Question: When do you know your personal movie collection is spiraling out of control?

Answer: When you find films you purchased years before and didn’t remember having them.

A little while back I wrote a review of Phantasm II and noted the following regarding the original Phantasm and its sequels:

Over … time I became aware that sequels were made to that original film.  However, I missed pretty much all of them, only realizing there were sequels when the (I believe) third film was shown on TV one night.  I found the sanitized version I saw Ok enough, but I was confused by the various characters and situations.  It felt like I needed to brush up on the original and its sequel to understand what was happening now. 

(the entire Phantasm II review can be found here)

So the other day I’m going through my DVD/BluRay collection and its so damn large that its two rows deep, with the DVDs in the second row covered by those in the first.  I move around a few DVDs and, viola, am shocked to find that I have a copy of the Anchor Bay release of Phantasm III!  I grab it and realize that when I wrote the above paragraph regarding Phantasm and its sequels I had conflated two memories into one: I did indeed see a sanitized TV showing of Phantasm III at some point but obviously I had also purchased this DVD and must have seen it too… only I forgot most of what I saw.

This is not a terribly good sign, I’m afraid.

Still, after seeing Phantasm II so recently and having a more solid idea of where we were, story-wise, with the whole Phantasm universe, I eagerly popped my copy of Phantasm III into the DVD player and gave it a whirl.  Would the fact that I had more of a backstory of what was going on make the difference?  Would I react more positively to the film?

As it turned out, the answer is a definite “yes”.

Phantasm III compresses the entire second film into its first few minutes to give new viewers a sense of what happened before.  But because what happened before was so out there, newbies might find the recap -as I originally did- more confusing than illuminating.

In one particular way, this film’s opening reminded me of Alien 3 in that it brutally eliminated one of the main characters featured in the second Phantasm movie in the opening minutes.  Without getting into too many spoilers, the actor who played that particular role chose not to return to the third film and was therefore disposed of right away, a curious thing given how “important” the character was supposed to be to the Phantasm story…well, at least in Phantasm II.

The other big difference is that the original actor playing Mike returns to that role (Phantasm II was the only big studio release of the Phantasm series and the studios forced writer/director Don Coscarelli to feature a more prominent actor in that role).

For better or worse and depending on your views, this movie is very much in the vein of Phantasm II.  In fact, at times I felt I was watching a in-tone/spirit remake of Phantasm II with Phantasm III rather than an entirely “new” film.

As I said before, depending on your views this will be a positive or not.  For me, it proved to be a positive.  Having a better understanding of the characters and situations thanks to having seen Phantasm II, I found Phantasm III a far more coherent affair than I remembered.  The same mix of humor and suspense can be found within this film though clearly the budget was much lower this time around versus for the second studio paid film.

In sum, if you’re in the mood for an oddball horror film that features some genuinely creepy scenery along with some sly humor, you should check out Phantasm III…but I recommend doing so only after seeing Phantasm II.