Essentially a glorified fan film, Phantasm: Ravager brings all key cast members together with underwhelming results. Don Coscarelli's assured touch is sorely missed here, with veteran actors badly in need of direction. Michael Baldwin and Bill Thornbury in particular appear lost and unmotivated. Reggie Bannister gives an enthusiastic performance and still has a lot of charisma, but that's not enough when pitted against woefully poor dialogue and amateurish mise-en-scène. Angus Scrimm as the Tall Man talks way too much (he even unashamedly bargains with Reggie at one point) and fails to project much menace. Kathy Lester's cameo as Lady in Lavender serves no purpose. One wishes Gloria Lynn Henry had stepped in earlier on in the film. Dawn Cody, Daniel Roebuck and Daniel Schweiger barely register in their roles. Only Steven Jutras (Chunk) makes an impression, but his thinly-written character, essentially a mean parody of an 80's action hero, is given awful dialogue and remains unlikable. The Phantasm saga was never known for its plot coherence, relying on atmosphere, dream logic and assaulting the viewer with stylish visuals instead. Ravager has neither the visual splendor nor the suggestive, subliminal creepiness of the previous films. The story is a mere series of vignettes, with the befuddled Reggie zipping from one less-than-photogenic location to another. With its extremely erratic framing and frenetic editing Ravager doesn't fit stylistically with the previous films at all. The sound design is threadbare and new rendition of the classic Fred Myrow/Malcolm Seagrave theme is embarrassingly bad. The machismo, muscle car worship and bad language have taken place of eerie poetic minimalism that made the 1979 film a genre classic. Embarrassingly short on meaning, chock full of bad CGI (the lethal flying spheres have never looked so laughable), mismatched stock footage, shaky camera work and choppily-edited action scenes, Ravager is a chore to sit through. There's no journey for the original characters and the new characters are too sketchy to make them interesting. Phantasm:Ravager is bound to disappoint most Phans. It's unfortunate that Don Coscarelli has authorized this atrocity to be made and released. The low-key Phantasm:Oblivion was a more fitting final installment of the much-loved Phantasm saga.
Review of Phantasm: Ravager
