When one thinks of the movie 1998 movie Phantoms, I suspect its more for this very funny self-referential line delivered by one of the movie’s stars, Ben Affleck, in the film Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back:
“Affleck was the bomb in Phantoms“.
Funny stuff and one suspects that Mr. Affleck (given how his character in this scene takes down the critically acclaimed Oscar winning -for him!- film Good Will Hunting just beforehand) doesn’t think all that much of Phantoms and/or his acting in it.
I have only a vague recollection of Phantoms coming out in theaters back in 1998. I didn’t see it then because I had read the 1983 Dean Koontz novel the movie was based on a couple of years before and found that although Mr. Koontz’s story started off extremely well, its second half/resolution proved a big disappointment.
Why see the movie version of a novel that disappointed you?
I nonetheless caught bits and pieces of the movie on TV in the intervening years and found what I saw neither terribly bad nor incredibly good…even though the film did indeed feature the “bomb” presence of Mr. Affleck.
The other day one of the cable stations was airing Phantoms and I decided to finally sit down and watch the whole damn thing. By now enough years had passed and my distaste for the novel’s conclusion had evaporated and I could watch the film “fresh”.
And what I saw wasn’t all that bad. That’s not to say the film, except for that great Ben Affleck quote, is a “forgotten” masterpiece in horror. It isn’t, but its a decent enough time killer.
The plot of the movie (as with the book) goes like this: Dr. Jennifer Pailey (Joanna Going) brings her younger sister Lisa (Rose McGowan) from L.A. to the quiet and small town of Snowfield, Colorado. There is tension between the siblings but it is forgotten very quickly when they arrive in town and find that it appears completely deserted.
There is absolutely no one to be seen and when the sisters get to their house, they find a corpse and realize something very sinister is afoot. Soon, they are joined by some deputies who have just arrived in town (including Mr. Affleck and Liev Schreiber playing a whacked out weirdo Deputy).
Eventually the group is also joined by Dr. Timothy Flyte (Peter O’Toole looking shockingly old and frail…I can’t help but wonder if he was experiencing some health issues while making this film). Flyte is a disgraced academic scientist who is now forced to write for a “National Enquirer” type rag wherein he espouses theories of a mysterious creature that lives underground and may be responsible for the disappearance of entire cultures/cities/groups of people in the past.
Guess he was on to something, no?
Anyway, Phantoms’ story plays out like a cross between Alien and The Andromeda Strain. You have your mysterious/unbeatable monster who’s hunting people down one by one and you also have the town whose inhabitants mysteriously perish, along with a “scientific” resolution to the problem.
The movie presents some good shocks but isn’t overwhelmingly gory. There are also several very effective creepy moments sprinkled throughout.
On the minus side, there are also plenty of logical holes in the story. One of the bigger ones: Why exactly does the creature leave certain people alive, especially after they’ve served their purpose (I’m trying to dance around SPOILERS)? And if we are to believe the creature is capable of doing what it does, why would it allow our heroes any movement, especially the ability to find a way to defeat it? I suppose what I’m really saying is this: Dean Koontz created a creature that was simply too powerful to be defeated in any logical way.
There are also too many characters populating the film. When an author writes a novel, they have as much time and space as they desire to breathe life into their characters. Unfortunately, when producing a film, you have a limited amount of time to tell your story and sometimes streamlining characters/events helps to tell a more effective story in the allotted time. In the case of Phantoms, one of my complaints is that it felt we were dealing with too many characters. While, I have nothing against either Joanna Going or Rose McGowan or their acting within this film, Phantoms might have been more effective film if it merged their two characters into one.
Anyway, the bottom line is this: While not the greatest horror film in the world, Phantoms is among the better adaptations of Dean Koontz novels. If you’re in the mood to see Ben “the bomb” Affleck as the hero in a horror film, you’ve certainly come to the right place.