Okay
As I understand the last movie, Mike leaves Reggie and starts hanging out with his brother, the ghost/ball. He goes back in time and encounters the tall man when he was still human and working on some sort of dimensional thing. Then the tall man returns from a trip through the dimensional thing and is no longer human. Mike has flashbacks indicating some more elaborate relationship with the tall man when he was a kid. Then in the end, a ball rips its way out of Mike’s head….
The thing that bothered me about this Phantasm is that there isn’t even the false hope. In every Phantasm, the tall man wins in the last scene. But then again, up to that point, it looks like they’ve won.
Here there’s no sense of even a false victory, no sense of progression or struggle. Instead, we’re given what seems to be a handful of clues or pieces, but the story seems to end half way through, without explaining what the hell is going on or why its happening. Worse, this is a movie that *promises* to explain things, but in the end, all we’ve got are hints and questions.
It didn’t do particularly well in DTV, not compared to the previous Phantasms, which themselves were a long time between movies. I had thought Coscarelli might have wrapped up with this one… but I almost get the feeling he was planning a two parter, and hoping that the first part would provide the financing for the second.
Anyone who has a clue as to what it all amounts to, let me know.