Phantasm: Ravager (2016) Review

Phantasm: Ravager is the fifth and final entry in my favourite horror franchise, and a movie that has split the fandom down the middle - many hold it as a brilliant tribute to the golden indie filmmaking that brought us the original 1979 movie and the loyalty of the phans and the series' longrunning cast. Others see it as disappointing and ugly mess.

Unfortunately, I belong to the latter category and today I want to elaborate on why I think this film not only fails to be a compelling finale, but is just... bad. I've seen a lot of fans have go in-depth into why they love Ravager, yet most negative reviews I've seen online tend to focus on the poor CGI or the disjointed storytelling(the latter of which, as any phan will tell you, is part and parcel for this franchise).

To make my case, I am going to start with what I feel is this film's biggest failing in comparison with the other Phantasms and that's the characterisation of our main heroes. Because ultimately, the reason why people have stuck with this series for so long is their love for the trio - Mike, Reggie and Jody, and the actors who play them. The weird concepts are cool, but the trio made the movies fun. We could easily relate to these three nobodies as they got themselves lost in this insanity and then did their best to cope with it and stay true to one another.

Now, as the movies went on, part of this charm was lost as they became more familiar with the Tall Man's universe. Some innovations were necessary to keep things from getting stale, like the arc about the Tall Man wanting to turn Mike into one of his own kind, or Jody's imprisonment in the iconic sphere. But they were still our heroes and we were eager to see how they would come together to defeat the Tall Man, or be defeated by him.

And then Phantasm: Ravager happened. In this movie, Reggie has(for no reason that's ever explained) become splintered between different realities, and to make matters worse, the movie tries to be extra vague by constantly contradicting itself and changing the rules from scene to scene.

The investment is lost, because we no longer have a definitive trio. Why should we care about post-apocalyptic Mike when the only thing connecting him with the Mike that we know is one itty-bitty flashback that completely brushes over the storyline he had going in the past two films? Not to mention dementia universe professor Mike, who is very obviously not the same person(until he kinda is, maybe? And then not). Same goes for Jody, whose death and subsequent rebirth at the hands of the Tall Man was an ongoing mystery, yet here it's just forgotten about(I am aware that a deleted scene would've shown Jody become a sphere once more, but that's all it is, deleted).

Even Reggie, the heart of the series, is weak in this film, because
A) We don't really know what he's been doing for all the years between this and Phantasm IV. Either he was "looking for Mike" or was brainwashed by the Tall Man(the latter seems likely, until it's not... ah, the magic of Ravager).

B) The end of the movie has Reggie splintering off as well. In one reality, he's happily driving in the back of a Barracuda and in another, he's dying of dementia. The movie implies that Reggie has chosen to stick with the Tall Man universe and that's the Reggie we should care about. I'd be 100% onboard with that if the last we saw of the dementia universe was Reggie picking up the quadruple barrelled shotgun and obviously rejecting that world, but why waste our time showing Reggie dying next to Mike(who has magically forgotten all the memories he regained during the movie) and Jody(who was supposed to be dead in this universe to begin with)? Or is the car ride supposed to be a metaphor for how Reggie has gone to Heaven?

This exact composition is used in two different scenes featuring
the Tall Man and Reggie. They couldn't ask the two to move around a little?
Or just put the camera someplace else?

This is the moment where the fans would say "well, Phantasm was always open to interpretation and I love Ravager because the movie is so vague". To that I say, without investment or any kind of cohesion, why should I want to interpret anything?

The original 1979 Phantasm was a surreal, jittery movie that explained very little... but that doesn't mean it completely abandoned logic. There was still a plot that went from point A to point B. Cause and effect were a thing. And unlike Ravager, the original film didn't rewrite itself from scene to scene or throw new implications at the audience that didn't matter in the end.

Sure, by the end of the movie, we were left wondering what even happened, but until the ending, the film was one complete experience. A wild and crazy one, but it was complete. Ravager is about as far away from complete as you can get. There is no plot aside from Reggie trying and failing to figure out what's happening to him.

Now let's talk about how the movie fails as a follow-up to the first four films. That series, was more or less the story of Mike Pearson and his fear of death. Sure, Reggie took the center stage from time to time, but the story still belonged to Mike. This film, on the other hand, forgets Mike almost completely aside from being a prize for Reggie's character. The fascinating transformation of Mike into one of the Tall Man kind that both Phantasm III and Phantasm IV were centered around, is dropped without fanfare and brushed under the carpet with a few throwaway references.

I've written stuff. I know sometimes a writer can decide that something isn't working out, or he simply loses interest. I wouldn't begrudge Don Coscarelli for losing interest in Mike's transformation, or David Hartman wanting to tell his own story. But at least they should've had respect for the audience and work the change in direction into the movie smoothly. It's Phantasm, they could've done anything! Hell, with split realities, they could've had two Mikes, one evil and one not! That would've been kinda cool.
Instead, what happens is that Mike patches himself up and the Tall Man just claims his experiment is over and that's it. What a letdown after all these years of waiting.

And what of the human-Tall Man war as a whole? Well, I do appreciate Hartman making use of Roger Avery's abandoned Phantasm's End script by upping the stakes for the grand finale, even with that CGI. But unlike the other films, which at least creatively kill off the Tall Man, Phantasm: Ravager gives him the lamest possible send-off - he's blown up(been there, done that) by a really obnoxious midget. And for no reason, since both the phans and the characters themselves are perfectly aware that the Tall Man will just walk out from between a fork like one second later.

Surely they could've concocted some kind of cool send-off for him that wouldn't require 89-year old Angus Scrimm to move around too much and still seemed like it could be a definitive end for the Tall Man(even though of course, it's never over). This is the end of the franchise: the story may go on, but we should have a sense of finality regardless, because they must have known that the chances of making a new film were practically nil with this aging cast. Instead, midget explosion. Followed by a post-credits scene that brings back a fan favourite and only lets her interact with said midget, which leads me to believe she was only there as sequel bait. Which is kinda-sorta insane.

I love how Reggie's hair constantly switches between dyed and grey in the later films.
It was grey already in 1988, yet for some reason, mr Bannister wants me to assume
that in 2016 it became magically black again. Far out, man.

And now, here's a list of cool ideas that Phantasm: Ravager throws at the audience and then never does anything with:

5) At the very end, Mike implies that their next plan will be to fight the Tall Man someplace extremely cold. Leaving aside the obvious question of what exactly was their plan in this film to begin with, why couldn't we have had Phantasm In Antarctica? And don't tell me it was beyond budget, I've seen cheap sci-fi shows from the 60s pull that off.

4) Reggie wandering the post-apocalypse Earth. The first few minutes of Ravager, where we see him lost in the desert, collecting scraps, was so promising. It reminded me of the abandoned towns we saw in the earlier films and how the Tall Man was sucking the life out of Earth. It probably would've been better to stick with this desolate, atmospheric approach than the CGI hellworld we get towards the end of the film.

3) An alien virus has spread throughout humanity(I'm inclined to believe that this was only in the film because they heavily hinted at it in Phantasm IV, hoping to do Avery's film next).

2) Reggie is the Tall Man's bad dream. The concept of our heroes being a manifestation of Jebediah Morningside's own conscience could've been something beautiful.

1) At one point, the Tall Man explicitly tells Reggie that they've time-travelled back to the funeral home Morningside, three days before the events of the original film. There is absolutely no follow-up to this. Reggie does visit a mausoleum shortly after, but it is a completely different place.

And of course there's the regular movie problems - the CGI is ugly, and the cinematography is all over the place(some shots are actually quite beautiful, but Hartman's constant use of the zoom is terrible and cartoonish). The digital camera footage just doesn't look as good as traditional film, though I won't blame them for that one, since film is much more expensive now.

The movie's also just full of very noticeable production errors, like the Tall Man's CGI shadow having hair twice as long as Angus Scrimm, or Reggie's grip on the gun changing completely as he turns around from the dementia reality to the Tall Man world. The acting ranges from great(the regulars, Dawn Cody) to indescribably awful (Stephen Jutras, Daniel Schweiger).

I'm a Phantasm fan. I love the fact that this series lets the viewer fill in the details. In fact, my second least favourite is Phantasm II specifically because it is just a rerun of the first without the mystery. But my love for the series and its lore don't blind me to the fact that Phantasm: Ravager is a terrible film, and an infinitely worser send-off for the series than the fascinating and extraordinary Phantasm IV: Oblivion had been.