It was a weird summer. Technically, adolesence had arrived, but as I was in the neutral zone between junior high and high school, it didn't feel like it. I was the same way I'd always been, stuck on a farm, unable to drive, dependent on others for transportation. And always wanting to go somewhere, for no real reason.
It was a weeknight, like any other. Nothing to do in a pre-video world, nothing but reading or watching summer reruns. I looked in the paper to see if there were any movies showing worth seeing. Of course, even if there was something playing I wanted to see, I'd have to persuade someone to take me.
Phantasm? I'd heard of it by name, but I knew nothing about it. Some kind of horror movie, and that was good enough for me. I asked my brother John if he'd take me, but he had no interest in something he'd never heard of. The fallback was to ask Mom.
She said yeah, sure, she'd take me. Why not? She'd seen Halloween and The Fog, so she was good with horror pictures. Besides, she was bored with summer reruns, too.
The Perry Theater in those days was a single screen house, not quite an aging palace, mostly nondescript in appearance, though the walls of the auditorium itself showcased magnificent WPA-era murals depicting aspects of rural life. It was a quintessential small town theater, mostly showing second-run features, or in the case of Phantasm, one-week plays of movies in regional release.
The movie began--no previews, no opening credits. The protagonist was a kid my age, living with his older brother after their parents had died. Weird doings at a mortuary, a scary Tall Man, scurrying Jawa-like dwarves. Pretty weird, but it wasn't doing a whole lot for me.
Then,while our hero is poking around the mortuary, the Tall Man unleashes a flying silver sphere. Spikes emerge from it, and our hero ducks just in time, and it smashes into the head of an unfortunate bystander, and a drill pops out and digs into his brain, spilling oceans of blood.
mom and I sat there awestruck, looked at each other and began laughing hysterically. From that point on, Phantasm's director, Don Coscarelli, could do no wrong, and each weird new development--The Tall Man's finger is lopped off, spilling yellow blood, and his finger overnight mutates into some kind of weird-ass flying critter--just made it better and better. By the time the movie ended, my summer torpor had been shattered. Damn, this was cool.
I saw Phantasm three more times in various theatrical runs (they actually reissued popular movies to theaters back then), and have owned it on CED disc, VHS, laserdisc and DVD. It's being reissued today by the good folks at Anchor Bay, and the new digital upgrade is reportedly breathtaking on a high-def monitor. For now, with my faithful tube set, my copy of MGM's disc from earlier in the century will do, but when I upgrade my TV, rest assured I will upgrade my copy of Phantasm.
Not because I want to, but because I'll need to.
