- Directed by David Hartman
- Written by Don Coscarelli, David Hartman
- Stars A. Michael Baldwin, Reggie Bannister, Dawn Cody
- Run Time: 1 Hour 25 Minutes
- Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0UQUDKjNr2U
Spoiler-Free Judgement Zone
It was made eighteen years after the previous film. It’s just been too long. The characters are all just too old for this stuff. The story is a confusing mess of time and dimensional jumping. But at least it does have The Tall Man, so that’s cool.
Synopsis
Reggie walks out of the desert, his ice-cream battle suit obviously showing a lot of wear. He gives a quick recap of everything that has happened. Reggie explains that he’s the only one left, but he obviously hasn’t given up. Credits roll.
As Reg walks past a demolished house, a corpse inside wakes up. Back to walking down the road, a guy stops and agrees to drive Reggie to town for $50. It turns out it’s Reggie’s car, and he wastes no time in taking it back. A pair of steel balls fly down the road. One kills the guy, and the other goes after Reggie’s car. Reg locks one in his glove compartment and tries to outrun the other one.
Then Reggie wakes up in a wheelchair in a nursing home. He’s being pushed by Mike. He looks really old now. Reg doesn’t know why he’s here, but Mike explains they found him wandering in the desert “like Moses.” Mike explains that Reggie has dementia.
Reggie tells the story again. Reg is in the desert looking for a sphere and the Tall Man. He picks up a girl on the side of the road. She’s dawn, and she needs a ride. He stays the night at her place, and she seems nice, but that never works for poor Reg. They finally get to sleep, and we see the Tall Man and a silver sentinel outside.
Reggie wakes up in the hospital, and the Tall Man is the patient in the bed next to him. Only he’s not, he’s Jebediah Morningside. The two have a conversation; Jeb says they brought them both here to die. “You’ll never be safe.”
Reg wakes up back at Dawn’s house. He goes upstairs to find a ball drilling into Dawn’s head. Reggie runs out to the car and loads up every weapon in existence into his bag. He runs into Demeter, Dawn’s farmhand, who doesn’t speak English. The two men battle spheres in the barn.
Back in the present, Mike and Reg talk about the possibilities that one could be in two dimensions at once. This world is fine, but maybe Reggie has been traveling to another dimension with the Tall Man.
Back in the past, Reggie sees a huge silver sphere in the sky. He also finds a portal. Suddenly, he’s back with Mike in the wheelchair. Maybe he is shifting between realities. Mike suddenly isn’t there, but he does hear a familiar humming noise which leads him to another portal.
Both versions of Reggie go through the portal. The Tall Man is there. “Our paths cross again.” He has a plan to make everything better, but Reggie has to stay out of his way. Reggie can even have his family back.
Reggie finds himself in another mausoleum; there’s at least one dwarf running around too. He kills the dwarf eventually, but then finds himself on the Tall Man’s homeworld. Reggie demands Mike and Jody be returned, but the Tall Man won’t cooperate. “You’re not even real; you’re my bad dream” says the Tall Man.
Reg is rescued by Jane, who looks exactly like Dawn and Chunk, a non-evil little person. Chunk soon saves Reg from an undead dwarf. Chunk takes him to see Mike. Mike explains that Reg has been on ice for the past decade. “Nothing is the same.”
They open a door, and Reg sees the Earth burning, with spheres, both large and small roaming the streets, killing humans wherever they find them. This is now the Tall Man’s world.
Back in the nursing home, Reg spots an old man with a walker. It’s the Tall Man, sort of. He’s slipping between worlds much faster now. Mike comes to see him, and now he’s having those strange dreams. We get flashbacks of giant spheres laser-blasting buildings and alien viruses being released on Earth. The world basically ended, but they’re still trying to fight the Tall Man.
The Tall Man exists in huge numbers, in more dimensions than they can imagine. He looks essentially invincible. There’s another battle or six, and they’re picked up by Jody in the muscle car.
Then we move to the hospital again, where Reggie dies. In the battleworld, however, he still fights on.
Commentary
Time has caught up with all of the cast. It was eighteen years between Phantasm 4 and 5. Reggie Bannister was 71 when this was filmed, and Angus Scrimm was 89 and died the year this was released. Let’s just say they both looked mighty natural in those hospital beds.
Still, it’s Reggie vs. the Tall Man, and we got to see all the actors for one final sendoff, which was nice. Unfortunately, that’s about all that I can say good about this one. The lower budget and super-ambitious plot means it relies heavily on CGI, which isn’t very good. All the time jumping is more disorienting for us than it was for Reggie.
It’s one film too far. I like the ideas presented here, but everyone was just too old, and nothing really looked right because of it. It was partly filmed in 2008 with Reggie fighting stuff, and then more in 2014 with old man Reg and Mike in the nursing home. It jumps all over time and space, and it’s pretty disjointed because of it. It does offer an ending that’s just way over the top, but at least it is an ending.
The after credit scene implies that there could be more, but I suspect there almost certainly won’t be.