By Geno McGahee
The Tall Man is back in this fourth and probably final entry of the Phantasm series. This movie has so much potential, and half of the film delivers, but the other half is plagued by bad acting, annoying and senseless dialogue, and distracting and meaningless scenes, featuring Reggie Banister as “Reggie.” The back and forth between “The Tall Man” (Angus Scrimm) and Mike (A. Michael Baldwin) is very interesting and there are some really neat things about this flick. Mike is basically owned by the Tall Man and to escape this fate, he must find out who and what he exactly is. He travels through dimensions back to the time when “The Tall Man” was a human being and a scientist and created a doorway through dimensions, but as he traveled through himself, he never came back. “The Tall Man” emerged, seeming to take that form and living infinitely through time, killing and taking souls.
There are some neat scenes, and every scene is neat as long as Scrimm is in it. I especially liked the way that he stormed through the empty city, and negotiated with a young Mike to cut him down from where he was hanging. One of the greatest things about this film was the use of footage from the prior films that had never been seen before, making the flashbacks that much better. I really enjoyed a lot of this film, but there was that God damn Reggie that made up half of the movie.
Reggie, the ice cream truck driver in the first one, is now a “soldier,” fighting the Tall Man, complete with horrible action lines like “blow me” to a ghoul of some sort as he shoots him, and “cops are assholes” when a demon cop tries to kill him. He is completely annoying and I was so tempted to shut off the movie, but the hope that I would see the altercation between the Tall Man and Mike kept me watching. What was the writer thinking using Reggie like that? Well, if he’s going to use Jody, the deceased brother of Mike, in the absurd way that he did, then anything is possible.
Jody (Bill Thornbury) returns as a silver orb turned ghost turned silver orb turned balding older brother. Apparently in the ghost world, you age as well. He comes down to advise both Reggie and Mike and lead them in the safest directions, but his character is lame and adds nothing to the movie. He’s not as bad as Reggie, but he’s not that far from that either.
Overall, Phantasm IV: Oblivion, was a good idea, executed poorly at times. I think that a lot of the Reggie scenes were filler to make the movie longer and it completely took away from it. The Tall Man is the Phantasm series. Angus Scrimm steals every scene that he is in, and this film would have probably been a 1/10 without his genius. Calling Scrimm a “genius” may be a stretch you might contend, but very few villains in the horror film business have his presence and understand their character. You get the feeling that Scrimm helped create this “Tall Man” and was the sole reason why we’ve had four entries instead of one. The Tall Man is one of the best horror villains of all time, and a lot of this movie is very good, but when you take that and subtract the Reggie scenes, you get the rating of 5.5/10
Scared Stiff Rating: 5.5/10 The Tall Man still delivers, but he needed a better script.