Phantasm I - IV (1979-1998)

[Live watch notes as I went through the first four movies on a lazy Sunday]

Embarking on watching the Phantasm movies for the first time. I only even know of them because comic book writer Evan Dorkin references them a lot.

Boy, they are really struggling to fill this 89 minute running time. I'm only 20 minutes in and they've already replayed one scene then had two characters just jam out on their guitars for a while for no reason.

Yeeesh, that was terrible. It was actually more like 85 minutes without credits and it was still incredibly slow and full of padding. It was like Rocky Horror Picture Show but played completely straight and made with no talent. I wonder if this is one of those horror franchises that starts so poorly it actually gets better as it goes...

Well, the second one has a much higher budget, that's for sure. From $300K to $3m, and Universal as distributor.

Okay, this one basically skips straight to the Dream Warriors stage and is a lot more fun and pacey. They've already doubled down on the 'ah it was a dream, no it wasn't, well some of it was maybe!' silliness from the end of the first one, blown up the same house twice, and put the survivors from the first movie on the road, tracking the Tall Man across America armed with a flame-thrower and a quadruple-barrelled shotgun.

Bah, it slowed down almost immediately after I wrote that, about half an hour in. It's trying to build up tension, or a dreamlike atmosphere, but it's really just long stretches of not much happening punctuated by supposedly 'scary' moments that are directed so flatly and languidly that they feel more Wes Anderson than Dario Argento. At least the acting is a little better this time round and it all looks a bit nicer.

lol they just showed a bag of remains with the name Sam Raimi on the label.

Wow, Phantasm II is heavily inspired by Evil Dead II (and possibly Bad Taste). This means it's more fun to watch than the first one, and the extra budget and Kurtzman/Nicotero effects don't hurt, but it's just not up to the standards of those movies, or Elm Street at its best or even Child's Play. You could probably get a reasonable 60 minutes cut out of each of these, but they still wouldn't be good movies.

I think I'll have a quick skim through the next two, but they're apparently DTV and I'm guessing they get worse again. My time is probably better spent on a hundredth watch of Rocky Horror or Braindead.

Ha, well Coscarelli has definitely seen Bad Taste by this point because Phantasm III just ripped off the same 'goons fall out of trees' gag as one of the original Worms cutscenes did.
Anyway, this one's a total mess. He brings back the previously re-cast child actor from the first one, but clearly it's out of principle rather than any kind of faith in his acting ability as he gets rid of him after about ten minutes in favour of having his friend Reggie (playing the character "Reggie" for the third time) wander through R-rated riffs on Home Alone and blaxploitation movies, and once again a gratuitous sex scene.

Oh boy, this is shameless, they just did a disembodied demonic hand slapstick fight.

Onto IV, and it's promising some deep lore revelations.

A handy way to tell how much care has gone into each one of these is just how easy it is to see the camera crew reflected in close-ups of the silver orbs. For a while they at least put sheets over them and stuff, at this point they're practically waving at the audience.

Agggh, the digital title card is so tacky, it's straight out of a Wing Commander game.

Good grief, they do so many recaps and flashbacks and what have you in these, I feel like I've watched the first movie twice at this point along with all its deleted scenes.

Finished Phantasm IV and that movie is also a mess. Ends up feeling like an episode of of Stargate SG-1 or something, just three old guys in the California desert talking about how they're going to erase each other from time or something and then not really doing very much after all.

Thankfully I do not have access to the fifth movie!

Rating: goes from a sincere yet crappy attempt at an Argento to a rip-off of Raimi to finally just eating its own tail and becoming a big pile of nothing.

Prey (2022)

I didn't mind it but it wasn't the stripped-down horror I was hoping for - far too much extravagant CG action and elaborate melee choreography (which was fucked over by all the shitty whip-pans most of the time anyway). Too much stuff from the Predator's point of view as well - not literally the heat vision POV shots but just loads of scenes following him around beating up animals and stuff before the humans have even encountered him. We all know what a Predator looks like and stuff now so the mystery is going to be hard to maintain, but it still feels odd when they don't even try. I did like that because the human weapons were primitive, the Predator wasn't just laser-cannoning everyone from the get-go.

Rating: okay

Predator: Badlands (2025)

MILD SPOILERS BELOW

Overall really enjoyed it. It looks fantastic, the action is great, and it has a bunch of cool ideas. BUT it's best enjoyed on the understanding that it's essentially a kids cartoon. It's like if in the late 90s, Fox went to the makers of Aeon Flux and said 'please make us a feature length pilot for a Predator tv show - it can be as cool as you want but it has to be suitable for and appeal to ten year olds'. So it's basically just a load of cool cartoon fights in a story about an angsty teen Predator who crashes on a dangerous planet and winds up in a found family of comedy/cute animal sidekicks, going on adventures and only ever killing robots and aliens. Apart from Aeon Flux, I was periodically reminded of stuff like the Lost In Space movie and Battle For Endor. It's probably the second best Predator movie and, again, I really enjoyed it, but more on the level of Killer Of Killers than the '87 original.

Rating: great fun, if you don't mind the kids cartoon tone.

Death Of A Unicorn (2025)

Gave up on this halfway through, as it was slow, unfunny and dull. It has at least five characters who just don't need to be there, it's aiming for political satire, comedy and horror but only dips its toe in each of them without doing anything interesting, and I didn't laugh once.

Rating: rubbish

Star Trek Generations (1994)

(watched as part of a broadcast-order franchise group-watch)

cool to think that, thanks to this movie, near the end of 1994 there was a month or so when TOS, TNG, DS9 and VOY were all putting out new live-action stories. I wonder if Trekkie discourse reached a fever pitch around that time.

Also interesting that this movie's release feels perhaps a little bittersweet, as it serves as a reminder that the show had recently wrapped after seven seasons of generally quickening returns, whereas TMP came a decade after a slightly ropey third season and felt more like a surprising and triumphant revival.

I like the tribute to the TOS movies with the blue font on starfield background, with the little twist of the (clearly CG) champagne bottle.

Old-school uniforms! Old-school composited models and matte paintings! Aaaah, this is glorious!

Wow, great bunch of character actors on the Enterprise-B bridge - Alan Ruck, Glenn Morshower, Jeanette Goldstein and Tim Russ.

I really like the unspoken interplay with Ruck and Shatner when that distress call comes in.

This all makes me wish they'd not killed Kirk then found a way to de-age Bones and bring Chekov, Uhura and Sulu (and, what the hell, Rand as well) to the 24th Century and kept on making movies with the TOS crew. (edited) 

Guinan reveal! That must have been such a cool moment for any Trekkie who had somehow managed to avoid spoilers.

This whole opening section is fantastic, whatever happens with the rest of the movie.

The transition to the TNG scene was a little rushed, bit of a shame. They could have taken at least an extra minute or so over going from that lovely shot of the damaged Enterprise to the stars to the water to the olde time boat to the TNG crew to medium shots to the first dialogue. And probably dropped the '78 years later' chyron as well, let the slow transition do its work and the audience figure it out. (edited) 

Yeahhhh, Tracee Lee Cocco up on the big screen!

I'm being silly there, but one benefit of this coming so soon after the show finishing and the show going on for so long is that you get a really nice sense of continuity from the same extras you've got to recognise over seven years also milling around in the background (and foreground) of the movies, even if they still don't get to say anything.

Good choice to have Picard snap at Riker there and then Riker bark at Worf, make sure the tone doesn't get too cosy. I like the use of handheld camera and a whole load of differently coloured lighting in the away team sequence, too, gives it lots of energy.

I assume this is Data's quarters due to the presence of Spot? They feel a lot more expansive and atmospheric all of a sudden! In contrast to my comments on the away team bit, I feel like the DoP could have maybe chilled out here a bit and made it feel more like the show!

Gahhh, feels so weird to have everything in this strong yellow light and feeling so much bigger! I guess the lighting is justified by them being right next to a sun or whatever, which is pretty smart, and I get why they wouldn't want their movie to look exactly like the show but they don't have that whole TMP thing of 'this is essentially a brand new ship' to really smooth over that gap.

Oh my god, this yellow is killing me. Too fast, too yellow, is my review. Need some TMP vibes up in here.

Okay, the star just blew up and the lighting returned to normal, I take it back, that worked nicely.

Also, it's a good example of the difference between tv and movies that I don't think the show could have achieved a tenth of the effect by simply holding on a close-up of a guest actor's face like they just did with McDowell.

The Picard/Troi scene was really beautifully written and acted but it also feels like the most egregious contravention of 'show don't tell' ever. Like, clearly there to establish a character trait of Picard's for the audience and for no other reason. I'll see how things play out, but from my memory of this movie they probably could have covered all this with a line of dialogue and the audience's general understanding that people love their families.

There's something for me to like or dislike every ten seconds with this movie! Amazing shot of the Klingon bird of prey wheeling round in space, slightly weird shot of a crewmember slapping away at a control panel, return of those Klingon sisters is very cool, but then the scene with them and Soren feels too cramped and rushed. But then we get Guinan with her hair down! What a rollercoaster!

Good scene with Picard and Data in the astrology dept. Mainly due to the writing and acting, but I also like the clever use of locations we've heard about but not seen before to give the ship some extra production budget oomph.

Confused about Guinan - seems like Soran is also her species, but is it her species that gives her timey-wimey powers, or her experience with the Nexus or what? Will have to look into that later!

Yeahhhh Ogawa in a barely noticeable non-speaking appearance!

Pretty funny that they chose to set so many of the pivotal scenes on some scaffolding at what isn't but very much looks like the Vasquez Rocks. Like, nice call back to TOS, I guess, but it feels sooo cheap! This is a big part of the problem with Kirk's death, iirc. Also a big part of why Insurrection (and Beyond, actually) feels like an extended tv episode: you can't have large swathes of your grand sci-fi movie clearly filmed an hour away from the studio lot. (edited) 

Data's jolliness really undercuts the tension of the Klingon fight, they should have made him tense and amped up. Really good final moments in that sequence, though, and Data's fist pump is perfect.

Come on, put a big moon in the sky or something! Bond and Star Wars movies have been doing stuff like that for fifteen years already!

I do like another budget flex of having more fleeing personnel and also having more of them in alien make-up. The teddy bear moment is also a really nice touch, which I assume never gets resolved.

The whole saucer sequence from separation through crash is fantastic, and Data's "Ohhhh shit" is magnificent. But iirc, it doesn't actually have much bearing on the plot. Like, if they managed to fix the warp drive or whatever and stay in orbit beaming down as and when necessary, would that make any difference?

ALSO, really weird that we're 80 minutes into this 120 minute movie and we haven't got back to Kirk yet. Some really bone-headed decisions here, presumably because they were making it at the same time as the show and everyone had tunnel vision and was burnt out.

No score under this Picard/Soren fight! That's a cool creative choice to make if you're in a big cool location, not if you're trying to work up some drama out of two old blokes scuffling in the backyard.

And his star-destroying missile looked like a moderately impressive bottle rocket. It should have been huge! Or at least a cool-looking sci-fi thing. What were they thinking?

Ah, okay, I guess the idea of the saucer section thing is that they all got killed by the ribbon or whatever. Makes you wonder why they couldn't use their impulse boosters to fly off in another direction, did they mention anything about them being broken? The saucer should be able to function as an autonomous spaceship, and they knew the destruction was coming. Also undermines it to not have any shots of them before they die, or tie them in with the Soren/Picard location at all.

Picard almost instantly realising the Nexus isn't real and not really caring about staying really undermines the whole premise! Plus Guinan having an echo in there is a bit contrived, feels like the usual 'Guinan special powers' get out of jail free card that the show could get away with a little easier than a movie can.

Also, a very cheap transition from Guinan talking to the Kirk exterior. Way to undermine the reveal and the Picard/Kirk meet-up moment!

This whole bit feels cheap, in fact - Kirk and Picard hanging out in a kitchen. Then they try to make it feel epic with the horse ride, but the music is way overdone and it all just looks like the planet Soren was just on anyway!

Also feels a bit shitty of Picard to pull Kirk out of eternal paradise just to help him beat up one old man. And Kirk is also way too easy to convince. It's like Faramir or Tom Bombadil showing disregard for the One Ring, you can't afford to undermine your central threat/temptation like that in a movie.

Three old blokes rolling around on some rocks in a very badly directed fight sequence, then Kirk goes out as a dummy strapped to a bit of bridge that falls a bit too far, good grief.

Wait, Kirk's last words are "Oh my"? Like, the George Takei joke that started four years earlier on the Howard Stern Show?! Is that not the silliest thing to do ever? "It was fun" would have been great last words!

I get how in theory Kirk having a very small, anonymous death while saving millions of people works nicely, but when everything else also feels small and low-budget, that just doesn't work.

Bit of a weak ending as well. Sigh. The whole thing started to fall apart about halfway through, once Soren goes down to Veridian 3.

Also, bit too easy to read the message as being 'stop getting caught up in nostalgia, nerds, TOS wasn't that good'.

Well, I enjoyed lots of little bits and pieces but I also remembered why,  outside of the novelty of seeing the TNG lot on the big screen and Kirk and Picard sharing scenes together, this movie is not particularly well thought of. I'm looking forward to First Contact a lot more now, basically TNG's Wrath of Khan.

Tron: Ares (2025)

The first two TRONs have lovely design, Jeff Bridges' charm and are otherwise very boring. Ares brings nothing new to the table design-wise, replaces Bridges with charm vacuum Jared Leto, has even worse writing, plus it's frustratingly disconnected from the previous two films thanks to Disney fucking about for fifteen years until almost no one wanted to come back.
It has a few nice ideas, like going back to the 80s version of the Grid which I missed a little in Legacy, bō fighting with light cycle style jetwalls, and Grid stuff in the real world, but unfortunately these are all only interesting for about a minute each because it doesn't do anything interesting with them.
It also wastes a staggering number of character actors - Gillian Anderson, Cameron Monaghan, Katherine Isabelle, Sarah Desjardins and Hasan Minhaj are all in the movie and yet could be completely removed without making an iota of difference. Some of them don't even get any dialogue and the ones who do only get to say something like "wait what?" or "you shouldn't do that" every twenty minutes. It suggests a very troubled production process.

Rating: a degraded copy of Legacy

The Running Man (2025)

MILD SPOILERS BELOW

Just so careless and bland, I find it difficult to believe Edgar Wright made that. Nothing makes sense, there's nothing clever about it, the action is all just that over-edited, no one able to shoot in a straight line, CG shit that you might expect from something like Taken 3 or Underworld 4. So many weird bad decisions, like having one character do some Truman Show level blatant product placement and give a terrible over the top performance and then not have that all be clues that he's a plant, have it just be bad movie-making, or having the first time the baddies discover the location of the lead character be a very cogent dream/his imaginings of how they might find him, so that every subsequent time they discover him you're assuming it's going to turn out to be a dream again, or mention that the baddies watch you through your television sets and then have the lead guy watch tv constantly and yet never get tracked because of it. Honestly, there are like a hundred of these. If there were a Pitch Meeting video for this, it'd be an hour long. And the social commentary feels hopelessly dated for most of it - at best it's like watching the Fifteen Million Merits episode of Black Mirror in 2025 and thinking 'wow, the media landscape changed so much in 15 years' but really it's about as relevant as the Arnie adaptation. Such a waste of a bunch of good actors, too.

Rating: inexplicably awful.