Phantasm (1979)
Directed by Don Coscarelli
A teenage boy and his friends face off against a mysterious grave robber, known only as the Tall Man, who employs a lethal arsenal of unearthly weapons.
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What critics compared Phantasm to
With his cowled eyes and pallid skin, young Noah Wiseman combines the plucky spark of Phantasm ’s Michael Baldwin with the haunted gaze of The Hills Have Eyes ’ Michael Berryman – a figure of both pity and fear who inspires wildly contradictory impulses in his tormented mother.
Like, say, 1979’s Phantasm, which Wingard briefly references in one scene, it boldly toes the line between sharp self-awareness and goofiness—two gears that tend to rub audiences the wrong way no matter what.
As to the cast, youngsters Muggleton and Poots come off best, especially the former, whose tight-jawed imperturbability is sometimes reminiscent of Michael Baldwin in the original “Phantasm.”
Where Potter’s Bluff has its William G Dobbs (in Gary Sherman’s Dead & Buried , 1981), and Morningside has its Tall Man (in Don Coscarelli’s Phantasm , 1979), Raven’s End has Montgomery Dark to take care of the community’s dead – and those left behind.
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So I don’t understand why his art, such as it is, hasn’t advanced much over the first film of his I ever saw, “Phantasm,” back in 1979.
Much-hyped, John Dies at the End is a collaboration between horror auteur Don Coscarelli (Phantasm, Bubba Ho-Tep) and Cracked.com…
Directed by Don Coscarelli (“Bubba Ho-Tep,” “Phantasm”) and based on Jason Pargin’s trippy horror novel of the same name (published under his pseudonym David Wong), “John Dies At The End” follows a pair of slackers whose experience with a new drug called “soy sauce” reveals the existence of an interdimensional invasion occurring all around them.
As director Coscarelli demonstrated in " Phantasm " and " Bubba Ho-Tep ," he likes to traffic in scrappy chaos, spicing every dollop of gore with an equivalent dose of laughter.
B-horror-movie auteur Coscarelli made his name with “Phantasm,” a low-budget 1979 film about a boy grappling with the supernatural that was an antidote to “E.T.” and the film that introduced the world to “The Tall Man” character and actor Angus Scrimm.