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This week on The Rotten Horror Picture Show Amanda and Clay do a deep dive into the darkest depths of Clay’s psyche as they try to get to the bottom of why Clay has such a distaste for #190 on our list of cinematic scares, 1979’s Phantasm! Does Amanda share his disdain? Well, there’s only one way to find out, boyyyyyyyyyyyyyyys and girls!
The residents of a small town have begun dying under strange circumstances, leading young Mike (Michael Baldwin) to investigate. After discovering that the Tall Man (Angus Scrimm), the town’s mortician, is killing and reanimating the dead as misshapen zombies, Mike seeks help from his older brother, Jody (Bill Thornbury), and local ice cream man Reggie (Reggie Bannister). Working together, they try to lure out and kill the Tall Man, all the while avoiding his minions and a deadly silver sphere.
Join Clay and Amanda as they pay their last respects to underaged drinking, underaged driving, voyeurism, child abuse, false imprisonment, breaking and entering, trespassing, assault, murder, a sick 1971 Plymouth Barracuda, anatomically awkward graveyard sex, an impromptu ice cream man jam session, fake dream brothers, and the state of California’s entire supply of fake marble laminate.
Much like American Werewolf in London, Phantasm is a movie on Clay’s “three strikes” chopping block. It’s a classic for so many horror fans, and while it is one of the more unique horror films, its weird pacing and somewhat baffling story and scene structure has never quite landed for Clay. But don’t let this thinly veiled foreshadowing of how they felt about the movie scare you off, at the very least it’s only an hour and a half long–remember, fear is the killer!
So make your final arrangements, rev up your hemicuda, and make some interplanetary slaves out of smooshed-down corpses with us…if you DARE!