Phantoms Review
by Jon Popick (jpopick AT sick-boy DOT com)October 22nd, 1999
PLANET SICK-BOY: http://www.sick-boy.com
I thought that I could go a bit further into the New Year (or at least further into January) before I saw a film worse than Firestorm. Boy, was I ever wrong.
Now, I’ve read about 10 or 12 Dean Koontz books, but I don’t think that Phantoms was one of them. The reason for my uncertainty is that most of his work is pretty much the same. I stopped reading Koontz for that very reason. He’s Stephen King light. And to make things more frightening, the films made from his stories are turning out to be worse than King’s adaptations.
Phantoms is set in a small Colorado town where Jenny, the local doctor (Joanna Going) has taken Lisa, her younger sister (Rose McGowan) home so she could spend some quality time away from her alcoholic mother. Driving into town, they notice that things seem very quiet. Too quiet, in fact.
To make matter worse, Jenny’s housekeeper is all dead when they get home. The phone is dead and the car won’t start, so Jenny and Lisa hoof it to the police station, where they find (gasp) everyone dead. Sound creepy yet? Didn’t think so.
Eventually, some other cops (Ben Affleck and Liev Schreiber) come by to…to…well, apparently just to read some really bad lines. If they wanted to make things REALLY scary, they would have taken a tape measure to Schreiber’s head. That is one huge melon. It’s bigger than Billy Corgan’s and nearly as big as Rosie O’Donnell’s.
The scenes that are supposed to be scary are just sad. They are cut together very poorly and lit even worse. You can’t really tell what’s happening or whom it’s happening to. That’s why I spent most of the movie imagining what McGowan (Scream and The Doom Generation) would look like riding naked on my Kenmore vacuum cleaner.
By the time the evil expert Timothy Flyte (Peter O’Toole) shows up, I was completely gone mentally. So were about 15 people who got up and left during my screening. They were the lucky ones and I cursed them as I drove home.
Nobody in the theater jumped, screamed or even inhaled suddenly. It was almost like they pumped carbon monoxide into the theater to quell the teaming masses. They didn’t need to. Phantoms is just plain bad filmmaking.
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