phantasm

Director: don coscarelli

Actor: a. michael baldwin,bill thornbury,reggie bannister,kathy lester

Data Published: Wed Mar 28 1979

Genres: Horror,Sci-Fi

Key Words: sex on the floor,sex outdoors,exposing one's breasts,tall man,cult film

IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0079714/

WIKI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantasm_(film)

Description: Phantasm is a movie starring A. Michael Baldwin, Bill Thornbury, and Reggie Bannister. A teenage boy and his friends face off against a mysterious grave robber known only as the Tall Man, who keeps a lethal arsenal of terrible...

Plot: Tommy (Bill Cone) and a woman (referred to in the credits as "Lady in Lavender," played by Kathy Lester) have sex in Morningside Cemetery, after which the woman kills Tommy with a knife. Later, Tommy's friends, including 24-year-old musician Jody Pearson and family man Reggie, attend Tommy's funeral at Morningside, believing he committed suicide. Jody explains that he didn't bring his 13-year-old brother, Mike, because their parents died recently and he felt Mike would be traumatized by another funeral. However, Mike has been secretly observing the funeral from the bushes; after the mourners leave, Mike witnesses a tall man in a suit who seems to be the Morningside mortician lift Tommy's 500-pound casket with superhuman strength and load it into his hearse instead of completing the burial. He also seems to telekinetically knock Mike off his motorbike as he flees the cemetery. Mike relays this story to a fortune teller (Mary Ellen Shaw) and her granddaughter (Terrie Kalbus), as well as his fears about the possibility of Jody departing and leaving him in the care of his aunt. Through her granddaughter, the fortune teller tells Mike not to worry about Jody, assuring him that Jody would take Mike along if he chose to leave town. Then, she seems to magically produce a small black box and instructs Mike to put his hand into it. After the box grips his hand, Mike is told not to be afraid, and as the panic subsides, the box relaxes its grip. After Mike leaves, the fortune teller's granddaughter investigates the Morningside mausoleum, where she finds a strange room filled with white light. She screams at what she sees, and is not seen again in the film. Later, the Lady in Lavendar seduces Jody in a bar and takes him to Morningside Cemetery to have sex. Mike, who has taken to secretly following Jody in the wake of their parents' deaths, has an aggressive encounter with a short, hooded figure while spying on his brother. He runs screaming from the bushes, interrupting Jody mid-coitus. When Jody catches up to him, Mike frantically tries to tell him about the hooded figure, but Jody dismisses the story. After another violent encounter with more hooded figures and seeing the Tall Man walk down the street and react strangely to cold air coming out of Reggie's ice cream truck, Mike resolves to investigate Morningside and obtain proof of his suspicions to show to Jody. While exploring the mausoleum, a silver sphere flies through the air, narrowly missing Mike as he dives under it. He is accosted by a Morningside caretaker, but Mike escapes just as the sphere is making another pass; it impales itself in the caretaker's skull and drills into his brain, killing him. The Tall Man approaches Mike, but he escapes by exercising control over his fear, surprising the Tall Man and trapping his hand in a heavy door. Mike cuts the fingers off of the hand, causing the Tall Man to bellow an alien roar while yellow blood gushes from the wound. Mike takes one of the Tall Man's still-moving fingers and escapes the mausoleum, narrowly avoiding capture by the hooded figures. The finger is enough for Jody to believe Mike's stories about Morningside. Meanwhile, the finger transforms into a vicious, oversized fly-like insect that attacks Mike. Reggie coincidentally witnesses this, and joins the brothers in their suspicions about Morningside. Jody decides to go on his own investigation alone. He is chased away from Morningside by a seemingly driverless hearse, but is rescued by Mike in Jody's Plymouth Barracuda. The two run the hearse off the road and discover it was driven by one of the hooded figures, whom they discover to be a re-animated Tommy. Tommy's body has been unnaturally shortened, although he weighs significantly more than average. Reggie and Jody resolve to defeat the Tall Man. Mike is taken to an antique store owned by Jody's friend Sally (Lynn Eastman). There, Mike discovers an antique photograph of the Tall Man. Mike begs Sally to take him home; on the way they see Reggie's ice cream truck overturned. Mike finds a handprint melted into a block of ice with the same yellow blood that came out of the Tall Man. Mike tries to get Sally and her friend to leave the scene quickly, but all three are attacked by a mob of hooded dwarves. Mike survives by being thrown out of the back window, while the girls drive off into the night, screaming. Mike assumes they and Reggie are all dead. Jody locks Mike in his room to keep him safe, then goes to Morningside to execute his plan to kill the Tall Man. Mike escapes his bedroom and tries to leave to help Jody, but the Tall Man is waiting for him outside his front door. He kidnaps Mike in a hearse, but Mike thwarts him by shooting out the back window and a rear tire, causing the hearse to strike a pole and explode. While looking for Jody in Morningside, Mike opens his father's casket and sees that it is empty, prompting him to scream and attract the attention of the silver sphere. Jody destroys it with a shotgun. Suddenly, Reggie appears and explains that he rescued Sally and several other girls. The three then open the mysterious door the fortune teller's daughter opened earlier. Inside, they find oil drum-like canisters with more dwarfed re-animated corpses inside them. Mike accidentally falls through a portal and catches a brief glimpse of a red, hot planet where the dwarves are toiling as slaves. He is quickly snatched back to Earth by Jody, after which he deduces that the Tall Man must come from the red planet and that the corpses are shortened so they can withstand the increased gravity and temperatures. The trio is suddenly split up by a power outage. Reggie remains in the dwarf storage room alone, and places his hands on the portal, mirroring an earlier scene when he stopped a tuning fork from vibrating. This causes the portal to become a powerful vacuum that Reggie narrowly escapes. It also stuns the Lady in Lavender, revealed to be a shape-shifted Tall Man, and saves Jody from being stabbed. However, in the chaos, Reggie stumbles upon the Lady in Lavender's body, and she kills him. Jody and Mike flee, and the mausoleum vanishes. The brothers devise a plan to lure the Tall Man into a local deserted mine shaft and trap him inside. Mike once again controls his fear and succeeds in the plan, after which he suddenly wakes up in his bed. Reggie, still alive, tells Mike that much of what he experienced was a nightmare, which has been happening frequently since Jody died in a car crash. Mike appears to remember this and believe it. Reggie tells Mike that he will take care of him like Jody did, and that they should go on a road trip together. When Mike enters his bedroom to pack, he is shocked to see the Tall Man is waiting for him. Hands crash through the glass of his bedroom mirror, pulling Mike into a dark void.