Wimp + "Phantasm"

I can't believe I wrote all that emo stuff last night about my personal life. It probably makes me sound like a big wimp, but so be it. What is written is written. Sometimes I get off on a tangent and get carried away, and I guess I am pretty emo, truth be told. It's just that, unlike guys who are in Emo Bands, I am outwardly stoic. You won't see me joining Weezer anytime soon. But on the inside, I am emo, or to be more specific, I am a romantic. I think, and hope, in idealised terms.

But anyway, just so we are clear : Marine Corps on the outside, hearts and flowers on the inside. That's me. Sorta.

Monsoon weather is back, just in time for the start of August, which is really when our Summer begins in Ernest. Not earnest - Ernest. Today we had 75% humidity to go with the 102 degree temperature, so it was good hiking weather. I went up to O'Melveny for an hour's trip down the trail and back.

Last night I watched "Phantasm 2", which I had seen once before when it was released in 1988. I found it at Porter Ranch Libe, where I had stopped before yesterday's hike at Limekiln. Horror fans know the original "Phantasm", which came out in 1979, to be a fairly original entry in the genre of that era, which mostly consisted of Slasher films. "Phantasm" was instead about a really creepy and supernatural Mortician called "The Tall Man", who went around digging up graveyards in order to enslave the Dead. A weird premise indeed. And he had at his disposal these shiny silver spheres, which he would send swiftly through the air toward anyone challenging him. The spheres had tiny saws inside, which would work their way through various parts of bodies, usually skulls.

What made the "Phantasm" movies so much fun was that they had a couple of Regular Dudes as their protagonists, one of whom was a kid (who was the first one to see The Tall Man, in dreams), and the other an older guy in his 30s who drove an Ice Cream truck.

I mean, who would think of all of these obscure details, right? So that's why these movies were so entertaining. The 80s was the decade of Teenager Horror, of teens getting butchered by wackos and psychos of all stripes, usually at parties or camp-outs or sleepovers. As opposed to classic horror from the 30s through the 50s, when the Hero Protagonists all wore suits and fancy dresses, the teenagers of 80s horror wore street clothes, the same jeans, t-shirts and Reeboks that the kids in the audience were wearing. So I guess the inference was that the audience would identify with the victims. I never did, and I think the same is true of a lot of horror fans. We always wondered why these particular teens, in any given movie, never ran away from the scene. They always went back for more, even when it was clear that the Psycho who was after them was Superhuman......

I think that, for me, Horror Movies from the 1980s were a lot like Metal Bands in the 80s.

I was never a fan of either genre overall, didn't simply "love" all Metal, just because it was Metal, nor did I love all Horror. And it's funny, looking back, how important Metal and Horror were at the time (and still are, doggonitt!). But to get back to the point, I didn't "love" Metal; I loved a few bands, and that is because those bands wrote and played good music.

Same with movies.

For myself, with Horror, I always went for the Extreme. This began with "The Exorcist" when I was 13. And it continued with "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" and the original "Hills Have Eyes" a few years later. Those three movies are The Pinnacle Of Horror as far as I am concerned, because they seem real.

There were other realistic horror films in the 70s, like "Don't Answer The Phone", and a few more that were low-budget and somewhat cheesy, though no less terrifying. My friends and I went to every one.

That was in the late 70s, and as Horror progressed into the 80s, it became much more teen-and-party oriented, more fantasy and less realistic.

But it was still a blast, and I had fun re-watching "Phantasm 2" for the first time in almost 30 years. So much so, that I went and searched the library database to see if they had the original "Phantasm"...

And they did! So I ordered it, and will be watching soon.  /////