Silent Night Deadly Night 4 : The Initiation
Clint Howard watching a flaming corpse fly off a roof? Now THAT’S how you start a movie! Between this, Reggie Bannister and Allyce Beasley (the receptionist from Moonlighting), I have high hopes for this film. Seeing Brian Yuzna in the director’s chair is another good sign. The director of Return of the Living Dead 3 (arguably the most iconic of the series with it’s pierced heroine) and several of the Re-Animator films, this is a guy who gets how to make a solid, memorable piece of horror, especially a sequel. He also knows enough to hire someone like Screamin’ Mad George to sling latex and create horrific monster FX, not to mention bringing Full Moon alumni Richard Band along to do music.
We find ourselves in the bullpen of a newspaper with a classifieds clerk who wants to break in to reporting and thinks the jumper, being ruled a suicide, is her big break. She heads to the jump site where the chalk outline is still fresh and encounters Clint Howard – “Ricky”, as she browses books on spontaneous combustion. He’s a creepy homeless person who follows her to the roof as she checks out the ledge the victim jumped from. Cockroaches seem to follow her home – a problem that will escalate around the half hour mark with the most terrifying giant roach I’ve ever seen, a skull airbrushed into it back. It almost feels like our slasher series is morphing into a horror edged fantasy as our reporter drifts into nightmarish visions.
There’s nothing particularly Christmassy about this story of a young woman, being initiated into a coven of witches. No real connection to the rest of the Silent Night series 
either unless Clint Howard’s “Ricky” is meant to be Ricky Cauldwell, somehow still alive and now having grown some skin over that brain box from the last film. It’s possible. He almost hints at it during a scene where he watches the dream sequence from SNDN3 and answers “Santa Claus Killer” when asked who he is. He serves the witches and I suppose they could have magically shoved his brain down and generate some flesh to cover it.
In any event, the creepy FX are spectacular and the dreamlike confusion of the film give it a “Serpent and the Rainbow” kind of feel. It’s actually a really good film on it’s own, but feel like it should be it’s own thing and not a part of this franchise. That’s kind of ironic, because it may just be the single best film in this series. No worries though, the crew will be back for the next entry too.
The Mangler Reborn
Right off the bat, I’m glad to see that this film wants to be a proper sequel, unlike the sequel in name only that we got from the Mangler 2. The problem is, I’m not convinced that the filmmakers ever saw the actual original film. I’m not sure what kind of device they think the Mangler is (other than being referred to as “an antique”) but for this film, they have transformed it into a big boxy conveyor belt with stabby CGI knives that pounce on you from above. This isn’t a laundry device, it’s just a killing machine…and it wants blood.
The video quality is better than consumer grade, but not as high as I’d expect from professional production. It feels like an Asylum movie and I was actually a bit surprised to discover it wasn’t one. The addition of Reggie Bannister is a definite plus though, making sure that the movie still had some horror star cred, just like it’s predecessors.
We start off with a man, Hadley, and his wife arguing. She wants him to get a job and stop tinkering with that machine in the attic. It ends predictably and we pretty much know the score before the title credits roll.
Hadley does service on washing machines and uses that as an excuse to kidnap victims for the Mangler. We get a brief sequence of him abducting ingénue Jaime and then switch over to Reggie Bannister and his son Mike, casing Hadley’s house. They’re thieves and have been planning to knock over the place for a while. Reggie sneaks in, but to his surprise he doesn’t have to pick the lock – the door is open. Inside, the windows are bricked up behind tacky curtains and Reg discovers that the locks are actually on the inside of the doors. He’s going to have to pick his way OUT, not in.
Things get weirder when he discovers a drawer full of old wallets – all of which have money in them. He suspects the mark may be a thief himself and after grabbing the cash figures it’s time to start getting out. Back in the van, Mike is getting worried and nags Reg over his wallkie talkie to get movie. Reg is almost to the stairs when he sees the bloody handprints on the wall and hears the whimpers of a woman locked in the bedroom across the hall. He decides he’s going to do the right thing “For once in my life!” and 
grabs his lock pick tools to try and free her. It’s too late, Hadley arrives home, with Jaimie in a sack slung over his shoulder.
Things go poorly for Reg and Mike sneaks in after him. The girl that Reg tried to free gets fed to the machine, but Mike does better than his father, getting Jaimie out before buying it himself. Turns out that Jaimie is the actual main character here. I wasn’t sure, because she vanished for a good 20 -30 minute stretch in the middle of the film while we focus on Reggie.
Bannister for his part, is well used in this film. While he couldn’t have worked more than a couple of days on set, his scenes are shot judiciously, mostly alone. There’s shots of him talking on the Walkie, or hiding in the closet – stuff where you can insert the other actors later without immediately worrying about shooting their coverage when time’s at a premium. As a result, Reg has a significant amount of screen time here. It’s more than a cameo, but less than a full supporting role. If there a weakness, it may be that he’s too likable. Bannister is obviously trying to play a sort of scummy deadbeat dad type. Perhaps I just have too close an association with him from other movies, but you take one look at that skullet ponytail that only Reggie Bannister can pull off, and you just feel like he’s you cool uncle. He’s impossible not to root for.
The house too, is a little underdeveloped. There’s some good ideas here – the house is a trap. Once you’re in, you can’t get out. But it needs to be better highlighted and the spook factor increased. The entire place is lit in a flat white light. Some gloom here to really creep up the look as well as some grime to add more repulsion would go a long way towards making this a truly scary set. The bricked up windows are treated as an afterthought. People come in, glance behind the curtins and then move on. Treated as a revelation, with proper lighting this could have been unnerving. As it is, it’s just…odd.
All in all, the greatest sin here is that it feels cheap. The movie has good intentions, but it’s ambition outweighs it’s reach and the entire affair comes off as a misfire. It’s worth watching as a companion if you really love the Mangler, but the film could have been so much more.
Phantasm Ravager
I came in to Ravager with high expectations. It’s been a very long time since I anticipated a film with quite as much excitement as this one. It is the promised final installment of the phantasm series, it is the last on screen performance of dear Angus Scrimm. This film had dropped a trailer two years ago and had been generating buzz since then… It had a lot to live up to. I should’ve been worried, but I wasn’t – and I had no reason to be.
Phantasm Ravager is the sequel fans deserve. It is the sequel that we have been waiting decades for. Now mind you, I am a phantasm apologist, and I will happily explain there is at least half a good film in Phantasm three, and if you get rid of the Pink Cadillac Crew, maybe scruff up the orphan, you’d actually have a good solid entry into the series. I genuinely like Phantasm 4, despite the fact people complain that it looks and feels cheap. I think the 
intercutting of all the new footage with the old unused shots is surprisingly effective and Phantasm 4 does more to world build and push the story then most sequels do, particularly late series ones.
Still, I’ll admit that these are weaker films then the first two, though I’ll enthusiastically defend them to the death. No such defense is needed with Ravager. It comes out of the gate strong and does everything that Phantasm is supposed to do. It fufills all the promise and potential that I saw in the last two movies.
Ravager is the first Phantasm film not to be filmed by Don Coscerelli. While Coscarelli was still around, very much a hands on type a producer looking over the shoulder of director David Hartman, the very different directorial style shows. It makes me wonder if Don shouldn’t have handed over the rains awhile back. The fresh perspective of a 21st century director like Hartman and a fan of the series goes a great way towards reviving and refreshing this franchise. Watching Ravager, I felt very similar to the emotions I had during Star Trek 6 – the original crew’s final outing. It was a feeling of “this is finally great again… why does it have to end now 
that they’ve finally got it right?”.
Reggie is in rare form – even though the third film also focused primarily on him, the performance he turns out in five is far superior. The balance of humor and four, the more serious tone works perfectly.I’ve long said that the Phantasm films are more about Reggie than anyone else and he’s always been my favorite character in the series. Despite his advancing age, Reg is still very much an action star.
We’re in the 21st-century, and CGI abounds. Still, I really can’t complain about the CG balls. As much as I love the practical spheres (like the one Coscarelli is plunging into my skull here) The computer graphics allow them to do things with the balls they were quite able to do before – and we see a great deal more of the sentinal spheres than we have in any other sequel. Honestly, this is whata sequel is meant to be… to take what’s gone before and double it. More importantly, they’ve managed to make the Tall Man scary again. I’ve always said that the reason you go to Phantasm films is because it’s a reunion – it’s time spent with Reggie and Mike and Angus and Bill… Even Don, whose presence is still felt though he’s never seen on screen. But in the last couple of films, while the Tall Man has been made mysterious, he hasn’t seemed as scary as he once did – his obsessive focus on Mike, and 
whatever special talent it was that he needed to extract from him… It made him intimidating and etherial, but he never did anything to anybody else. He wasn’t the terrifying spectre of the first two films. With Ravager, that has all changed. The Tall Man is once again a malevolent monster. There is an iconic moment where the tall man is surrounded by the hooded dwarf lurkers, and the masked gravers. It’s terrifying and intimidating and everything that the Tall Man is supposed to be. It’s a sharp contrast from seeing him collaborate with the goofy pink Cadillac zombies of Phantasm 3. there is a moment of the tall man lurking outside a 
victims house. His eyes are all that are lit and silver sphere hovers at his shoulder before taking off to do it’s diabolical work. He’s not just a threat to Mike in this film. It’s an expanded cast, there’s more characters here and anyone can die. We don’t ceede any of the mystery, we don’t give up the familiarity, but man… Angus Scrimm is terrifying again! And that is as it should be.
If I have one complaint, it is the over reliance on CGI. I realize I just praised it for their use in the silver sentinels, but this film uses an awful lot of green screen. This is understandable, the original plan was to make a series of shorts, and release them as web episodes. You don’t 
necessarily require the same high levels of resolution for internet content as you do for a film. I wouldn’t be surprised if part of the delay in getting this film out was having to re-composite some of those backgrounds with higher quality images. Still, sometimes it gets to be a bit much.
On the other hand, it provides us with a scope that Phantasm has never quite been able to achieve. If anybody out there is familiar with the Phantasm’s End concept, you’ll recognize some of those elements here. Back shortly after Phantasm 3, Roger Avery, the co-writer of Pulp Fiction presented Don Coscerelli with a script for a final Phantasm movie. It would be an expensive film… Far greater in scope and storytelling then anything that had come before. In many ways Phantasm 4 was designed to try and kickstart this – to generate interest and serve as a sort of prequel. You can see it in some moments, particularly when you see 
the scene of the tall man walking down abandoned streets on Wilshire Boulevard – remember Jody mentioning that there was a risk of infection? I had always personally assumed he meant infecting the timeline, corrupting the space gate… But now we know he meant infection from a disease that ravaged mankind… and we get to see the effects of it first hand, not to mention the world that it leads to. Mind you, Ravager is not Phantasms End, in all fairness it is an amalgam of Phantasms End and several other stories. But it works – it works better than it has any right to.
Don Coscerelli always aspired to make the Phantasm films a sort of dreamlike fantasy. He always insisted that there was an off-kilter quality and a surrealist philosophy. I’m not sure if I ever saw that – everything seemed reasonably straightforward to me, but then again I was 
introduced to the series by Phantasm 2 and perhaps I have the wrong perspective. In any event, if you want a very surrealist, dreamlike, fantastic feel to the phantasm story, this is where that really comes into play, jumping between timelines and realities with Reggie lost in the world of Phantasm’s end, wandering in what appears to be our world, and then the next moment, frail and delusional in a nursing home (not unlike the one we saw in Coscrelli’s Bubba Ho-Tep).
The end – it’s hard to describe. I think we see Reggie finally back where he belongs. It’s hopeful, in the way a Phantasm film never has been before. It’s a good place for comics and books to take over now – and they should. Even as it ends, Phantasm has given us a world ripe for exploration.
Goodbye and hello, as always.
Argo City Comics 