Review: Phantoms (1998)

Phantoms (1998)

Rated R for sci-fi violence/gore and language

Score: 3 out of 5

Based on a Dean Koontz novel, Phantoms is an extremely silly mashup of The X-Files, Silent Hill, and The Thing, one that is probably best known today among Kevin Smith fans for a scene in Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back in which Jay and Holden say that Ben Affleck was "da bomb" in this movie. ("Word, bitch! Phantoms like a motherfucker!") In many ways, it is very much a product of its time, the kind of ultra-stylish, teen-friendly horror movie that was huge after Scream, starring a group of young rising stars in a story that was light on serious scares but heavy on action, special effects, and witty dialogue. It is an extremely disjointed film whose three acts feel like three different movies awkwardly bolted together, the ending relies too much on technobabble instead of exploring some of the more interesting ideas it raises, and overall, it's easy to understand why critics tore it a new asshole back in the day and audiences left it to sink at the box office and be largely forgotten since... but you know what? Its energy was such that I was still able to groove to it. It moves like a rollercoaster, one where you probably shouldn't pay too much attention to the plot but which still makes for an entertaining monster flick that seems almost aware of just what kind of movie it is, and boasts some pretty cool imagery on top of it.

Set in the small resort town of Silent Hill, Mai... sorry, Snowfield, Colorado, we start with a doctor named Jennifer Pailey and her sister Lisa arriving in town only to find it mysteriously deserted, with only a few corpses lying around indicating that something not right has happened. They stumble upon the only people left alive in the town, the sheriff and former FBI agent Bryce Hammond and his deputies Stu Wargle and Steve Shanning, and together, they realize that inhuman monsters are on the loose, capable of imitating human speech in order to lure people to their doom. A message left on a mirror refers to a "Timothy Flyte" and to an "Ancient Enemy". They send out an SOS, which leads the FBI to contact Flyte, an academic who believes that the Ancient Enemy is a monstrous force that, in the past, was responsible for the disappearance of the Mayans and the Roanoke colony. Arriving in Snowfield with the army, Flyte gets in touch with the survivors in the town, and they cook up a plan that may defeat the monsters living there before they start to expand their horizons.

The first act of the film was easily my favorite part. Relying on isolation, a small cast, and atmosphere as it keeps the monsters hidden in the background, it's this part that invites the most Silent Hill comparisons, especially when the Ancient Enemy seems to activate the town's air raid siren to announce its arrival. We don't see a monster swoop in and snatch one of the cops, but seeing only his shoes and his gun left behind does the job in establishing early on that this thing does not play around, and that the characters are not safe. The cast has to do most of the heavy lifting in the first act, and for the most part, they're surprisingly good for a B-movie like this. Ben Affleck is, in fact, da bomb as Hammond, a take-charge sheriff who's haunted by a tragedy in his past that got him fired from the FBI, a subplot that I would've liked to see the film focus more on to flesh him out as a character. Joanna Going made for a good female lead as Jennifer; while she wasn't a standout, she still got to kick monster ass and she didn't stink up the proceedings. Liev Schreiber played Stu as an utter dick who I couldn't wait to see get his comeuppance, especially given his sexual harassment of Rose McGowan's Lisa that comes off even sleazier now given how this film's producer Harvey Weinstein notoriously treated the actress. McGowan's Lisa was the only really forgettable member of the cast, her main character traits being that she's Jennifer's sister, that she's hot, and that Stu repeatedly hits on her with all the attendant harsher-in-hindsight sleaze. Throughout the film, I suspected that she was cannon fodder who would be killed off to give Jennifer some motivation, and was surprised at how long she lasted.

Story-wise, the film goes completely off the rails once it leaves Snowfield and introduces us to Peter O'Toole's Flyte, though it's not for lack of trying on O'Toole's part, as he does his best to class up what is basically a cheesy monster movie. In the second act, the film abandons the characters from the beginning almost entirely, focusing on a bunch of nameless soldiers and government scientists venturing through the town and ultimately encountering, and getting their asses kicked by, monsters. This is the part of the film where I think it would've been better served slowing down in order to flesh out our main cast, thinking that they're safe with the army and discussing what they're facing with Flyte while fleshing out their personalities and backstories. Hammond has his guilt over accidentally murdering a child that only comes into play during the ending, while Jennifer and Lisa are blank slates who serve mainly as audience inserts; here, we could've learned more about who they are, fleshing out their personalities and backstories. Instead, they're absent for a long stretch of the film in favor of monster action involving people we don't know and don't care about. The trend of missed opportunities continues into the third act, where we learn that the Ancient Enemy, a creature that has absorbed the memories, knowledge, and ideas of the people it's eaten, has come to believe that it's Satan. A very interesting concept is raised here, that the heroes can fight the Ancient Enemy by playing to the fact that it's embraced the personality of the devil, who is portrayed in the Bible as an arrogant egomaniac that thinks it's invincible -- and thus can fall victim to hubris and be led straight into a trap. Unfortunately, this idea is soon forgotten as the film instead shifts to Flyte discovering that an oil-eating bacterium can kill this amorphous monster that can take any form, a clumsy technobabble solution when a far more creative ending was sitting right there.

Fortunately, however, the movie is still a lot of fun to watch even as the plot was creaking and collapsing under its own weight. The first act had a nice atmosphere to it, and once the monsters came into play, they looked mean and nasty, with some neat special effects and some very gory kills. The transformations in the third act in particular recall The Thing, especially a well-done shot of a man's intestines becoming prehensile tentacles that he uses to crawl after and try to grab the main characters. For all the near-Lovecraftian pretensions of the plot, it never forgets just what kind of movie it really is, and while its storyline shifts were jarring, its tonal shifts weren't. It starts off as a slow burn that builds up to the monsters, and then it cuts loose and kicks ass with scenes of soldiers getting hunted by monsters, a whole horde of its meat puppets fusing into a single giant beast, and more. It never makes any excuses for how silly it is, which was honestly rather refreshing given how hard it was for me to get invested in the main storyline.

The Bottom Line

A mashup of other, much better horror stories that's nonetheless a fun watch in spite of itself, Phantoms is not some hidden gem, but if you're in the mood for late '90s horror that's willing to go over the top, you can do far, far worse than this.