Please don't spend money on this.

Beautiful, moving film.

A brilliant film that helped define a genre

If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.

Very good film. Silver spheres, evil flys, dwarves, moving fingers, graverobbers, tuning forks to other dimensions, the Tall Man...this movie has it all. The cool thing about this is it could've been a stand-alone and it would've been fine. The one con I have about this movie is when Reggie (Reggie Bannister) & Jody (Bill Thornbury) play and sing a song on their guitars...they could've done without that scene. Other than that? Instant classic.

this film made shivers in the marrows of my bones like a rash of jelly? This long man is the pig spit of my uncle Callie - a repulsive fellow who used to laugh at me until I literally cried my eyes out. As you can imagine, the affect this fiml had on me was tenfold!. After viewing this film for the tenth time, I finally plucked up the courage to ring my estranged uncle. "Callie" I gobbled down the line. "Why did you used to mock me so? Why?" But of course the line was dead and I realized I never had an uncle Callie and the film had reawakened my other personality, archdeacon bubbles.

A small town sees the arrival of the Tall Man, a mortician, who carries with him an air of mysterious evil. There are an increase of deaths in the town and it seems the Tall Man has something to do with it. Mike, a 13 year old boy follows his older brother Jody and his girlfriend into the cemetery at night and is frightened out of his wits by some kind of robed monster. This sparks off a journey into terror of which Mike could never have imagined.Phantasm is undeniably a cult classic. It is a strange film in the way that it has some fantastic, iconic moments yet is very shallow in script and direction/development of the story line. This is somehow echoed in the visuals when showing us the stark wasteland that is the alternate universe where the Tall Man is from. Dwarfs are enslaved, snaking across a desolate wasteland, which mirrors the emptiness of the script. This somehow feels fitting.For me I enjoyed the visuals of the Tall Man striding through the town, knowing he was being watched and stopping to stare back. As kids we all had a creepy person we were scared of but liked to watch from a distance and then run away if the person got wind of you. The Tall Man is the epitome of this. The silver orbs are fantastic, absolute class, I love everything about them. Got to be my favorite weapon of all time.This movie has an air of Stephen King about it which I say as a compliment. It's one of those films you watch and are not particularly impressed with at the time but it stays with you and plays out in your mind.Every horror freak must watch this franchise, be part of it and enjoy the honor of knowing the Tall Man.

As far as horror films go, Phantasm is a film with much on its mind. It is at once an elegiac meditation on life and death, a poignant story of a boy on the verge of manhood, while also serving as a macabre funhouse ride, bouncing recklessly between reality and the dreamworld, offering a robust mythology encompassing alternate dimensions, zombie dwarfs, and, most iconically, flying silver spheres that drill into the brains of their victims.The story is set in small town America circa the late 1970s, and focuses on two young men, 13-year-old Michael and his older brother Jody, in the wake of the tragic death of their parents. Jody has taken a break from his exciting life as a musician on the road to take care of his little brother, who idolizes Jody to the point of following him around town, in the fear that he will one day abandon him as their parents did. Michael's constant surveillance of his brother leads him to Morningside Cemetery, where Jody attends a friend's funeral, after which, Michael witnesses Morningside's enigmatic undertaker, known only as the Tall Man, scoop up the 200-pound casket in his arms, toss it back into the hearse, and drive off, leaving an empty grave. From there, the film's focus turns to Michael's investigation of Morningside, eventually uncovering the Tall Man's fiendish plot to wipe out the entire town in order to resurrect their corpses as demonic dwarfs and use them as servants in his ever-growing army of the undead.The loss of liberty, characterized by enslavement and brainwashing, is the central issue in the film. Those unlucky enough to be buried in a Morningside Cemetery plot are dug up by the Tall Man, shrunk down to dwarfs, and resurrected, only to serve for all eternity as the mindless minions under his control, tasked with furthering his reign of terror and harvesting more cadavers for his army of ghouls. It is no coincidence that the Morningside Funeral Home greatly resembles a Southern plantation (the shooting location was the historic Dunsmuir estate in Oakland), just as the Tall Man is dressed impeccably as a Southern gentleman of considerable means, for the character is playing the role of slavemaster, and his dwarfs, gravediggers, and murderous spheres are his slaves.