Yeah, So okay,
Speaker 1: they want to go in the room. They open up
Speaker 1: the door and inside the room is full of these
Speaker 1: black barrels with little glass windows on them. Huh, what's
Speaker 1: going on there? We get a loud hum And then
Speaker 1: also in the room with the black barrels there is
Speaker 1: some weird furniture. There were just these two metal prongs
Speaker 1: coming up from the floor, and they look inside the
Speaker 1: barrels and they're like, oh, it's those necro dwarves there
Speaker 1: they are. So they're being created in these barrels, I guess.
Speaker 3: And then yeah, or at least created and then like
Speaker 3: pickled in the barrel, finished in the barrel, or stored
Speaker 3: in the barrel for transit.
Speaker 1: I don't know. And then Mike realizes that the two
Speaker 1: metal prongs coming up from the floor are actually a
Speaker 1: transdimensional portal, and he reaches his hand through and then
Speaker 1: he falls entirely through and sees what's on the other side,
Speaker 1: and it is a desert planet made of just like
Speaker 1: stones and gravel with a red sky where all of
Speaker 1: the necro dwarves are lined up in a row going
Speaker 1: all the way to the horizon as if they're like
Speaker 1: carrying stuff. And then Jody and Reggie save Mike. They
Speaker 1: pull him out from the portal and they put everything together.
Speaker 1: They figure out, Aha, the Tall Man is using the
Speaker 1: human corpses as alien slave labor on another planet, but
Speaker 1: because of that planet's gravity and I guess atmospheric pressure
Speaker 1: or heat, they have to be crushed down to a
Speaker 1: smaller size so they can work there as zombies.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I absolutely love this. This is a marvelous reveal,
Speaker 3: like there's another world out there, some sort of giant,
Speaker 3: high gravity world where crushed down necro dwarves are being
Speaker 3: sent to serve as labor. And also they never I
Speaker 3: don't know if they ever really draw this line or not,
Speaker 3: but I wonder if that's also why the tall Man
Speaker 3: is so tall, because he comes from one of these
Speaker 3: worlds with higher gravity, it comes to a lower gravity
Speaker 3: world and it like makes him taller somehow, I don't know. Huh.
Speaker 1: Okay, Well, anyway, there's a bunch of fighting after this
Speaker 1: lights go out, and then Jody and Mike end up
Speaker 1: chasing around with some of the with some of the creatures.
Speaker 1: Reggie is left behind in the room and there's a
Speaker 1: great moment where Reggie thinks back to the tuning fork
Speaker 1: because he is looking at the two metal prongs coming
Speaker 1: up from the floor, and he figures out how to
Speaker 1: do something to them, Like he puts his hands on
Speaker 1: the prongs like he did with his fingers on the
Speaker 1: tuning fork earlier, and that does something it like opens
Speaker 1: a portal, and then all the winds starts rushing and
Speaker 1: he almost gets sucked in.
Speaker 3: It's a great sequence, and I like how it, you know,
Speaker 3: connects to that moment with a tuning fork earlier in
Speaker 3: the film. He's like, this is it. I know what
Speaker 3: this is. I mean, I don't really know what this is,
Speaker 3: but I know the basic relationship here. I'm bad if
Speaker 3: I reach out with both hands and I stop the vibrations,
Speaker 3: I'm going to close this portal.
Speaker 1: Another trivia thing I saw alleged on the internet is
Speaker 1: that the idea to connect that to the tuning fork
Speaker 1: and everything was an idea that came from Susan, who
Speaker 1: was Reggie Banister's wife.
Speaker 3: Well it was a great idea.
Speaker 1: So Reggie makes it outside. He sees the lady in Lavender.
Speaker 1: I think he does not know like the audience does,
Speaker 1: that she is actually Angus scrim So he goes and
Speaker 1: tries to help her, but he gets stabbed, and there's
Speaker 1: general wind and chaos. There's you know, the tall Man
Speaker 1: standing over Reggie with a knife, and a Reggie apparently dies,
Speaker 1: and then we get the final show down where Jody
Speaker 1: and Mike escape and Jody's like, this is so out
Speaker 1: of nowhere, like not earned at all. Jody's like, there's
Speaker 1: an old mind shaft up by Singer's Creek, thousands of
Speaker 1: feet down. We just got to find a way to
Speaker 1: get him up there. And so he sends Mike into
Speaker 1: the house to at Ammo, and Jody says, he's going
Speaker 1: to go remove warning signs from around the mind shaft.
Speaker 1: But I don't know why they'd send Mike into the house,
Speaker 1: because don't they already know that the tall Man knows
Speaker 1: that's where they live. I don't know. Tall Man shows
Speaker 1: up and attacks Mike in the house. You know, he says, boy,
Speaker 1: you play a good game boy, But now the time
Speaker 1: is finished, and so they run around chasing and Mike's
Speaker 1: were repeating the litany against fear, except not really. Instead
Speaker 1: he's just saying, don't fear. And they they succeed. They
Speaker 1: you know, they they lure the tall Man into the
Speaker 1: mine shaft, which does not look like a mind shaft
Speaker 1: at all. It looks like a square somebody dug a
Speaker 1: square shaped hole in the dirt.
Speaker 3: Yeah, this is the one moment in the film where
Speaker 3: I feel like the effects feel a little bit shoddy,
Speaker 3: especially when the boulders roll in to fill up the
Speaker 3: pit after they drop the tall Man down there. It's
Speaker 3: not a deal breaker for the movie or anything, but
Speaker 3: but yeah, everything else feels fresh and believable, and this
Speaker 3: is a little like you can see the scenes. You
Speaker 3: can see the tarp there in that sequence, and.
Speaker 1: I was like, are they going to wake up? And
Speaker 1: it's all a dream and you know what happens the
Speaker 1: next thing, Mike wakes up as if from a dream,
Speaker 1: and then Mike and Reggie are hanging out next to
Speaker 1: a roaring fire and they're talking about how Jody died.
Speaker 3: Huh.
Speaker 1: It's like like, so instead of Reggie dying, they're saying
Speaker 1: Jody died. And then they show Mike visiting Jody's grave,
Speaker 1: and then Reggie's like, I'm going to take care of you, Mike,
Speaker 1: and then Reggie starts playing. He's like, let's go on
Speaker 1: a road trip. You know, we'll leave when the sun
Speaker 1: comes up. You go pack your bags. And Reggie sits
Speaker 1: there by the fire and starts to play that song
Speaker 1: sitting here at midnight again, and it is violently dissonant
Speaker 1: with the non diegetic soundtrack that's playing at the same time.
Speaker 1: Sounds horrible. And then up in Mike's room, the tall
Speaker 1: man appears in a mirror and he's like boy, and
Speaker 1: then there's a jump scare and pulls him into the mirror,
Speaker 1: and that's the end of the movie. I have no
Speaker 1: idea how to make sense of any of that. It
Speaker 1: does not connect at all.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I don't know dreams within dreams or dreams and
Speaker 3: images caused by by traumas and losses, because it's like
Speaker 3: there we start off with a growing understanding that Mike
Speaker 3: has lost both his parents, and then here at the
Speaker 3: end we get this revelation that he's lost his brother
Speaker 3: and that the only parental figure left in his life
Speaker 3: is Reggie. And yeah, it's I don't know, it's it's
Speaker 3: it's hard to connect all these things together, and yet
Speaker 3: everything shapes up in a way where you can you
Speaker 3: kind of buy it. You're like, there's a pattern here.
Speaker 3: I just can't quite piece it together. But if I
Speaker 3: watch it enough times then maybe it'll begin to sink in.
Speaker 1: I have a question about the theory of this movie.
Speaker 1: Why is the Tall Man doing murders at all? Because
Speaker 1: we discover in the end that his goal is to
Speaker 1: create Jawa zombies to work for him on this other planet,
Speaker 1: and he does that just with human corpses, so he
Speaker 1: just needs corpses. But he already operates a funeral parlor,
Speaker 1: So why is he going out of his way to
Speaker 1: do murders? Like I guess it would suggest that, like
Speaker 1: at the normal rate of natural death, he is not
Speaker 1: getting enough bodies to do what he needs to do.
Speaker 3: I guess. So yeah, Like in the second movie, they
Speaker 3: add this nice detail where the Tall Man moves around
Speaker 3: from town to town and he leaves just decimated funeral
Speaker 3: homes and decimated graveyards in his wake, Like all the
Speaker 3: bodies get claimed and turned into dwarves and send to
Speaker 3: this other world. So yeah, maybe he just like juices
Speaker 3: the numbers a little bit more. It's like, well, today,
Speaker 3: I could get just thirty dwarves from raiding the cemeteries
Speaker 3: and you know, getting some natural deaths rolling in. But
Speaker 3: I could also juice it a little bit and maybe
Speaker 3: kill a couple of people on the side. That's just
Speaker 3: more profits for me.
Speaker 1: He's trying to hit those Q four numbers.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I guess also it's like people who in some
Speaker 3: cases is there's a sense of like people who interfere
Speaker 3: with the process here with the with the scheme, they
Speaker 3: get killed and turned into zombies because why why waste
Speaker 3: a good body when you could turn that into a
Speaker 3: dwarf as well. But yeah, other times, like he's turning
Speaker 3: into this this woman to go out and clearly lure
Speaker 3: people to the cemetery for for for death. But I
Speaker 3: guess that that's ultimately more about this connection between sex
Speaker 3: and death in Mike's mind.
Speaker 1: But what if he goes to the trouble of doing
Speaker 1: that and then the person's family decides that they want
Speaker 1: that that person buried somewhere else.
Speaker 3: Oh, I don't think the tall Man would stand for that.
Speaker 1: He's got to use mafia tactics on grieving families to
Speaker 1: make sure he gets all of the bodies.
Speaker 3: I guess so. But it's like a small town like
Speaker 3: how many how many rivals? Well, I mean he's probably
Speaker 3: put the rival groups out of business, like you're not
Speaker 3: going to operate a funeral home in competition with the
Speaker 3: tall Man.
Speaker 1: I guess so, Rob, this has got to be one
Speaker 1: of our longest episodes ever. We must cap it here.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we'll go ahead and cave it off here. But yeah, Phantasm,
Speaker 3: it's a lot of fun. It's widely available in all formats,
Speaker 3: but the Phantasm remastered Blu Ray or digital release is
Speaker 3: certainly where you want to go for this one. I
Speaker 3: think I streamed the remastered version of via Prime, but
Speaker 3: you can again find this film just about anywhere. And yeah,
Speaker 3: it's a load of fun. It's a great Halloween viewing choice.
Speaker 3: All Right, we'll be back next Friday with more Weird
Speaker 3: House Cinema calibrated for your seasonal Halloween needs. In the meantime,
Speaker 3: will remind you that we are primarily a science podcast,
Speaker 3: with our core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. On Mondays
Speaker 3: we do listener mail. On Wednesdays we do a short
Speaker 3: form artifact or monster fact. On Fridays we do Weird
Speaker 3: House cinema. If you're interested in seeing what movies we've
Speaker 3: covered in the past, there are two places you can go.
Speaker 3: You can go to somemmutomusic dot com. That's my blog
Speaker 3: where I just do some very casual blog posts about
Speaker 3: these movies that we watch. But also if you use
Speaker 3: a letterbox that's L E T T E R box
Speaker 3: d dot com, we are on there as weird House.
Speaker 3: You will find our profile there and you'll find a
Speaker 3: list of all the movies we've covered on the show,
Speaker 3: and sometimes there'll be a little hint or a little
Speaker 3: spoiler of what the next film will be.
Speaker 1: Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Seth
Speaker 1: Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch
Speaker 1: with us with feedback on this episode or any other,
Speaker 1: to suggest topic for the future, or just to say hello,
Speaker 1: you can email us at contact stuff to Blow your
Speaker 1: Mind dot com.
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