A Tall Man and Deadly Balls.

Phantasm II (1988)

Directed by Don Coscarelli

I was a teenage video store addict. Actually my horror movie obsessions started way before my teenage years. I used to spend hours of my time looking at the horror and sci fi sections of the video store. The bat-shit crazy, suggestively gorey VHS covers staring back at me, begging me to take them home. I remember when Phantasm II just came out on VHS and I spotted it on the video store shelves right below the also incredibly alluring cover to Evil Dead II. Anyways, on the box was this creepy old man (the incomparable Angus Scrimm as the Tall Man) holding a large silver ball with protruding knives and drills aimed at a young terrified couple. I had never seen the original Phantasm yet but when you're a kid that shit doesn't matter. If the VHS box was cool, I wanted it.

So yeah, I loved it. I then went back and watched the first one which I loved even more. So here's the story relatively spoiler free. A creepy Tall Man from a creepy evil dimension kills towns using his creepy mortuary as his headquarters. He turns dead people into evil Jawas and has a few flying silver balls with different deadly accouterments flying around to kill people. A former folk-rock singing ice cream man and Roach from Point Break (it was almost a baby Brad Pitt but he got turned down for the part) try to end his ass with their super cool Hemicuda car and shotguns taped together. Yeah, that's pretty much it. Oh yeah, it's also awesome.

One Halloween when I was like 9 years old my mom sewed me a Jawa costume and I loved it so much I wore it all the time. Well one year I repurposed my robes to be a Phantasm lil creeper. I did my best little-dead-old-person-from-an-evil-space-dimension makeup and and called it a day. It was a hit with my neighborhood Halloween candy-givers. They would ask me who I was supposed to be and then I would go on explain the entire plot to Phantasm II. Yeah, I was cool.

As an "adult" I would suggest watching the original Phantasm before watching the sequel to get all the back story. Plus the first one is amazing and a classic where as perhaps I love part 2 for more nostalgic reasons. That's not to say it isn't a wonderful film. It is.