The funeral is about to begin! The Unenthusiastic Critic's 2020 Halloween Movie Marathon gets underway with Don Coscarelli's Phantasm, from 1979.
First, we're discussing the charm of "bad" horror movies: those clunky, cheesy, DIY movies made with more love than skill or money. And Michael tries to get to the bottom of why Nakea—whose favorite Stephen King movie is Sleepwalkers—likes bad horror movies more than good ones.
Then, we're sitting down for Nakea's first viewing of Phantasm, a surrealistic cult classic about three young men battling the evil Tall Man, his reanimated dwarves, his flying metal spheres of death, and his entire body-snatching, corpse-shrinking, dream-invading, inter-dimensional post-mortem slavery ring.
Join us for a film Nakea describes as "someone retelling you their dream," and a conversation she describes as "listening to two people retell someone else's fucking dream."
Program
00:00: Prologue: from Phantasm
00:36: Preliminary Discussion: Bad Horror Movies
15:32: Interlude: from Phantasm
15:54: Cultural Osmosis: Pre-Viewing Discussion
22:02: Interlude: Restoration Trailer for Phantasm
23:51: The Verdict: Post-Viewing Discussion
1:20:54: Outro and Next Week's Movie
1:22:02: Outtake
Notes and Links
—Movie Reviewed: Phantasm (dir. Don Coscarelli, AVCO, 1979).
—Movie Nakea Won't Shut Up About: Sleepwalkers (dir. Mick Garris, Columbia, 1992)
—Links and Resources: "‘Phantasm’ Is the Surrealist Horror Classic You Shouldn’t Go Another Halloween Without Watching," Winston Cook-Wilson, Decider; "The 100 Best Horror Films," Time Out; "The 25 Best Horror Films of All Time," Wired; "Bravo's 100 Scariest Movie Moments," Bravo TV; "Sphere of Influence: Don Coscarelli, Angus Scrimm, and Reggie Bannister on Phantasm-ania," Mark Savlov, Austin Chronicle; "“You Think When You Die You Go to Heaven. You Come to US!”: Phantasm, Death, and Deindustrialization in Modern America," Mindy Clegg, Tropics of Meta; Review by Roger Ebert, rogerebert.com; IMDB.com User Reviews by babybink and kelson-williams.
—Find additional episodes, leave a comment, or make a donation to support the podcast at unaffiliatedcritic.com.
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—Saint-Saens' "Danse Macabre" by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under CC BY 3.0.
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