Phantasm III: Lord of the Dead

Phantasm III is where Don Coscarelli, the writer/director/creator of all the Phantasm movies, finally said "there needs to be story with this plot". Gone is the high-octane, all-killer-no-filler streamlining of P2. Also gone is the mysterious unease of P1. This movie is all about two things: injecting a metric ton of lore, and doing so within the trappings of a somewhat campy B-movie. That second point first, it's ... weird. It isn't BAD, per se, that it embraces its status as a B-movie. Some of the camp can be fun. But then you have moments like the three scavengers, who get killed early on, and return as wacky zombies that have to be killed another two or three times apiece, and are treated both as demonic threats and comic relief. It's not a good balance. Equally silly are Reggie's sidekicks, a gun-toting child and a woman who looks like Grace Jones and acts like a ninja, but claims to be ex-Army. It's also weird and doesn't always seem to fit right within the movie. As for the lore? Prepare yourselves, because you're about to get a bunch of it. Where do the spheres come from? What really happened to Jody? Why did the Tall Man flinch on the street in the first movie as he passed by Reggie's ice cream truck? That and more get explained in this movie ... but then, just as many questions get raised. You find out that The Tall Man wants Mike specifically, and he wants him alive ... but you don't find out why. You see him regenerate through one of the dimensional forks, "replacing" the defeated version of him from P2, but you don't find out how. It's almost maddening to get a bunch of lore, but have a bunch of it left up in the end. And that's another thing: the end. While the first two end with typical horror movie sequel-bait endings, this ends literally on a cliffhanger, in the middle of a high-stakes showdown. If you were hoping for a self-contained story, nope. not here. P3 is doing its own thing. It's a good movie. It's an awkward movie. If you liked the first two and want more of it, it's worth a watch. But ... it's definitely a step down.