Mike, having found out that he is going to become an alien, or is already an alien, or is carrying an alien in his head (it’s not clear, and is never made clear) goes off on his own, chased, often in his dreams, by The Tall Man. Reggie tries to either rescue Mike or kill The Tall Man—again, it’s not clear.
The fourth outing in the Phantasm series is cobbled together from outtakes from the first film combined with new footage. The effect is what you’d expect. Things happen because they had old shots of those things. The new stuff is just as incoherent as ever, leaving a film that’s nonsense even by Phantasm standards. Some of that nonsense is fun, but it is still nonsense.
For much of the film, Reggie is on his own, running into the occasional zombie or monster. He journeys through empty towns and picks up a girl with peculiar breasts but for the most part does nothing related to the story for the first hour..
Mike spends this time in surrealist landscapes that sometimes are dreams and sometimes aren’t. He also develops telekinesis, which is later ignored, attempts suicide, and travels in time. The last is the strangest as it is a new power that comes out of nowhere, is then suggested to be the answer to everything, and then comes to nothing.
The plot, such that it is, doesn’t move much till the end. It is just “stuff happening.” With that stuff, the mythology of Phantasm gets switched around and any answers we’ve gotten the past are thrown out. The Tall Man is no longer an alien, a good guy is now a bad guy, Jody died in a car crash while his parents were still alive, and Mike’s alien side isn’t at all what it was implied to be in the last film. And Tim, one of the lead characters in that last film, is absent without comment. There could be multiple well considered reasons for all that, but I tend to think it is related to two of Coscarelli’s statements: First, that he’d run out of ideas after Lord of Death, and second, that he was only making another Phantasm film for the money.
Does all that make Phantasm IV weaker than its prequels? Not really. It is the same meaningless, flightless, surreal drug trip that any Phantasm fan should expect.
The ending is annoying, being even more open ended than in previous installments, but these films never left anyone with a sense of completion.
So, a fun, dumb, Saturday afternoon movie. But it didn’t do well among two groups: film critics and geek fanboys, and in this strange case, they’ve gotten the general population to go along with them. Critics were going to hate it. These kinds of exuberant destruction flicks tend not to have acting and dialog that deserves an Oscar. But that’s really beside the point; no matter what went up on screen, Godzilla was not going to get critical approval. Roger Ebert loathed it, but that was a given before he saw it. The characters of Mayor Ebert and his aid Gene are in the film because of the pair’s disdain for Independence Day and Stargate. Things have changed in the nearly twenty years since Godzilla came out, and newer critics are more likely to accept a giant monster or science fiction action flick, but not so then. And it shows in that most of those reviewers who despised Godzilla were, like Siskel and Ebert, equally negative toward all the works of the directing/writing/producing team of Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich. And that makes sense. Any criticism you can level against Godzilla goes double for Independence Day. Silly characters making some jokes in the midst of battle? Check. Pauses for triumphant shots or gratuitous destruction? Check. A lead actor not bothering to play his character? Double check. Devlin and Emmerich have a style that makes all their films a good time, and pretty much the same. If you don’t like Independence Day and Stargate, then yes, Godzilla isn’t for you as they are three of a kind.
