It's no secret that I love the Phantasm movies. It's one of the best series out there, regardless of genre. If you are unfamiliar with the Phantasm story, allow me to give you the short version of what is going on throughout the four movies. As a young boy, Michael learns of the secret evil plans of the Tall Man. These plans, of course, revolve around snatching all of our recently deceased friends and relatives from the cemetery and squashing them into dwarfs filled with goo in order to be shipped off to an alternate dimension so they can be used as slave labor. They need to be squashed on account of the "gravity" and the "heat." It's science. You wouldn't understand.
Michael enlists the help of his good buddy Reggie the ice cream vendor to fight the forces of evil. For four movies Mike and Reggie go toe to toe with the Tall Man and his minions while the line between nightmare and reality is constantly crossed and blurred. Will the Tall Man succeed in harvesting all of our world's dead or will a whiny kid grow up to be a saviour with a middle-aged, ponytailed warrior by his side? That's the basic gist. Very little gets explained directly. The ambiguity of what is "real" in the context of the movies and what is some nightmarish hallucination of Michael's is part of what makes these movies so fun. That and flying Christmas tree ornaments that plunk into your forehead and bore through your skull to suck out your blood. Trust me, these movies are great.
In the first movie, when we aren't witnessing strange sights through the eyes of Michael, like the Tall Man lifting the coffin of a family friend from the ground and into his hearse or cloaked midgets rustling in the cemetery at night, we catch interesting glimpses of a tranquility that we know is going to be destroyed when the Tall Man's plans are put into action. We get to learn little bits and pieces about the lives of these people. We get to see what they are going to be fighting for. Michael and Jody's parents are dead and potentially at the mercy of the Tall Man at the mausoleum. Michael is constantly worried about Jody taking off. And with good reason. He's probably taking off. We get a brief conversation with a friend (who, judging by his sweater, wasn't the closest of friends with cool 70s leather jacket Jody) that implies Jody was "on the road" seeing lots of action with his band. It's a little hazy, but I think with the scant evidence at hand we can assume that Jody, Reggie, and Tommy the mustachioed corpse from scene 1 who got stolen by the Tall Man were in a band together. Then Tommy had to go and get himself squashed into a midget full of nuclear custard. What a way to end a trio, indeed.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. The point I was trying to make was that even though there are so many cool things to like in these movies, you need to appreciate the little things too. I'm sure everybody loves seeing that random evil caretaker guy take a flying sphere to the cranium and then piss all over the floor after his brains have been liquefied. Who wouldn't? It's awesome. But I also really like those calm before the storm moments like when Reggie swings by the house to jam.
Reggie pulls up to the house in his ice cream truck with his guitar holstered on the side like a Smith & Wesson. He's wearing his uniform, sure. But he hops out of the truck, grabs his six string, and saunters up to the porch with music on his mind. He simultaneously says, "I mean business," but, "I also like to rock," without uttering a word. And I wonder how long Jody had been sitting there singing, "do do do doo" before Reggie showed up? This is part of what Mike and Reggie are fighting for throughout these movies: The freedom to just hang out on the porch jamming and wearing bad hats. This is reinforced in OblIVion when there is a dreamlike vision of another possible reality where Jody never had a car wreck. Mike, Reggie, and Jody are hanging out at the beach as the sun sets along with their hairlines and they are rocking out in slow motion. And more importantly, they're happy. In this brief glimpse we see a world where the Tall Man never was. A world much like the one this scene on the porch shows us. The scene of Reggie and Jody on the porch sums up what is best in life: freedom, friends, good music, good weather . . . and bow ties and ice cream.
So Reggie sits down and immediately starts riffing on the grooves Jody's laying down. They sound good, man. "Sittin' Here At Midnight" is pleasant and smooth. That is to say it's pleasant and smooth until about 54 seconds into the video when they both let out an, "UGH!" and the song gets a little edge to it. Man, Reggie seems to love this part. I get the feeling this was the part he came up with. If you pick up Phantasm on DVD it has a studio recording of this great song by Bill Thornbury, who played Jody. The rocking, edgy section of the song that made Reggie so happy is absent. I like to make up my own backstories to things like this so I just assume Reggie did indeed write that rocking, edgy part. And Thornbury secretly felt threatened. Could it be? Could Reggie rock harder than Jody? It's a good thing Tommy got wasted in the first scene because a few years down the line, right as their band was about to reach the pinnacle of their success, there probably would have been some internal power struggle and the band would have exploded, much to the chagrin of their female following.
Anyway, after they finish rocking out Reggie seems pretty satisfied and says, "We're hot as love." There are two ways to take this. Either that was some complimentary phrase from the seventies that never became popular enough to enter the common lexicon or, more likely, it was the name of their band. "We're Hot As Love." Can you imagine the festival crowds that would have turned out to see Reggie in his white suit and bow tie, Jody in his hat, and Tommy with his mustache playing in front of a huge banner the read: HOT AS LOVE? Damn you, the Tall Man, for robbing us all of this possible and probable sight.
Another reason this scene is cool, aside from the rocking, is that it isn't as random or pointless as it might seem on the surface. I've watched Phantasm with people countless times and most of those times, right as this scene ends, they say, "Tommy, what the Hell just happened and why are you making me watch this?" They usually say it with their eyes, but they say it nonetheless. As otherworldly and strange as the movie's soundtrack is, this song by two schmoes on the porch roots the story back into some kind of reality we can relate to. As I said before this scene lets us see part of what's at stake if the Tall Man wins but it also serves another purpose by giving us a piece to the Phantasm puzzle. At the end of the song a cocky and self-assure Reggie grabs his tuning fork. And we all know, or at least will know by the final few minutes of the movie, that the tuning fork is in some way the key to stopping the Tall Man. It's just as scientific as the "heat" and "gravity" so get off my case.
So bottom line, America: Don't let anybody take away your right to jam on the porch. Especially not some interdimensional asshole who wants to harvest our dead. Sadly, this probably isn't the last you'll hear from me on this subject. Sue me. I like to overanalyze things. And if there was ever a series of movies that was perfect for overanalysis, it was Phantasm. And I like Phantasm. Particularly when Reggie and Jody rock out on the porch.
