Phantasm, or, Ow, My Balls!

I mentioned that The Texas Chain Saw Massacre was the movie whose reputation terrified me the most as a kid. A very close runner-up was Phantasm. Just the idea of it was enough to give a little boy in the 1970s nightmares. Which, as it turns out, is appropriate, because the movie was inspired by a nightmare and plays out like one. It follows its own weird dream logic, jumping around between ideas and surreal scenes in a way that seems to make sense to the characters acting them out, but is nonsensical to anyone watching or trying to piece it all together afterwards. And it’s all kind of charming, even if it’s charming in spite of itself. It’s the kind of movie where if it were any better, it’d be much worse. For most of it, I was thinking that if they’d just tweaked it a little bit to make it a surreal horror-comedy, it would be brilliant. After thinking about it some more, though, I think the ambiguity of whether you’re laughing at it or laughing with it is an essential part of what…