Retro Rewatch: Phantoms 1998

Retro Rewatch is an ongoing editorial that takes a look into certain films, conventions, crazes, and characters of the horror genre years after their heyday. It is an effort to try and put the magnifying glass up to the horror world with the much needed luxuries of time and perspective applied in order to fully understand the impact and social significance of these projects/themes/ideas (if any). So for this installment of Retro Rewatch, I present to you the (not very) well received Phantoms. Spoilers lie ahead!

Some people like myself are really into movies. This may or may not extend to the area of production where following around rumors, casting calls, and unofficial location scouts will almost make your head spin clean off. Oh yeah, you hear all kinds of crazy stories like for example, “the studio wanted this guy, he’s hot right now” or maybe even “the director didn’t like the scene, it had too much talking in it during the disposition”. Sometimes you hear about these little behind the scenes wheelings, dealings, and catastrophes, and sometimes you don’t. Nevertheless you can always spot a movie that absolutely had to have something go wrong at some point in production then haphazardly healed with a dirty band aid. I am almost certainly convinced this was the case during Phantoms.

There are many reasons that critics came down hard on this film, giving it only a meager 11% approval rating on rotten tomatoes. You can blame the flat performance by Joanna Going, the complete miscasting of an entirely too young Ben Affleck, or the last 30 or so minutes of the film for breaking out of a solid and formulaic structure. But within this overall mess of a movie, there were glimmers of brilliance. I know this is going to be a tough sell from the director who heavily cut down Donald Pleasence in Halloween 666 because he said that he was “boring”. Also it doesn’t help that Joe Chappelle directed Hellraiser Bloodline, but bear with me here a moment while I go over a few amazing scenes that I promise are worth watching.

Interesting, in the very beginning of the film, we learn just a little bit about two of our main characters named Lisa (Rose McGowan) and Jennifer (Joanna Going) as they drive back into the town of Snowfield Colorado. We find that they are sisters and Lisa is hard core because she lives in LA. Within the first 7 or 8 minutes of the film, the sisters come into the town and find it completely deserted and their grandmother dead on the floor filled with some kind of black substance. The kitchen looks like it has been utilized literally minutes ago with a pot of water on the stove just reaching the boiling point. They escape to the outside to find that their car doesn’t start even though it had just been working moments before. A car that they passed in down running on idle has also been found to be inoperable. During these first 10 or 15 minutes of the film, the tone is set to almost perfection. Every corner that is turned and every little clue discovered leads us to an area of complete unbalance. It feels like whatever did this to these people had literally just left the scene and is calculating every step then waiting in the shadows to strike. At this point, we know something is really wrong, but we don’t even have a guess at what it may be.

From here we eventually wind up with some other characters including an impossibly young Ben Affleck as Sheriff Bryce Hammond. Sheriff Hammond is supposed to be a washed up shell of a man who accidentally killed a child as an FBI agent and now spends his days as a small town sheriff feeling sorry for himself. Ben Affleck doesn’t look a day over 23 in this movie. Turns out he was actually 25 or 26 at the time of filming which doesn’t make sense considering you can’t even apply to the FBI before your 25^th birthday. Well now I’m kind of venting here, but after the new characters (3 lead foots) come into play, they stumble onto the street where a cacophony of car alarms, sirens, and anything else that makes a loud noise blaring into the street. After they all stop at the same moment, we see a single hotel light up in the distance while the rest of the town stays black. Something is telling them where to go. So not only are all but five people in the town dead, but whatever did it seems to have a stranglehold over the town with seemingly endless powers. This is an absolutely terrifying situation to be in. It’s what I would imagine a rat in a cage would feel like, knowing that someone is lurking over you coherent of your every move, just playing with you. The hotel scene, which I don’t really want to get into too deeply here, takes the idea that something weird is going on up to the absolute insane level that “it is messing with us”. What is it? What does it want? How is it doing this? Is it eating people? We have no idea, but we are absolutely terrified.

While these scenes really showcased the absolute terror and dread that falls onto the shoulders of the main characters, I don’t want to accidentally portray that the film is a hidden masterpiece. It’s not and if you say that you have never heard about this movie before right now, I’m not surprised in the least bit. What really does bother me though is the fact that this movie gets lumped into the “B” category where it flat out doesn’t belong. It’s a polished Hollywood movie with a cast that includes Peter O’Toole, an early careered Liev Schreiber, and a criminally under used (like usual) Nicky Katt. I would easily take this film over The Uninvited, The Grudge, Prom Night (08), My Bloody Valentine (09) and a slew of other recent soulless genre entries. If you haven’t seen this movie yet and you’re looking for a genuinely good (albeit, hole filled) story which is guaranteed to freak you out a bit, then pick this up immediately.

Is it a cult classic, a fitting analysis, or complete forgettable?: Can I say none? It’s a ride that won’t leave you disappointed if all you are looking for are some dirty and creepy scares. This movie still creeps me out to this day.

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