Phantasm: Ravager

If you're claiming to be THE final Phantasm film, you must have some pretty big balls.

With the fourth installment, quality and entertainment took a nose dive. Here, a good deal of the blame can go to a lack of funding, and part of it can be placed on a new director, but the truth is that Oblivion had already reached the tipping point where any deeper exploration into the mythology of the Phantasm universe only served to confound. The world was beginning to look like a jigsaw constructed of a thousand different puzzles. And now with Scrimm dead, any hope left is likely lost.

Sadly, while I wanted "Reggie" to become the "Burt Gummer" of the "Phantasm" series, I really didn't want the series to go the way of the "Tremors" franchise with unnecessary sequels full of terrible CGI and ugly cinematography. Unfortunately, just as the visuals were notably the worst of the series to date, likewise the confusing surrealist "Tall Man" mythology goes full blown "Inception"/dementia/apocalypse nonsense, that despite the Coscarelli & company charms, quickly became a tiresome bore.

Up to this point, I've been enjoying the series little by little. The first confused me, the second had a better budget...but was pointless overall. The third finally gave us some answers (as well as some pretty decent visual choices), and the 4th really dived deep into who the Tall Man is, where he came from, and where he may be going from here - and this 5th film....was an incoherent mess that mostly felt useless. It even feels wasted for that 18 year gap specifically.

As much as I love the Phantasm series I can't help but be disappointed with this film. No matter how I look at this it just seems like a fan film. Still it was good to see all the characters one last time.

Ravager is the first Phantasm film that wasn't directed by Coscarelli, and while the last few installments were uneven, there was a cracked charm that kept them watchable, even in their dire moments. Hartman's direction, on the other hand, is a bland paint by numbers job, and the film generally plays like bad f(ph)an fiction cobbled together from various throwaway sources. The effects are laughably cheap and the story is more incoherent than surreal with no sense of atmosphere. Disappointing.

Everything about it feels cheap and half-finished - the camerawork, the score, the acting, the writing, the use of voiceover. I gave up less than 20 minutes in when someone starting singing and playing guitar in front of a log cabin fire.

Phantasm and the Multiverse of Indecision: in the end, the series could never figure out whether it was being literal, or if it was all happening in Mike's head, or in Reggie's head, so the answer is all the above. But with too many silver balls in hand, it struggles to juggle these narratives. The unique horror atmosphere of the original has been fatally split into action that isn't exciting and drama that isn't dramatic.

After all the negative comments, I was surprised by how entertaining the first highway scene was. The biggest issue is that the film mainly recycles old hits with a smaller budget, digital look and FX with varying quality. Scope gets bigger by the end, and that’s where the budget limitations become distracting. It's a pity that they head that direction, as the core of the series has always been the characters - not the FX. Still better than I feared and worth it for one more ride with the gang.

Nope.

More for its visuals than for its plot quality.