Horror Classics: I Drink and Live-Blog "Phantasm"

A horror expert I know recommended 1979's Phantasm to me at some point, and so here goes.  BTWS, it's my birthday today. I mostly celebrated over the course of the last couple nights/week, but somebody left a bottle of champagne here and I'm trying to occupy myself until Isaac gets home from work so I can watch the second showing of the new Breaking Bad with him.* MOVIE TIME.

A couple is banging in the graveyard, lady on top, doing all the work. Boobs and also then she stabs him. And maybe some other guy was watching. Daytime: mansion. Baldy McPonytail and his friend are both wearing pinstripes. Oh, maybe it's not a mansion, it's a mausoleum. Their friend killed himself, apparently. The second suit guy is walking around inside the marble death museum, and hears some weird scraping noises, but sees nothing. He stops to look at Jody and Ann Pearson's wall plaque/death slot.

Now some douchey kid on a motorcycle comes tearing through the cemetery, straight up driving on the grass, over graves and shit. He hears a noise and sees something out of his peripheral vision. We see a dark shape duck behind grave markers. Suit guy inside hears the same noise inside again. What is that? Scraping, almost the sound of some rubbery friction or something? The old man who watched the murder smacks him on the shoulder and tells him the funeral's about to begin. He is tall and creepy. I'll call him the Undertaker. Oh, it's the funeral of the guy who got stabbed during cemetery sex, Tommy.

The motorcycle kid is apparently somebody's little brother who wasn't allowed to come to the funeral because he had nightmares after his parents'. The kid watches the pallbearers carry the coffin to the grave through some binoculars. Death spy! I'm guess it was second suit guy's parents' grave he was visiting earlier. The motorcycle kid sees the Undertaker pick up a coffin by himself and stick it in the back of a hearse and mouths "What the fuck?" to himself. Totes, kiddo. The kid is like 14 or 15, maybe.

I think now he's gone to see a psychic. A cute teenage girl lets the kid, Michael, into the house and he goes in to see her creepy grandmother. The grandma is in all black, in an old-timey wheelchair, wearing sunglasses even though it's dark and only candlelit in there. Grandma doesn't talk. Michael's worried Jody (his brother, I think) is going to leave town or something. Maybe this kid is actually 16, because I'm pretty sure he was just driving in this flashback. He fixes some fancy black muscle car in the driveway as Jody greets some preppy friend. Oh, he's 13, and Jody plans to send him to live with their aunt because Jody's a dick and likes to spend time on the road. Psychic Grandma says (through the girl) that Jody won't really leave without him. Michael tells the grandma about the Undertaker. And apparently the Undertaker stared at him while he was riding through the graveyard and made him crash. Serves him right, that's some shitty cemetery etiquette.

"Just some good ol' boys, never meaning no harm."

The psychics have Michael put his hand in some black box. He can't take it back out until he's not scared anymore. They claim the Undertaker stuff was all in his head. Grandma laughs after Michael leaves. WTF? Ponytail finds Jody jamming on the guitar and drinking Dos Equis on the porch and joins in. They're pretty good and seem like they're actually playing and singing. Ponytail uses a TUNING FORK for his acoustic guitar. Old-timey. Now the psychic blonde girl opens a door in the mausoleum and then there's a scream and then we see Jody pull up to a dive called Dune's Cantina in the muscle car. Lot's of quick cuts here, friends. Michael has creepily followed him to the bar and watched Jody chat up some woman at the bar, who he leaves with before he even drinks his beer. What a waste.

Michael follows them to the cemetery where they're going to fuck, I guess. She's in a purple dress, is she the same purple-dressed lady who killed Tommy? This seems to be her M.O. She claims the cemetery's not spooky, it's "exciting." Michael watches as they lay down on a grave to make out because Michael is sad and creepy. He gets pumped about her exposed boobs. "Wow," both brothers say, about the boobs. Michael hears that strange noise again as Jody and the blonde get down to business. Now it kind of sounds like something's being dragged.

Normal, small-town interactions.

A weird little figure in a black robe chases Michael, who runs screaming out of the woods, interrupting Jody's tryst, Jody has to take the lady's underwear out of his mouth and pull up his pants to chase Mike down. Jody thinks Michael was just being chased by a "gopher in heat." Jody gives Michael the car keys and tells him to go home, because that's the responsible thing to do. Michael's bleached-out jean jacket is pretty hot. Jody goes back to the grave, and the chick he was banging is gone. I do love the way his chest hair kind of pops from behind the lace-up front of his shirt. THE SEVENTIES! Michael has a leopard print pillow and a nightmare that his bed is in the graveyard and two zombies or something emerge from graves underneath him and attack him as the Undertaker looks on. Michael follows Jody back to Dune's the next day, but then just starts walking around town, sucking a Tootsie Roll Pop. He sees the Undertaker across the street, who then stops, turns, and stares at Michael and creepily sniffs the air around the ice cream truck? I don't even. The bartender at Dune's says that chick never came back to the bar last night.

Michael works on the muscle car, which is all jacked up in the garage. From under the car, he hears and sees something weird. Something is shaking the car. Get out, kid! The car shakes off the jack, but Mike is okay. Jody thinks it was some "retarded kid" from up the street who fucked with the car. Mike has a giant knife that he puts in a shin scabbard under his pants. Nice tube socks, too. He takes a rosary or something and sneaks out of the house. Like Jody gives a fuck. Back to old Morningside Cemetery. Michael kicks in a window of the mausoleum/funeral home(?) basement and climbs in. He finds a styrofoam head with a wig on it, then wanders into some kind of casket showroom with amazing orange carpet. He hides in a casket because some guy has shown up, looking around suspiciously. This guy is wearing coveralls. OBVS. Through a crack under the lid, Michael sees as the Undertaker shows up, and he and Coveralls silently leave the room.

This is a thing, I guess.

Because he is stupid, Michael follows them out into the mausoleum hallways. Okay, he hears some weird noises, then a weird metal ball flies over his head. Now Coveralls has grabbed him! Michael bites the fuck out of Coveralls' arm, gets away, and the shiny metal ball lands on Coveralls' face, holds on with weird arm things and then starts drilling into Coveralls' head and spraying red paint blood out the other end. I have no idea what is happening.

Michael has some sweet white '70s Adidas kicks. He pulls out the knife and finds himself face to face with Undertaker. "Um... oh shit," he says to the guy. Michael runs away. He slammed the Undertaker's hand in the door, which is still moving. He chops the fingers, and yellow paint sprays out! Instead of grabbing the knife again, Michael picks up one of the still-moving fingers. The little hooded guys (I'm going to call them Goth Ewoks from now on, BTW) chase him and get one of his shoes as he climbs back out the window he broke. Later on, he's asleep on the shag-carpeted Brady Bunch stairs with a shot gun in his lap.

Jody, with his shirt all unbuttoned, is like, "What are you doing?" and takes out the bullets. Jody is skeptical about Michael's story, but Michael shows him the moving finger in a box with a large puddle of mustard.

Jody doesn't believe the Undertaker picked up that coffin by himself, but he's going to go to the police. Michael goes to get the finger in the box, and out comes some creepy giant demon fly thing! Oh, it's in his hair! Gross! Michael's got it in his jacket and he and Jody go to put it down the garbage disposal. They should really run some water down that.

Oh hey, Ponytail just showed up! He wants Mike to go ice cream trucking with him, but the fly comes out of the sink and lands on Ponytail's head. They catch it and put it down the disposal again. Jody is now wearing a sweet leather jacket and giving Michael gun safety tips like, "Warning shots are bullshit." Jody's going to go up to the funeral home all by his lonesome. He tells Michael not to follow him, but he will. Apparently Ponytail had to go back to work, but it's also now suddenly nighttime, so who knows? Jody climbs in the broken window.

"So he went home and finally found the only thing Daddy had left him, and that was a gun."

Oh, and there's one of the Goth Ewoks. It jumps on his back and makes creepy growling noises. I think it's biting Jody? In a very dangerous gesture, Jody shoots it off of his back over his own head. With a handgun. Bullets have very little effect, but give him enough time to climb back out and run away. But a hearse follows him out of the cemetery. I mean, did you really think the Undertaker wouldn't hear the gunshots in the basement?

Jody shoots at the hearse to no avail. Suddenly Jody's muscle car shows up, but it appears no one's driving. Oh, it's just his brother, who is in junior high. The hearse chases them, but Jody says, "There's nobody driving that mother." NOBODY BUT GHOSTS OR ROBOTS OR WHATEVER, MAYBE ALIENS WITH THAT METAL BALL THING. Jody claims he's going to get "that bastard" and shoots at the hearse, even though nobody's driving it. He disables it and it crashes, while his underage brother continues to drive.

Oh, it was actually one of the Goth Ewoks driving. Jody calls it a dwarf, but I like Goth Ewok better. He moves the hood and sees that it's his dead friend Tommy's corpse, or at least his decaying head! Jody calls up Ponytail (Reggie) from a phone booth and tells him to bring his ice cream truck to get the Tommy Ewok. They put it in his ice cream freezer. Jody doesn't know why "they" would crush the bodies into the Goth Ewoks, and Michael thinks it might've happened to their dad. Also, there was a (sassy?) black landlady and a roaring fire in the fireplace. I love this carpet. Jody has Reggie take Mike to hang out with Sally at the antiques shop. Lots of white bell bottoms on ladies! Michael wanders around the shop, discovering various creepy animal tchotchkes from around the world. Also, a cabinet of black and white photos. One of them is an old-timey funeral picture, and it's our friend the Undertaker driving the horse-drawn hearse! He's been bleeding yellow blood for centuries! Apparently "Three Blind Mice" always plays in Reggie's truck, just quietly when he's off duty. I think the Tommy Ewok is going to break out and get him.

Jody has made the mistake of falling asleep. In his dream, he's in the mausoleum, the Undertaker is walking towards him, when some of the Goth Ewoks break out of the wall and grab him. Sally is driving Mike home at his own insistence when they come upon Reggie's truck, on its side. Because he is a man (sort of), Mike tells Sally and her friend to stay inside their Slug Bug. The lock's been broken on the freezer, Tommy Ewok has escaped. All that's left is a yellow puddle. One of the stupid girls opens the door to the Ewoks, and they climb in the car and attack them. The car starts driving away, but Michael's rolled out the rear window onto the street. OBVIOUSLY. He wakes up and runs home, where Jody hugs him. Jody's pants are so tight. Mike takes a swig of beer because he never does age-appropriate things. Mike screams as Jody carries him upstairs and jams a screwdriver into his door so he can't get out. Because when mysterious forces are coming for you, you should probably just imprison people. Mike stars doing something with a shotgun shell and a thumb tack? My ladybrain cannot comprehend what the MacGyver is happening. Oh, he's taped it to the hammer and shot a hole in his door?

Jody's off in the muscle car. I just want to take a moment to admire the wood paneling and half a stuffed cougar coming out of the wall next to the arsenal as Michael grabs himself a handgun. Oh, well the Undertaker has come to his door and throws him into the hearse. Another hearse besides the one they shot up earlier, duh. Somehow Mike shoots his way out of the hearse, jumps out the back window (again) and the hearse drives into a pole and immediately explodes for some reason. Conveniently they are back at the cemetery, where Jody is opening his parent's mausoleum slot or whatever to see if their bodies are still there, I guess. I'm glad it was a different jean jacket that got ruined by the fly and the garbage disposal earlier, not this sweet acid wash one. Everything has gone red, the metal ball is flying? Mike finds the coffin, but Jody is gone and his dad's coffin is empty. He screams and here comes the metal ball. But Jody shoots it with a shotgun!

The brothers go find some mysterious door and suddenly Reggie the Ponytail shows up, he's not dead. He found some girls and let them escape. Inside the room, we see a bunch of barrels, some of which kind of look like desktop computer towers. Also, it's very bright and white and there are two metal rods coming out of the floor. Apparently the barrels are where they make the Goth Ewoks. I think the rods are a doorway, because Mike's hand disappeared into it. But he remembers that thing with the box at the psychic's earlier and tries again, getting pulled inside. There's a red sky and a line of Ewoks on the ground. Jody pulls him back out, and Michael says the dwarves are slaves. They have to be crushed because of the gravity and heat on their planet, which is through that door. Sure.

Suddenly everything goes dark. Now they're fighting Gothwoks in the dark. Jody runs around outside looking for Mike, and Reggie's alone in the interplanetary doorway room. I love the sweet leather vest he's wearing over his ice cream man outfit. I think he's going to treat the doorway rods like a tuning fork now, but to what end, I could not tell you. He gets thrown back as the barrels are sucked through the doorway. Jody finds a blonde in purple outside. UH-OH. Reggie manages to crawl out of the room. Mike is outside somewhere where it's super-windy, yelling for Jody.

Reggie finds the purple lady, and she stabs him. Jody now yells for Mike and finds him. They go to look for Reggie, who's been gut-stabbed. The blonde alien lady and the Undertaker watch him as he dies, I guess. The Undertaker takes the knife out and Reggie dies. Jody won't let Mike go help him. They now drive away in the muscle car and the whole funeral home/mausoleum mansion turns a funny, fuzzy color and maybe disappears. Now Jody is rattling on about some sort of mining shaft. HEHEH, shaft. The brothers temporarily separate. This is a bad plan. While attempting to lock up the house, Mike finds the Undertaker at his window. The Undertaker jumps through and Mike runs away. He somehow lost him in his house, which is not actually very big. The Undertaker just busts a door open with his mind, growls "Boy" and Mike runs as the Undertaker walks after him, telling him he's going to die, I guess. Mike tells himself not to fear as hands grab at him from the dirt. He's got a knife again. He finds a sexy blonde in purple who also has a knife, but she doesn't fuck with him. Mike's managed to lead him to the mine shaft. The Undertaker falls down into the hole and from somewhere a giant boulder rolls down the hill and covers the entrance. Oh, I guess it was Jody from up the hill. I do not feel like this is very secure, but what do I know?

Remember this?

Oh, Mike knows it's not going to work. Apparently Jody has somehow died in a car wreck now and Reggie (who lived?) claims the Undertaker was uninvolved. A single tear falls down Mike's face and Reggie keeps saying he had a bad dream. They snuggle by the fire. Reggie asks Mike to go on the road with him. Is this Reggie an alien replacement? Reggie starts to play the guitar while Mike goes to pack and gets sad about a picture of Jody. Oh, the Undertaker's in his bedroom! Hands break through his mirror and pull him through and eat him, I guess? I don't even know. THE END.


*This live-blog is a week old, BTWs.