phantasm ravager

It's only as we get older that we start to appreciate time spent with family members during their "golden years." Suddenly, all the annoying habits and petty arguments are so much water under the bridge and just spending a couple extra hours together becomes deeply satisfying experience. The same can be said of Phantasm: Ravager, the final entry in a franchise many horror fans grew up with, which concludes with a surprisingly heartfelt meditation on family, friendship and memory wrapped inside a corny direct-to-video shell.

One could be forgiven for not keeping tabs on Reggie, Mike and Jody in their fight against the Tall Man (played by the late Angus Scrimm), a dimension-hopping slumlord who steals the bodies of the recently deceased and ships them to another world to provide slave labor. After the homespun success of the first film, subsequent sequels attempted to broaden the scope and fluff the franchise into something more than just a coming-of-age fever dream. And Ravager doesn't let all those details slip quietly into the night. However, a quick refresher from the first film (now out in a remastered special edition) is enough to get the general idea.

Reggie (Reggie Bannister), a former ice-cream vendor turned interdimensional badass, arrives in the desert pursued by a pair of the Tall Man's brain-sucking spheres. But he doesn't stay long. Bounced from one "membrane reality" to the next, Reggie finds himself in a world almost devoid of human life...and yet another where he's a dementia patient in a mental hospital...and yet another where he's....well, you get the idea.

It's a clever conceit thought up by writer Don Coscarelli, who hands the directing reigns over to David Hartman whose previous experience was almost entirely in the TV animation realm. And there's some real emotion to be wrung out of Reggie's frustration at finally being reunited with Mike only to have his friend claim the entire experience was nothing more than early onset Alzheimer’s. But the Phantasm series, despite being a family affair behind-the-scenes, demands a certain amount of action, gore and man-eating dwarves. So those heartfelt moments are mostly interruptions in a string of disconnected fight scenes and bad CGI as the Tall Man's spheres are magnified to enormous proportions.

Phantasm: Ravager uses its memory-scrubbing structure to avoid most of the criticism, the biggest of which is there's no real resolution in what's billed at the final installment. But I imagine most casual fans of the series stopped paying attention to the details long ago. As a crowd-pleasing slide show, the film hits the right emotional chords (or forks, if you prefer) and sends our heroes off into the sunset on the comfy leather seats of their '79 Barracuda.

Well Go USA's presentation is spot-on and includes an audio commentary with Coscarelli and Hartman, deleted scenes, behind-the-scenes footage, bloopers, outtakes and a trailer.