The Evil Dead

“The Evil Dead” fires up in a really tiny, lake-like area, and it features a point-of-view shot that we’ll come to recognize as being the “evil” in the title of the movie.

Only… the evil hasn’t been invoked yet. We’re still twenty minutes worth of exposition away from the evil being invoked. So what are we watching, exactly? It’s like the opening of the movie is some dude’s home video of his pathetic fishing trip.

Then we cut over to our heroes – five college students (or college-age students, anyway) on a trip together to a cabin in the woods. For some reason. Spring break? On the run from the law after a five-state murder/robbery spree? Let’s pretend it’s the latter. That way we can root for the so-called evil! Hoorah!

I can’t say we learn a whole lot about the five so-called heroes, outside of their lust for death, destruction, and filthy lucre. We do learn right away that Ash is terrible at reading maps, and right after we get to learn that Scotty is a terrible driver. He claims that the steering wheel “jerked right out of my hands,” when he almost sends the car careening into a head-on collision.

This is, of course, man-speak for “I was taking a swig from the jar of moonshine I’m holding, and I was too busy getting my drink on to notice oncoming traffic.”

The kids confer with one another, and we add to our trip knowledge database. We learn that no one has seen the cabin they’re headed to, and that they got the cabin cheap.

They head off the main road and onto what looks like little more than a deer trail, and cross a bridge that actually has a sign labeling it “dangerous.” We are not, I fear, working with criminal masterminds.

No matter. Despite some shattered boards, the car makes it across the bridge okay, while some dude who probably wasn’t supposed to be in the shot looks on in the background. Way to insert yourself into a horror classic, sir.

They drive the car up to the cabin, and Scotty walks up to the creepy place while everyone else looks on. It’s clear that Scotty is well-liked in this group. Ten bucks says that if the food runs out, they eat him first.

Scotty locates the keys, which are cleverly hidden on top of the door frame. The owner, I guess, does not fear squatters.

Scotty goes in and takes a long look around, because the movie was made on a tiny budget and they need to kill some time before they start spending money on homemade blood.

Outside, the rest of the crew unloads the car. The highlight of this is when Ash’s own girlfriend throws a bag directly into his stomach and/or groin. Clearly, she’s hoping a little below-the-belt injury will occur. Ash will not be getting any adult relations tonight.

Scotty does a quick walkthrough of the work shed. I’m guessing he has special weekend plans for his lady-friend.

Later that night, one of the girls sits and does some sketching. After a few moments, the clock in front of her stops, a voice outside says “Join us,” and her drawing hand is possessed. It draws what looks like a somewhat evil book.

A moment later, the trapdoor in the floor starts bouncing.

A smart person would tell her friends that something creepy is going on. Alas, she is but one of a group of criminal non-masterminds, and there is nowhere else for them to run. So she figures, you know, why make anyone else worry?

The group proceeds to have dinner, which is interrupted by the door in the cellar popping open. Theories are offered, and finally Scotty is sent down the hole. To be eaten first. You can tell they love this guy.

After a minute passes and they don’t hear anything, Ash calls to Scotty. Only Scotty doesn’t answer. So Ash goes after him. So much for the feminist movement with this crowd.

Ash wanders around the basement until Scotty runs out and yells boo. Scotty follows up this hilarious joke with, “Come on, I want to show you something.” Really Scotty? In the dark basement, with the ladies upstairs? Couldn’t you have picked a better time to reveal your love-which-dare-not-speak-its-name?

Scotty takes Ash to a table, where they find a shotgun, a creepy-looking dagger, and a reel-to-reel tape player that will be replaced by an iPod in the eventual remake. Scotty, always to prankster, points the gun at Ash and says, “I bet this still shoots.”

So you see, making fun of my killers on the lam theory just proves that you’re ignorant. These people are three slices of bacon short of a complete breakfast.

Oh, and they find The Book of the Dead, which has a bunch of creepy drawings in it.

A short while later, everyone gathers around the tape recorder to hear what’s on it, while Scotty first makes fun of someone and says that everyone hates that guy, and then when one of the girls says, “Like you!” he replies, “I’m gonna break your face.”

Something tells me Scotty used to make neighborhood kids lick steel poles in the dead of winter when he was a kid.

They listen to the tape, which starts with an explanation that a) reading from the book will raise the dead, and b) that evil demon-like beings are never truly dead. I guess “The Evil Semi-Living” doesn’t have much of a ring to it.

The tape plays, incantations are read aloud, creepy lights appear outside, Cheryl freaks and a branch breaks a window. So much for a cheap vacation – that window is gonna cost someone some scratch.

Ash and Linda decide to “stay up and listen to the storm,” only Linda exits to check on Cheryl, and Ash feigns sleep while holding a box. Linda tries to take the box from a “sleeping” Ash, and we learn that Ash has no problem with tricking his lady into stealing from him, and Linda has no problem stealing from him.

Criminal non-masterminds, folks.

Ash “wakes up,” the box is opened, and we learn that Ash has gotten a necklace for Linda that looks just like a magnifying glass. Linda notes that she’ll “never take it off,” but does not add that this is because she intends to use it as a centerpiece of mockery when she talks to her girlfriends later.

Now we know why she was so eager to give him a groin injury earlier.

Outside, we get the evil point of view, which watches Linda and Ash, then Scotty and Shelly, and finally settles on Cheryl, to whom it says, “Join us.”

Cheryl, who got a lot of ribbons that said, “Participant” as a child, heads into the woods to investigate the noise. This ends badly, with the woods, um… yikes… let’s go with “brutalizing” Cheryl in a most unpleasant way.

Cheryl gets free and runs back to the cabin, where after some crazy babbling she convinces Ash to take her into town. Only the bridge has been ripped up by the evil force. Or by that dude who was in the background earlier.

Either way, Cheryl freaks right out. But she’s had a bad night, so you can sympathize.

Back at the cabin, Ash slaps on some headphones and listens to the rest of the tape, and learns that the only way to stop the demons is through the act of bodily dismemberment. Luckily, his soul is as dark as a moonless night, and he’s just crossing his fingers that Scotty is taken first.

Because, of course, Linda gave him a groin injury, and Cheryl is his sister. So the only way to really make this whole trip worth his time is if Shelly is in need of a little comforting.

Speaking of Shelly, she and Linda are playing a game of “guess which card I’m holding up,” because comforting a woods-molested Cheryl just isn’t worth their time. Cheryl suddenly starts guessing the cards, and getting them all correct, which seems awesome until she turns out and everyone notices that she’s possessed.

The possessed Cheryl asks why “they” have been “awakened from their ancient slumber,” so maybe it’s not that the evil is all that evil, but rather they’re just kind of cranky about getting up so late at night.

Though I don’t suppose that “The Somewhat-Sleepy Semi-Living” would make for much of a title either.

Anyway, Cheryl falls to the floor, her so-called “friends” go to investigate, and she stabs Linda in the ankle with a pencil.

Then she throws Ash into a bookshelf, which falls on top of him.

Scotty pushed Cheryl into the cellar the cellar door with a conveniently-placed chain and lock that just happen to be sitting there when he needs them most.

Linda goes to lie down, and Ash, Scotty, and Shelly sit around and debate what to do. This ends when Shelly goes into another room and the evil pulls her through the window.

Scotty goes to investigate and finds that his girlfriend is missing. So instead of calling Ash into the room and going to find the shotgun, he instead opts to wander around the room looking for her.

Scotty has a few “Participant” ribbons himself.

Eventually a Shelly with a sever case of possession grabs Scotty, and tussling occurs. Scotty pushes Shelly over, and she falls into the fire. He pulls her out, because he is an idiot, and she attacks him again.

Ash attempts to help, only he’s thrown into a bookshelf. Again.

Shelly picks up the creepy knife from earlier and tries to stab Scotty with it, and Scotty fights back with a knife of his own, slicing into Shelly’s wrist.

Shelly then decides to bite off her own hand, to prove that she’s, like, a demon, and totally hardcore.

Scotty then picks up the evil hand with the evil knife in it, and stabs Shelly in the back. Because that’s what Scotty does.

A brief thought: Five people enter a cabin. Three of them are women, all of who seem kind of nice. Two of them are men, one of which is a total jerkface and the other of which has been, to date, thrown into two bookshelves and received a groin attack from his own significant other.

Meanwhile, two of the ladies are possessed by evil, and the third has dying of lead poisoning. Sorry. Graphite poisoning.

I ask you. What kind of message does this send to the youth of America?

Shelly, by the way, dies. And then of course, we learn that she didn’t really die, because she gets up and attacks Scotty again. So Scotty takes an axe and chops her into pieces.

Of course, given what we know of Scotty, this isn’t the first time one of his relationships ended this way.

Scotty decides it would be a good idea to bury Shelly, even though it’s still dark out, the woods are still evil, and Shelly’s bits and pieces are still flopping on the floor. Ash counters with, “We can’t bury Shelly, she’s a friend of ours.”

Which makes it sound as if, generally, Ash has his close friends stuffed on the occasion of their passing.

His collection of stuffed dead friends and relatives is, I’m sure, just one of many reasons that this small band of criminals is on the run, forced to hide out in a cheap cabin deep in the mountains.

(If you think I’m going to give up on that joke soon, you, sir or madam, are wrong.)

Scotty and Ash bury Shelly, and Scotty says he’s going to head out into the woods to look for a way out. Dude has a serious death wish. As a parting shot, he notes that Ash’s girlfriend is Ash’s problem.

Everyone, say it with me. “Woods! Woods! Woods! Woods!”

Ash goes to check on Linda, and to no one’s surprised, she’s possessed.

Ash runs away from her, having realized that a whack to the jimmies might soon be the nicest thing Linda will do to him now

He gets jumped by Scott at the front door.

Scott is torn up badly, having been attacked by the forest. He starts to panic, and then passes out. Ash slaps him awake. And the audience cheers, because Scotty’s been needing a slap for a while now.

Meanwhile, a possessed Linda starts taunting Ash. He slaps her across the face a few times, and then points the shotgun at her. Only she “wakes up,” and runs to him.

At that moment, Cheryl’s voice calls from the cellar, saying she’s all right. Ash goes to unlock her, and her still-possessed arms shoot up through the floor, attacking him.

He breaks free of Cheryl’s grasp, and sees that Linda is full-on possessed again. So he drags her outside. It is doubtful that this will prove an effective method of solving his problems.

Back inside, Ash tries to make Scotty drink some water, only Scotty dies. Ash gets up and goes to the window, I guess looking for something to stuff Scotty with, when Linda appears out of nowhere and stabs him with the evil knife.

She does not stab him in the groin, which he probably views as an improvement to their day-to-day relationship.

Linda and Ash tussle, and finally Ash stabs her in the back, and then takes her out into the tool shed to chop her up with a chainsaw. Only he can’t do it, because he’d much rather see her stuffed and mounted.

Only he forgot his tools at home, so he decides to bury her instead. Of course, she’s only semi-dead, so she crawls out of her grave and attacks him. He fights back, cutting off her head with a shovel. This does not prevent her from shrieking.

Ash goes back into the house, where he notes that the cellar door is now open, and Cheryl is missing.

He picks up the shotgun and goes to look for her. Apparently, he is capable of learning.

Cheryl, it seems, it outside. She attacks Ash when he walks too near a window, and he reacts by fighting her off and closing the doors to the cabin. Then he heads down into the cellar in search of shotgun shells.

He does locate them, after various things bleed on him, including the walls, some pipes, and the inside of a light bulb.

Ash reloads the shotgun and heads upstairs, skulking through the house as his paranoia builds. “Why,” he wonders, “did I ever begin my life of crime? I should have known it would end with my friends dead, and me trapped in a deserted cabin in the woods, surrounded by evil semi-sleepy beings from beyond the near-grave.”

Eventually he flips out and shoots and innocent window.

He then leans against an outside door, which allows the evil creature behind it to punch through the door and grab at Ash’s face.

Ash escapes and shoves something not-very-heavy in front of the door, which might protect him for minutes on end. Unfortunately for him, the now-possessed Scotty sits up on the floor.

Ash and Scotty fight, and Ash punches through Scotty’s eyeballs with his thumbs. Then Ash pulls a branch out of Scotty’s thigh, causing Scotty to bleed out on the floor.

But, of course, Scotty is technically already dead, so this doesn’t have much of an effect.

Cheryl punches through the door, and Ash is grabbed by Scotty. Ash falls to the floor, having noted that Scotty has started to smoke – because the Book of the Dead has fallen partially into the fire, and tiny flames are licking up from one of its edges.

Despite the fact that it looks like it would be the easiest thing in the world for Ash to stand up, grab the book, and toss it in the fire, for the sake of suspense we must watch him attempt to lasso the book using the magnifying glass on a chain that he gave his man-bits-hitting-woman-friend earlier in the picture.

Ash accomplishes this while Scotty yanks on his ankle and Cheryl picks up a fire poker and hits him with it.

Ash throws The Book of the Dead into the fire, and Cheryl and Scotty melt into somewhat-tired not-quite-dead goo.

Ash sees that the sun has come out, and he picks up his buddy the necklace and walks outside. Only an evil point-of-view shot comes running down a hill and through the back door of the cabin and out the front door of the cabin, and straight into Ash.

Who of course dies, so there will never be a sequel.

The Request Lines Are Open

All right folks - what do you want to see? I've got The Evil Dead trilogy on tap, and a few ideas for after that, but I'm taking requests.

The rules:

Has to be horror.
There have to be at least three of them.
I have to be able to get my hands on all the parts of a series, in order. This is more my problem than your problem, but trust me... there is just no way to get my hands on every part of The Howling.

Phantasm: Oblivion

“Phantasm: Oblivion,” it should be noted, makes prominent use of the IV in the word oblivion. So that you know it’s part IV of a series.

I keep thinking this is sort of awesome, and that more sequels should do this, and then I remember that there are no words that have the letter i in them three times in a row.

“Phantasm: Sorry We Left You Hanging At the End of the Last Movie” starts off with a montage of bits and pieces of the previous three films, which mostly tells you that there were some people that some events happened to, and that they were often rather violent.

Then Reggie pipes up with a voiceover and tries to explain the plot of the three previous movies in a succinct manner. Among the things he points out – “Jody was taken from us, turned by The Tall Man into an alien form.”

Because I guess “turned by The Tall Man into a little silver ball” would sound silly.

He goes on to say about Mike, “The Tall Man wants to transform him into one of his kind.”

Which doesn’t seem to be what The Tall Man wants at all. The Tall Man actually seems to want Mike to remember that he is already like The Tall Man. Or at least that Mike has a giant ball inside his head.

But I think it’s fair to say that we’ve already established that Reggie is kind of an idiot. So I guess we’re just lucky he doesn’t mention that he used to sell ice cream… no, wait, sorry, my mistake. He brings that up as well.

Roughly five minutes into the movie, we finally get back to where part III drew to a close, with Reggie pinned to the wall by a bunch of spheres. The Tall Man nods the balls away, informing Reggie that “…the final game now begins.”

I was sort of hoping the final game would be a best of three matchup of Chinese Checkers, but instead it appears to be the same thing that happened in the last two movies. The Tall Man goes off somewhere, and Reggie and Mike go looking for him.

Only in this case, Mike is driving around in a hearse that he got from somewhere, and Reggie is a few hundred miles behind him, trying to catch up.

This goes on until Mike has a flashback to the first movie, only it’s not actually a scene that was in the first movie. I suspect that “Phantasm IV” may be the first and only film to take a bunch of scenes that were deleted from an earlier part in a series and use them in a later part.

This happens a LOT in the movie – bits and pieces of story that weren’t important enough for “Phantasm” are apparently good enough for part IV, since your expectations have been lowered.

So whereas the first five minutes of IV are flashbacks to things that happened in parts I, II, and III, almost everything after this point is a flashback to something we haven’t seen before.

Anyway, the first lost scene involves Mike running up behind Reggie’s ice cream truck, jumping onto the back, and stealing some ice cream.

This is followed by another scene that involves Michael and Jody driving down a long empty stretch of highway. They pass a boy and his dog.

Then a hearse, driven by The Tall Man, comes from the other direction and runs over the dog.

Which begs the question: It’s strongly implied that these are Mike’s memories, so how, exactly, is Mike remembering that?

Back in the present, Mike looks in the back of the hearse using the rearview mirror, and sees someone there. Only they vanish. And appear on the seat next to him.

It’s the psychic grandma! I think.

Back at the mausoleum, Reggie has somehow found tires and repaired his car. Continuity! Yes!

He gets in his vehicle and gets ready to drive away, only Jody is sitting on the back seat. So everyone gets out of the car and they have a long conversation about what to do next.

Back in the hearse Michael is driving, Michael looks at his rearview mirror again and sees The Tall Man. He tries to hit the brakes, only they don’t work, as the car is now piloting itself.

They drive by a state trooper.

The Tall Man says a bunch of creepy stuff and then dives into a coffin in the back and vanishes.

The hearse drives by a sign that says “Death Valley 54.”

Which I’m guessing means it’s 54 miles away, not that it’s the 54th Death Valley. But you never know. The “Phantasm” movies love to mess with your head that way.

So it’s back to Reggie, who managed to get pulled over by the state trooper we saw just a short while ago. He gets asked for his license and registration, and then he sits and waits while the cop walks back to his car and checks out Reggie’s information.

At least until Reggie gets bored and decides to go find out what’s taking the cop so long. Only it turns out that the cop isn’t in his car. Okay, he is, but he’s been cut into bits and pieces and stuffed in the trunk, and now Reggie gets to fight a zombie cop.

There’s some running, and fighting, and Reggie shoots the cop twice with a shotgun, but it doesn’t kill him. So he pins the zombie cop into the back seat of the cop car with a nightstick, and then jams a flare into the gas tank.

It’s time for that Phantasm staple – the exploding car.

The car explodes, the zombie walks out of it while on fire, and then collapses.

Back in the hearse, Michael wakes up to find that the hearse is dead and smoking in Death Valley. He gets out of the hearse and wanders around for a bit, noting dwarves as they race about the dessert.

Finally, he goes back to the hearse, and opens the coffin, where he finds The Tall Man’s suit, but no Tall Man. So he gets into the back of the vehicle and starts writing his last will and testament, which is mostly testament as it is actually written as a letter to Reggie.

Then Mike falls asleep and dreams about The Tall Man cutting open his head. This is followed by another dream, in black and white, wherein Michael is in a tent during what appears to be the Civil War. The Tall Man is there, embalming him through his nose.

I’ve mostly avoided interpreting the dreams in this series, but honestly, this is a cry for help of the first order. It’s clear Michael has developed a nose candy habit.

Michael wakes up.

He gets out of the hearse and notes that one of those gates sitting in the middle of the dessert.

We leave these exciting developments so that we can see Reggie leaving a rest area, where he sees a girl who he does not interact with. So all we really learn here is that Reggie still has a bladder.

Mike attempts to hang himself in the desert, using a rope that I guess he must have created using threads from The Tall Man’s suit, because I swear he didn’t have rope up until this point.

This kind of works, and it means we get another deleted scene flashback, wherein Mike and Jody attempt to catch and hang The Tall Man. This works great, as they do manage to hang him. Only he doesn’t die. Which should surprise no one, because if he did, it would mean this series would have ended three movies ago.

Lil’ Mike confronts the hanging Tall Man, who demands to be cut down. “But you’re killing the world!” Mike replies, even though at that point The Tall Man has killed maybe four people that Mike knows about.

“I’ll go away, and I won’t ever come back,” says The Tall Man, which actually is true. He did go away. It’s just that Reggie and Mike keep chasing him.

I mean, he may traffic in the undead, but the man doesn’t lie. So he’s not all bad.

Back in the present Mike’s rope breaks, and The Tall Man says some more creepy stuff that basically amounts to, “If you could kill yourself, this series would have been over a long time ago, dude.”

He actually says, “I’ve been waiting for you for a very long time.”

This prompts Mike to walk through the gate in the desert.

Mike comes out from a rather antique-looking gate, which looks like something out of an old Universal monster movie. He goes outside, where he encounters someone who looks just like The Tall Man – only his name is Jebediah Morningside. Remember how this all started at Morningside funeral home? Sure you do!

Jebediah Morningside says, “Did you come through my dimension fork?” Which I guess scares the bejabbers out of Mike, because he runs away, goes back to the “fork,” turns it on and leaves.

Oh, and psychic grandma was on the porch again. It must mean something. But your guess is as good as mine as to what it is.

I mean, both times we’ve seen her, she’s been old and sitting. Which means… old people like to sit? And can sit for a long time?

Moving on.

Reggie catches up to the girl he saw earlier, and he goes to pass her on the empty highway. Only she sees a turtle, freaks out, and flips her car.

Reggie saves her. Then the car explodes. Who saw THAT coming?

Mike, meanwhile, is sitting in the desert. He sees a scorpion. So he uses the power of his mind to crush it with a rock.

Then he spots a dwarf, and uses the power of his mind to crush it with a rock.

Then he sees the people who caused a major financial breakdown in the United States… No, sorry. Just a little attempt at levity there.

Actually, what he does is go to the hearse and start playing around with the engine. Jody appears, and Mike tells Jody that Jody can’t be trusted.

Michael also cracks open the glove box of the hearse and finds the knife that he used to free The Tall Man from his hangin’ tree.

Jody explains that he didn’t abandon Mike – he was taken.

Mike uses this particular moment of brotherly revelation to go look over at the desert again, where hundreds of gates are now sitting and humming away.

Later that same night, Reggie and the girl, who is named Jennifer, stop at an abandoned motel, break into it, and proceed to set up camp for the night.

Michael, meanwhile, is sitting by a campfire. He looks over at the hearse’s engine, and a little homemade ball jumps out of it and looks around.

Back at the motel, Reggie and Jennifer prepare for bed. Or rather, Jennifer gets ready for bed while Reggie recaps the last three movies. Jennifer doesn’t believe a word Reggie is saying, which must mean she’s an idiot, since we’ve already watched Reggie and Jennifer discuss the fact that everywhere they go is a ghost town.

Reggie falls asleep, and “wakes up” in what looks like the world’s fakest graveyard, complete with plywood headstones. His dream ends with Michael looming over him in The Tall Man’s suit.

Reggie wakes up, and notes that a) Jennifer is still asleep, and b) her chest is rising and falling in a somewhat unnatural manner. So he unbuttons her shirt.

This proves to be a poor choice, as two silver balls have taken the place you’d figure two silver balls would on a lady-person.

They fly out and attack Reggie, and he fights back, smashing one with a sledgehammer, and stopping the other by catching the ball in his hand. Which the ball then proceeds to drill.

He finally stops the ball completely by hitting his tuning fork, which he happens to be carrying around. This causes the ball to explode, like a car in a Phantasm movie.

Oh yeah. And he kills the zombie Jennifer with a sledgehammer.

Back at the hearse, Mike writes to Reggie about going back in time and stopping The Tall Man before he can, I dunno, become The Tall Man. In other words, he’s about the use the old, “If you could go back in time and kill Hitler as a kid…” trick.

So Michael walks through a gate, which brings him to a very empty-looking city which is probably L.A. He notes that The Tall Man is there, and stalking him, and also that Jody is there. Jody says, “We can’t stay here, there’s a risk of infection.”

In a movie filled with “Wha?” moments, this one is the “Wha?”-est.

Back in the middle of nowhere, Reggie is driving along the highway again, when he sees a sign that says Funeral MTNS.

Shortly thereafter, he’s out of his car, loading up his four-barreled shotgun, and putting on his ice cream vendor outfit. You think I’m kidding? Heck, no. Dude is rocking the ice cream outfit. I’m guessing his plan is to make The Tall Man laugh himself to death.

Reggie walks down to the hearse, and spends a whooole lot of time wandering around it. He finds Michae’s ball made of car parts, and kills a bunch of dwarves.

Concurrent with this, Jody and Michael have left the city and walked through a gate that lets them stand around on a beach, until right after Reggie kills all those dwarves. Then they walk through the gate on the beach and step out by Reggie.

Mike tells Reggie not to trust Jody, and Reggie hands Mike his turning fork.

Jody leads Mike back through the gate, and they end up in Jebediah Morningside’s room the night he figures out how to operate his gate-which-is-kind-of-not-a-gate. Michael tries to stab him to death before Jebediah Morningside can step through the gate, only Jody patiently explains that they’re in some other dimension.

So Jebediah Morningside steps into the gate, and The Tall Man steps out. And sees Michael. So much for that other dimension thing.

Michael walks through a dimension gate, and arrives in a graveyard. Jody also appears in the graveyard, and attacks Michael.

Michael stabs and kills Jody.

He then walks away from Jody, only to be attacked by another Jody.

This ends with Michael in a mausoleum, strapped down to a table. Jody is holding him down. Jody is the worst undead brother ever.

The Tall Man arrives, and cuts into Michael’s head with a saw ball. So Michael pulls out Reggie’s tuning fork and hits it. This causes everything to kind of slow down, and Michael grabs the saw ball and jams it into Jody’s head.

This ends with Jody dying on the floor, stating, “I died in the car wreck.” Which hopefully means he’s really, really, really dead now, and not just semi-dead.

The Tall Man is suddenly able to move again, and he takes away Reggie’s tuning fork using his mystical Jedi powers.

Michael runs through the gate and ends up back on the beach with Reggie. Reggie tells Michael to get behind him, because he clearly knows what he’s doing. Or at least he knows how to put on an ice cream vendor’s outfit.

Seriously. Reggie has lost his mind. I have no idea why Michael just doesn’t run the other way when he sees the ice cream man clothing.

The Tall Man walks through the gate, grabs Reggie, and says, “Ice cream man, it’s all in his head.” Honestly, I’m looking at Reggie and thinking I want a creamsicle. Who’s with me?

Michael’s car parts ball suddenly pops up, reveals some blades, and flies toward The Tall Man and into his head. The Tall Man plucks it out and says, “A toy.”

And then Michaels’ eyes go silver, and the hearse (are you ready for this?) (no, really…) blows up.

The Tall Man is next to the car, and he is engulfed in flames. I’m sure this will work out. The cold was not the answer. No. It was actually fire that The Tall Man was afraid of.

Or not.

The Tall Man walks out of a nearby gate, thereby proving once again that killing the guy is really tricky. He walks over to Mike and pulls the ball out of his head, and then walks back through the gate.

Reggie tells Mike, who is still alive despite what should be a very large empty place in his head, that he’ll be right back. Then he grabs the four-barrel and heads through the gate.

And with that, we get one final flashback to Reggie and Mike back in the day. As they sit in Reggie’s ice cream truck, older Michael says, in voiceover, “I’m dying, Reg.”

Reg of the past says, “Did you hear something?”

And Michael of the past says, “Just the wind.” He does not mention that the wind he hears is the breeze passing through the hole in the head of his future self.

And we roll credits on the series, complete with Reggie singing a song about The Tall Man over the credits.

Oh yes, I am quite serious.

Phantasm III

Whereas “Phantasm II” picked up ten years after the first “Phantasm,” III begins mere moments after II ends.

This is somewhat hilarious, because this time around no one was under any pressure to bring in a big star. So they brought back the original Michael.

This means that the opening of III has to be very, very, very carefully shot and edited, because among other things, they didn’t bring Liz back to re-shoot scenes with Michael. So we never get to see the two of them together.

The movie fires up with The Tall Man sitting in a chair holding one those silver ball things. And believe you me, you’re going to learn so much about those little balls that you just will be totally sick of the word ball by the time you reach the end of this. I suppose I could alternate the word ball with the word sphere, but that isn’t going to help. Trust me.

So feel free to substitute the word ball with another word when you read it. Any random word. Chipotle. Hamdinger. Tortoise. Stapler. Whatever suits you. Really. It’s okay.

But I was talking about The Tall Man. He’s sitting there, looking at his ball (chipotle!) and we get some voiceover, but thankfully there’s just a little bit to catch people up who decided to go see “Phantasm III” but to skip parts one and two, because who has the time to follow a story logically?

Then we get a flashback to the end of I, followed by a flashback to the end of II with that careful editing I talked about. This flashback includes the bits where The Tall Man gets hydrochloric acid pumped through his body, but it adds a bit where The Tall Man’s corpse is lying on the floor, and The Tall Man steps out of that freaky gate, picks up his own withered corpse, and throws it back through the gate.

Which once again proves that while the dude is really neat and tidy, he just wastes so much time cleaning up messes that don’t really need cleaning. Perhaps he’s not so much evil as he is suffering from Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. You could see where he’d be grouchy.

I mean honestly, what’s so bad about bringing the dead back to life? He’s recycling, right? Trying to be Green?

Right. Back to the plot.

The Tall Man attacks the hearse at the end of film number two, only this time it has Classic Michael in it. The hearse crashes (there are a lot of crashes in these movies) and Liz dies. Or rather, her head is separated from the rest of her body. Because a kind of fake-looking plastic head is cheaper than re-hiring an actress.

Reggie, as it turns out, is not dead. It’s just a flesh wound. Or something. He runs over to the crashed hearse, and tries to revive Michael. And also, he shoots a bunch of dwarves out of a tree with a four-barrel shotgun.

At which point, dwarves surround the two of them, and The Tall Man steps out of the shadows.

Reggie pulls out a grenade, to which The Tall Man replies: “I don’t want him in pieces.” This makes no sense whatsoever, since The Tall Man just subjected Michael to a massive hearse crash that ended with Liz in at least two and possibly more parts.

Either way, The Tall Man and his Short Buddies all leave, and Reggie takes Michael to the doctor, where Michael lies in bed and appears to be in some kind of coma.

So the movie cuts back to The Tall Man, because watching a dude in a coma is pretty boring, and we get to see a ball open up, and we learn that they have tiny brains inside them. As in, an actual tiny little brain. The Tall Man stroke’s the ball’s brain, and then we’re back with Michael.

Michael appears to be dreaming, and nurse comes into his room and tells him that he should go towards the light. I guess because she figures that if Michael dies, she can knock off early for the day and let a dude from the morgue take care of him.

Michael, meanwhile, is walking into the light, where he encounters Jody, who has aged about ten years. Which is interesting, because I can’t think of a system of belief that states that after we die, we continue to age. One imagines people dead for thousands of years, sitting in the afterlife, having young dead people spooning mush into their mouths because they have no teeth and can barely move their jaws due to ever-worsening arthritis. Talk about your horror movies.

Jody tells Michael not to go towards the light, and Michael wakes up in his hospital bed. Unfortunately, the nurse has turned into an evil-possessed hag who is going to try to kill him. One assumes this has something to do with The Tall Man, so I guess it’s okay if Michael dies, as long as he’s not dismembered.

Michael fights back and stabs the nurse, and Reggie walks in just in time for the nurse to fall on top of him and bleed yellow all over him.

Then a ball {stapler!) pops out of the top of her head, and floats over to Michael’s bed. An eyeball pops out of it, takes a look at Michael, and flies off. Reggie decides that now would be a good time to leave.

They go to Reggie’s house and start gearing up, only they hear a noise, which they go to investigate. And there’s Jody, who wants to explain some stuff, only in the middle of explaining he CGIs into a silver ball, which we will call J-Ball, so you know when we’re watching Jody and when we’re watching a little silver ball with Jody’s voice.

The Tall Man shows up, and J-Ball tries to defend Reggie and Michael, only he doesn’t, because The Tall Man damages him somehow. The Tall Man then throws Reggie against a wall and takes Michael away through a gate that is suddenly located in Reggie’s hallway.

Reggie wakes up sometime later, and there’s a huge black mark where the gate was previously. Reggie clearly has no idea what to do, so he picks up the damaged J-Ball, which says, “Holtsville.” Which Reggie finds on a map, and then figures he might as well go there.

On the way, he stops for gas, and the creepy man who runs the place tells him not to go to Holtsville. But Reggie does anyway. Because there is not fear in an ice cream man’s heart.

The town is totally deserted, except for a fairly scantily clad woman who is going through cars looking for cool abandoned stuff. Some hijinks with a gun ensue, and then Reggie gets his noggin bashed in by a pair of thugs who are working with the woman.

They throw Reggie in the trunk of his own car and head out of town.

The three thugs end up at what seems to be an abandoned farmhouse. They split up to investigate, and the woman thug and one of the guys go in the front door, where they can see the backs of a pair of elderly couples sitting in chairs. So the thug shoots one of them, and discovers they aren’t real people after all – they’re dolls.

At which point a steel door slams behind them and a creepy doll’s head hanging from the ceiling informs the unwelcome guests that they’re in trouble.

A small person in a red sweatshirt and a mask scampers out of hiding – only he’s grabbed by the other male thug, and his mask is pulled off. It turns out that we’ve got a kid on our hands.

The kid, in turn, has a hatchet in his hands. First he buries it in the knee of the guy who grabbed him, and then he throws it right into the head of the female thug, and that’s pretty much it for her. Until she comes back as an undead minion. But that’s later.

The kid runs outside and the thugs give chase. So the kid throws a frisbee with razor blades attached to its edges at one of the thugs, and it cuts up his neck, rendering the thug dead. Until he comes back as an undead minion.

You’re seeing a pattern here by now, one assumes.

The final thug starts walking towards the kid, which ends with him falling into a hidden pit the kid made. Then the kid shoots the thug with the thug’s own gun.

Reggie pounds on the trunk of his car, and the kid comes and lets him out.

Various events happen, and bits of information are shared. The thugs are buried, but the kid and Reggie awaken to find their graves dug up and the people missing. We also learn that the kid’s dad was a cop, and also the first one taken by The Tall Man.

The kid’s name is Tim, by the way.

Reggie decides to hit the road, and Tim wants to go with him. But Reggie, always one to run away from a problem, stops at a farmhouse and convinces the woman who lives there to take care of Tim, by offering her some money.

But Tim don’t play that, so when Reggie drives away “without him,” Tim opens the trunk to reveal to the audience that he’s stowed away.

Reggie heads to the Holtsville mausoleum, where he’s attacked by a silver ball. By a stroke of sheer luck, Reggie opens a door in front of the speeding ball and it bounces off, rolling on the floor.

That’s pretty much where Reggie’s luck ends, however, as moments later he’s handcuffed by two black girls. At which point the ball recovers and comes speeding at one of the black girls, who apparently never learned that when an object is coming at your head, and it has spikes on it, you should get out of the way.

So black girl number one exits the movie moments after she entered.

The other black girl fights off the ball with a set of nunchucks, which doesn’t work all that well. But lucky for everyone, Tim shows up and shoots the ball until it explodes.

Reggie and Tim ask the girl, whose name is Rocky, to join them on their noble quest. But Rocky wants to stay behind and bury her friend.

No one sees fit to mention that burying the friend will in no way prevent anyone from using her corpse as a dwarf-slave.

But no matter. Tim and Reggie head out, with J-Ball offering directions. Eventually, they stop to pick up a hitchhiker: Rocky.

All I can figure is that J-Ball gives terrible directions and has been having Reggie basically drive in a circle.

The crew stops at a motel for the night, and Reggie gets a queen-sized bed and convinces Tim to sleep in the car. He also convinces Rocky to sleep in the bed with him. However, when he tries to convince her to “try vanilla” (I did not make that up) she handcuffs him to the bed and goes to sleep.

The next day, the three of them drive to Boulton, which is also empty. Except for the parking lot with the 12 hearses in it.

Reggie and pals drive away in a big hurry, and end up sleeping under the stars. As the night wears on, J-Ball goes for a float and ends up hovering over Reggie.

Reggie, meanwhile, is dreaming about giving the business to Rocky. At which point Jody shows up in Reggie’s dream and tells him that Reggie needs to follow him.

Long story short, they go through a gate. Which is located in Reggie’s mind.

They end up in a hallway, which is maybe also in Reggie’s mind, but maybe not.

In the same hallway, The Tall Man makes part of a brick wall invisible, and there’s Mike, trapped behind it. The Tall Man says, “You know the way out. Use your brain, boy.”

Only, of course, Michael doesn’t know what The Tall Man is talking about, and the wall becomes opaque.

The Tall Man wanders off, and Reggie and J-Ball go to the wall. And then J-Ball uses a laser to cut through the wall and free Michael. At which point they all run away, with The Tall Man in hot pursuit.

Reggie wakes up, and discovers that there is a gate near his sleeping bag. And Rocky and Tim are there. And also the scarecrow and the cowardly lion. Okay, that’s totally not true. But Jody is there, keeping the gate open.

Michael runs through the gate that was formerly in Reggie’s mind, or maybe not (seriously, was Michael in Reggie’s brain the entire time?) and then The Tall Man jams his hands through the gate as well.

Reggie places his hands on top of the poles that make up the gate, and that chops off The Tall Man’s hands. Which turn into little monsters, which have to be destroyed by our little band of Merry Men. Er, Merry People. Because Rocky is a girl. Er. Woman.

I’m totally going to get letters about my lack of sensitivity.

Reggie, Michael, Tim, and Rocky all get in the car and drive away. Only they end up being pursued by a hearse that contains zombie versions of the folks Tim killed. The thugs are back.

Or at least they’re back until Reggie runs them off the road and the audience is treated to a truly spectacular hearse flip.

Upside: Zombies are nowhere in sight.

Downside: Reggie’s car has two flat tires.

Michael suggests that they all go hide in a mortuary. Because The Tall Man won’t look for them there. Except, of course, he will. Because of his awesome thoroughness.

At any rate, they head over to the mortuary, where they discover a cryogenics freezing chamber. This sends Michael off into a nostalgia trip, where he remembers that The Tall Man stopped to sniff the air near Reggie’s ice cream truck years ago.

Michael deducts that The Tall Man does not like cold. Because he sniffed the air near the ice cream truck. Because we all sniff things we fear.

Which means, I guess, that I’m afraid of vanilla, my wife, flowers, my daughter’s head, and Cinnabon.

Reggie heads off to keep watch.

Michael lies down on a mortuary table, sticks J-Ball on his head, and asks for answers.

J-Ball shows Michael The Tall Man working on a naked dwarf. This includes The Tall Man pulling the brain out of the dwarf and sticking it into a ball. Apparently, this leaves enough brain in the dwarf that it can act on “instinct.”

The Tall Man sees Michael, and pursues him, which ends with Michael waking up back on the table. Only he’s been strapped down by The Tall Man.

In another area of the building, Reggie fell asleep (nice watch-dogging, Reg!), only to be attacked by a Zombie Thug.

And in another-another area of the building, Rocky and Tim are attacked by the other two zombie thugs.

Tim is captured by one of the thugs, and he’s strapped onto a table next to Michael. By The Tall Man. Who then wheels Tim into another room. And then takes a portable saw of some kind and goes back to Michael and starts carving into his head.

Reggie and Rocky, meanwhile, are fighting various and sundry zombie thugs, sometimes comically, and sometimes not. Oh, and J-Ball offers some assistance as well, in the form of drilling into one zombie’s head. Finally, they break away and go to rescue Michael.

They attempt this by sticking a poker into the cryogenics chamber, and then ramming it into The Tall Man’s chest, and using said poker to shove The Tall Man into a walk-in freezer. This works great, right until a gold ball bursts out of The Tall Man’s head.

The gold ball heads after Tim, and Rocky tries to help him. Only she gets attacked by the still-undead Zombie Thug Woman. They fight right up until Rocky does a little dodging that causes the gold ball to punch through the head of the Zombie Thug Woman.

The gold ball then heads after Reggie, who catches it on the end of a plunger. Rocky and Tim help him to shove the gold ball into the cryogenic chamber.

Michael, in the interim, has checked out his sawed scalp in the mirror, and discovered he has a ball under his hairline. By the time he finds the rest of his crew, his eyes resemble silver balls.

He runs outside into the graveyard, telling Reggie to, “Stay away from me.”

Then Jody appears, and says, “Reggie, don’t believe everything you see.” And also, “Be patient, Reg. We’ll be in touch.”

Then Michael and Jody wander off somewhere. Reggie does not follow.

Then Rocky pulls up in a hearse, and basically says, “Um, fighting the undead isn’t my scene.” Then she drives off, leaving Reggie and Tim behind. And Reggie does not follow.

Reggie and Tim go back into the mausoleum, because of course all the evil has been vanquished…

No, wait, what I meant to say is that Reggie is not all that goal-driven, and clearly is also not concerned about the safety of his charge, Tim. Or about Michael. Or about Rocky.

So, we get a nice panning-up shot, where we get to see a bunch of balls on the ceiling, and then Tim heads into the cryogenics chamber. Where, naturally, the cryogenics tank is lying on its side, with an open inter-dimensional gate next to it.

Tim runs back into the previous room to tell Reggie, only Reggie already knows something is amiss, since he’s been herded into a corner by silver balls.

Tim grabs a gun and prepares to go down fighting as The Tall Man walks through the door.

Reggie says, “It’s all over.”

The Tall Man says, “It’s never over. And I’m not afraid of the cold. Or Cinnabon. Michael is a nitwit.” I might have added the last three sentences there.

And then a pair of hands smash through a window and pull Tim into the night.

So, for the record, Reggie’s job started out as, Find Micael, and Keep Him Safe.

Then it added: And Deal with Jody. And Keep Rocky Safe. And Keep Time Safe.

Only by the end of the movie, Michael is turning into a ball, Jody already is a ball, Rocky has left because she knows quite well that Reggie is about as useful as ice cubes in a snowstorm, and once again a kid in Reggie’s charge has been pulled through glass.

I suspect that the further entry in the “Phantasm” series will feature Reggie working in a day care built inside a greenhouse, so that several people can be yanked through glass one right after another. After which they’ll all spend the remaining minutes of their lives in spectacular car crashes.

Phantasm II

Note: Despite the fact that “Phantasm” I, III, and IV are out on DVD, you cannot purchase Phantasm II on DVD in the United States. I guess because Universal doesn’t like making money.

So as you read this, realize that I watched it on video in pan and scan on a VCR that hadn’t been used in at least two years. Oh, and the tape was about 20 years old as well. And my remote was dead because of a leaky battery, so to pause and take notes I had to get out of my chair and press buttons by hand.

If Universal sees fit to provide me with a DVD, I will happily take another look at the movie.

For that matter, if Don Coscarelli, easily one of my favorite filmmakers, would like to stop by my house, watch the movie with me, and describe what was missing from each shot when he lost 40% of the screen space, I will provide him with muffins and Strawberry Quick.

Now, on with the show.

The cover of “Phantasm II” boldly declares that “The ball is back!” Which is not unlike selling “Caddyshack II” with the tag line, “Kenny Loggins is back!” It’s accurate, sure, but it’s not the point.

Because The Ball is not the villain. The villain is The Tall Man, and he is cutting a swath of destruction across the country. Or something.

It’s easy to make fun of the way villains often seem to go to ridiculous lengths to achieve mostly undefined goals, but The Tall Man takes the cake. And also several corpses. But we’ll come back to that.

“Phantasm II” sorta-kinda starts back up where “Phantasm” left off. And I say sorta-kinda because it starts off with a blonde girl waking up all of a sudden.

Her first impulse is to check the stove, though it’s unclear what her reasoning is. Perhaps she was concerned she left it on. Or maybe she was hoping that she had made some soup while sleepwalking.

After noting the lack of soup, she opens up a notebook, and we’re treated to a drawing of Reggie and Mike, and also a whooole lot of voiceover. I wrote some of it down, but typing it up isn’t going to help you or me to understand the plot. So we’ll just go with, “This girl has a psychic connection to Mike, and it’ll all make sense later.”

Then we cut back to the closing five minutes of “Phantasm,” as Reggie explains to Mike that Jody is dead, and that they should totally go on a road trip. Mike heads upstairs, encounters The Tall Man, and gets pulled into his mirror.

The movie cuts back downstairs to Reggie, who now looks ten years older, because the actor is ten years older and there is only so much that makeup can do to hide that fact.

Reggie hears the sounds of a struggle upstairs, and runs up to check things out. He sees Mike being pulled out of the closet by a robed and hooded dwarf, and he runs downstairs to get some sort of weapon.

A note before moving on, however. So, apparently, The Tall Man decided to stand in Mike’s room, waiting for him to walk in, having stuffed a couple of his dwarves in the closet just so they could smash through the door and the mirror and pull him in.

Am I the only one who finds this plan astonishingly complicated? We’re approaching sharks-with-lasers-on-their-foreheads territory here.

Back to Reggie, who grabs a shotgun, and tries to load it. Only he’s attacked by one of the dwarves. At this juncture, we learn that “Phantasm II” had an actual makeup budget, because we get to see what the dwarves’ faces look like.

Reggie, it seems, hasn’t quite figured out the best way to use a shotgun yet, so instead of shooting the dwarf, he beats it to death.

He then runs to the kitchen, where he’s confronted by more dwarves than he can beat to death with a stick. He notes that the fireplace is burning away in the living room, and comes up with a cunning plan.

This cunning plan involves him snuffing out all the pilot lights on the stove, then turning the stove on, and waiting for the gas to hit the fireplace.

Then he runs past various and sundry things that want him dead, grabs Mike, and jumps out a window.

At which point the house explodes.

Don’t worry about The Tall Man, though. He’s outside the flaming house, and ready for action.

Only we cut back to the blonde girl again, who is still narrating. Her name is Liz, by the way. So we’ll call her that, because referring to her as The Blonde Girl is going to get irritating.

Either way, she helpfully lets us know, still through voiceover, that The Tall Man has started crossing the country, stealing the dead from graveyards.

Instead of what? Taco Bell?

So now it’s seven years later (um… well, let’s try that again… since that last bit was mostly flashback, as far as Liz is concerned it’s now, and for Reggie and Mike it’s seven years later) and Mike is at Morningside Psychiatric Hospital, noting in voiceover that he’s totally not going to talk crazy while his doctor checks him out.

Out loud, it’s all, “Yeah, I dreamed the whole thing.” In his head, it’s all, “The Tall Man! He’s evil! And Reggie blowed up my house!” He does not say, “And now I’m totally played by a different actor, even though The Tall Man and Reggie are played by the same people!” But he should’ve, because he is.

The doctor lets Mike go, and Mike immediately goes to the graveyard and starts digging up graves. Hopefully this is not typical behavior for the doctor’s patients after he deems them “cured.”

Reggie shows up and reminds Mike that the whole house blowing up thing was only a dream. Mike counters this argument with the fact that he’s already dug up a few graves, which are all empty. He also throws in the fact that he wants to stop The Tall Man, and mentions Liz as well.

Despite all this, Reggie opts not to take Mike back to the hospital. Instead, they get in Reggie’s car and start tooling back to Reggie’s house, while Reggie talks about how all his relatives can’t wait to meet Mike. They’re all currently at Reggie’s house.

Which is too bad for them, as moments later Mike has a vision that the house is going to blow up. And then it does.

At the funeral of every single relative Reggie had, Reggie decides that Mike is right after all, and they head out across the country to find The Tall Man. This means we get even more voiceover, but this time from Reggie.

We get a weapons montage, where the boys break into a hardware store and take a bunch of things. Only they don’t really take them, because Mike pays for them before they leave.

There’s also a strange Do It Yourself component, as Reggie opts to make a four-barreled shotgun, and Mike makes a small but elaborate flamethrower. These will be their primary weapons. Oh, and also a small chainsaw.

Reggie does some more voiceover, noting that The Tall Man is easy to track, because he leaves ghost towns in his wake.

This means that Mike and Reggie are the worst trackers ever, because every time they get to a town it’s been emptied of people, which has to take a while.

They stop at a graveyard that has been totally emptied of bodies. It’s kind of hilarious, because all the graves are empty, but there are no nearby dirt piles. Which means that The Tall Man must have had all the dirt trucked somewhere else after his minions emptied out the graves. He’s clean and organized, I’ll grant him that. Not very efficient, but clean and organized.

Mike and Reggie break into the funeral home with a chainsaw, and split up. Because that’s how you deal with an unstoppable monster – you divide up your forces.

Mike goes to the embalming room, where he finds a dead, naked girl on a table. He turns away, turns back, and the girl is gone.

Reggie calls to him, and he and Mike enter another room where The Tall Man has left a person behind. Mike thinks it’s Liz at first, because he is an idiot. But it turns out to be some other blonde, who has a wormlike creature in her back with a head that looks like The Tall Man’s.

The Tall Man taunts Mike with his very special worm head, telling him, “Come East, if you dare.”

Meanwhile, somewhere in what I guess is the East, Liz, her sister, and her grandmother attend her grandfather’s funeral.

They are the only three people at the funeral who are not the priest or the dudes hauling the coffin around. And Liz’s sister takes off about four seconds after the priest says a few words over the body.

What do you have to do in life to end up with such a sparsely attended funeral? Hardened criminals have more attendants when they get shucked underground. One can only make assumptions about Grandpa’s shadowy past, but you’ve got to figure livestock was involved.

And probably a video camera.

Anyway, the sister takes off, and Liz gets up and goes after her, tracking her through the mausoleum. She sees a dwarf, panics a little bit, and pulls a pin out of her dress.

Through a slightly confusing series of events, she ends up stabbing The Tall Man through the finger. Then she runs away, leaving the pin behind.

Back at the “funeral,” grandma has walked out, so the priest takes a moment to stab grandpa through the heart to keep him from coming back to life. Or something. He’s a little vague about what he hopes to accomplish.

Either way, grandma comes in just in time to see her dead husband take one in the ticker. This will not be important later.

Later that night, the priest sits around drinking, until he hears a noise. He looks out the window, and sees grandpa standing there with a knife in his chest. This is also not important.

Then grandma goes to bed, only to wake up at 3 AM with grandpa in bed next to her. This is semi-important, inasmuch as we never see grandma at full size again.

Back with Mike and Reggie, Mike falls asleep in the car and dreams that he saw the dead girl from the autopsy room hitchhiking. Only when he wakes up, Reggie has picked up a hitchhiker who is, of course, the dead girl. Only she’s less dead. And named Alchemy.

Mike and Reggie stop the car to empty their bladders, and as they do so, Mike explains to Reggie that it’s not safe for Alchemy to be with them. Reggie argues that he’s really lonely. He also throws something in there about how the girl is in danger whether they’re there or not, but at least if she’s with them they can protect her.

But his primary argument is the loneliness. And by loneliness, I mean the loneliness in his pants. Oh, Reggie. Things will not end well for you.

Reggie and Mike and Alchemy keep on driving, and arrive in another ghost town.

Back with Liz, things are not going well. She finds out that grandma has gone missing. The pin she rammed through The Tall Man’s hand is on grandma’s bedside table. Then she goes to grandpa’s grave and finds it empty. So she goes to the funeral home.

Probably to give The Tall Man a thank-you note for returning her pin.

Elsewhere in town, Alchemy leads the boys to her uncle’s bed and breakfast, then can’t figure out why there’s no one there, and the building is boarded up. This despite the fact that every other building in the town in empty. Alchemy is clearly not hitchhiking home from a stint at an Ivy League school.

Reggie chainsaws them into the B and B, and Mike booby-traps it.

Over at the funeral home, Liz appears to wander around aimlessly. This allows her the chance to see a person get embalmed.

Back in the graveyard, Reggie and Michael check out the lay of the land. By which I mean, the dude digging up graves.

Inside the funeral home, Liz has now progressed to the mausoleum, where she passes by the hiding priest. Who I guess saw a living dead guy, freaked out, and opted to go where there were lots more dead guys.

The priest takes a walk down a hallway, tossing blessings at people, when The Tall Man appears, and informs the priest that no one there needs his services. The priest’s rosary then slips around his neck and lifts him into the air, choking him.

Eventually, The Tall Man lets the priest go, and the priest runs.

Behind the priest, a tiny coffin opens up, revealing two silver balls, and one gold ball.

The priest runs into Liz, and explains that The Tall Man has been harvesting the people of the town. This might explain why grandpa’s funeral was so sparsely attended, but I choose to stick with my livestock theory.

But while I’m at it, so, what, Liz didn’t notice that, for example, every single store in the city was closed? How much of a shut-in is this girl? Is she the Emily Dickinson of psychics?

The priest hears a noise, and goes to investigate. The investigation is brought to a close when a ball cuts off his ear, comes back for another pass, sticks in his head, and drains his blood.

The Tall Man grabs Liz, and throws her against a wall.

She lands in a heap on the floor, where she encounters a dwarf. She refers to the dwarf as grandma, but it doesn’t really look like her grandma, so maybe it’s one of those things where her parents had her refer to some old woman as Grandma So-and-So.

Wisely, she opts to run, eventually getting outside and falling into a grave. Where Mike is. There is kissing, despite the fact that they a) are in a grave and b) just met.

So apparently, Reggie is not the only one giving more thought to “loneliness” than survival.

Speaking of Reggie, he shows up, and the three of them head back to the B and B. Once they’re there, Mike lights the fire with his little flamethrower. Minutes later, everyone heads upstairs to get some sleep. Or rather, Mike and Liz head upstairs to get some sleep, and Reggie and Alchemy head upstairs to get some “sleep.”

Mike and Liz engage in some psychic dream talk, which lasts right until there’s an explosion downstairs. A booby-trap has gone off.

Reggie and Mike head downstairs, where they learn that cats can set off booby-traps just as easily as an evil being from another dimension.

Mike undergoes a crisis of faith, which probably isn’t helped by the fact that upstairs, Liz is being snatched from her room by The Tall Man.

The Tall Man throws Liz in the back of the hearse and takes off, and Reggie and Mike give chase in their car. This lasts right up until The Tall Man opts to bump them, and their car flips and explodes, with Reggie and Mike just barely escaping in time.

Back at the funeral home, Liz is strapped to a gurney and taken to the cremation room, where she eventually turns the tables on the minion who has been charged to burn her. I’d feel bad for him, but his inability to, say, shoot Liz in the head before attempting to cremate her is his own fault.

It just goes to show that there’s more than one way that sloppy work can end up with you getting fired. (I’m so sorry about that pun. Really.)

While all that is going on, Reggie and Mike head to the funeral home, where they find the embalming room. Reggie fills the embalming fluid machine with hydrochloric acid, and Mike notes that a nearby “keyhole” looks like it needs a ball to open it.

Which is like saying that all you need to win a million dollars is to survive a headshot with a shotgun.

So the boys split up, because they’ve totally failed to learn to watch each other’s backs over the course of two movies.

Mike locates Liz just as she finishes torching her captor in the crematorium, and they run off, with another minion close behind them. Oh, and a ball. A silver one. Which ends up embedded in the minion’s hand, pinning it to a door.

At which point the gold ball comes out and the minion cuts off his own hand to escape and the ball goes after Mike and Liz.

Mike and Liz run, and the gold ball demonstrates that it has laser powers, can stop and track people, and can sprout teeth all around itself and become a massive saw-drill, which will totally hit you in the back and burrow all through your body.

If you’re a minion, that is. If you’re the hero and there’s still ten minutes to go in a movie, then it can’t hit to you save its life.

Reggie ends up on adventure of his own, which starts with him chainsaw-sword fighting a grave-digging minion, and ends with him using the four-barrel shotgun on four dwarves. Yes, it does hit all of them, and yes, it is pretty awesome.

Reggie, Mike, and Liz all meet up, and Mike take the ball and the minion’s hand out of the door, mumbling something about flesh keeping the spikes out, while preventing the ball from attacking.

Because this is the point where the movie needs some logic, right? Not back with all the grave holes but no dirt to fill them. We need the ball explained.

Elsewhere, the completely forgotten about Alchemy’s car breaks down. So she hotwires and steals The Tall Man’s hearse.

Back with our bumbling heroes, the ball is used as a key, and we get to see barrels with dwarves in them, and a magical gate, just like in the last movie. And just like in the last movie, Mike falls in. As a slight variation on a theme, however, Reggie goes to rescue him, instead of Jody. Because Jody is still dead.

Liz, who was smart enough not to get sucked into the gate, is instead captured by The Tall Man and is strapped to a table for embalming.

Except that Mike and Reggie have escaped from the gate. So Mike throws the “key” ball at The Tall Man, who gets a couple of spikes to the head, and gets to bleed some yellow blood.

This does not kill him. Nor does the worm that pops out of his head.

However, Liz stabbing him with the embalming needle that fills him with a bunch of hydrochloric acid seems to do the trick.

Reggie sets fire to everything.

Liz, Reggie, and Mike all run outside, where they are picked up by Alchemy in the hearse. Convenient, no?

Well, no. Reggie gets up front, and Alchemy starts twirling her hair, which is pretty hot until she pulls off her scalp.

And then the car comes to a stop.

Mike and Liz, who are in the back, get to watch Reggie pound on the window and expire by the side of the road.

At which point, Mike says, “It’s a dream.”

And The Tall Man appears and says, “No, it’s not.”

But what does that guy know? Because seriously, Reggie blew up his house at the start of the movie, and THAT was a dream. I guess. Possibly.

Maybe we’ll find out in Part III.

Phantasm

The thing about “Phantasm” is, most people only remember little bits and pieces of it.

There’s the ball, of course. And The Tall Man. And that’s about it.

Most people, including myself, remember it as being dreamlike, and somewhat confusing. And that there wasn’t a whole lot of plot, and what was there doesn’t really make a lot of sense.

These things are all lies, at least as far as the first “Phantasm” goes. Unlike, say, most Asian Horror, which just keeps throwing crazy stuff at you until the writer runs out of ideas and the movie comes to an abrupt end, “Phantasm,” more often than not, presents you with explanations of what you’ve been watching.

It’s just that the explanations are kind of goofy. More of an “Ooookaaay,” than an “Oh!”

So let’s go back to the beginning. Erase everything you think you know about Phantasm from your mind. So, yeah, the ball, and The Tall Man.

The Tall Man isn’t in the opening seconds of the movie. No, no. First, we’ve got the word “Phantasm” in big red letters, so that all the people who show up know what they were watching. Which makes sense, because the opening scene is two people having some adult time in a graveyard.

Moments later, they’re done, and the man says, “That was great, baby.” Only I guess it wasn’t so much that way for her, because she stabs him in the heart.

Then we get a few shots where you see the face of the woman doing the stabbing, and then suddenly her face is replaced by The Tall Man. Which I imagine is the last thing you would want to see before you die.

Anyway, the man with the knife through his heart was named Tommy, which is important. So remember that. Think of the rock opera if you have to. Just remember that the pinball wizard got it in the heart.

Next scene.

Tommy’s funeral. We meet Jody and Reggie. Who are both dudes. Who also have names that end in an e sound. Not quite sure what to make of that.

There’s some dialogue, wherein we learn that Tommy’s friends think he killed himself. And also, Jody’s parents are dead, and his brother Michael is really broken up about it, even after two years, which is why he’s not at Tommy’s funeral.

Only he is, because he totally road to the graveyard on his… motorcycle? Dirt bike? I dunno. It’s smaller than a motorcycle, but it has an engine. I’m just going to say bike from now on.

Anyway, both Michael and Jody hear funny noises in the graveyard and mausoleum respectively.

Eventually, the funeral comes to an end, and everyone except Michael leaves. So he’s the lucky boy who gets to see The Tall Man pick up Tommy’s casket and shove it into the back of the hearse.

So Michael goes to visit a psychic. Really. With a sign hanging up outside that has a red palm on it. This is the part I’m talking about that no one remembers.

Michael goes in, and talks with the psychic and her granddaughter. By which I mean he talks out loud, and the granddaughter answers his questions. We get a flashback to Jody saying he was planning on taking off and leaving Michael, and then we get a flashback to The Tall Man picking up the coffin and stuffing it in the back of the hearse. Because it’s been nearly three minutes since we’ve seen that.

Then a box appears on the table and Michael is told to put his hand into it. He goes, and he notes that it hurts, and we get a whole thing about how the fear is in Michael’s mind, and he must not fear. What he’s not supposed to fear is up for grabs, but I’m guessing it’s the box.

So Michael stops being afraid of magically appearing boxes, and the box lets him go free, and we all learn a valuable lesson about not trusting psychics. And that the guy who wrote “Dune” must not be all that litigious.

Elsewhere, Jody and Reggie jam on some guitars.

Come to think of it, they’re remarkably chipper for a couple of guys who lost a good friend recently.

Later that evening, the psychic’s granddaughter heads on over to the funeral home. She wanders through the mausoleum for a bit, and then opens a door, sees a light, and screams.

And we never see that character ever again.

Or her grandma. So I hope you weren’t too attached.

Jody heads out to a bar, with Michael following along behind him. This is a running theme. We’re kind of given explanations about how Michael follows Jody around, but interestingly we never get a direct statement about why he’s doing it. I suppose it could be he’s afraid of losing Jody, or that Jody is just going to take off and leave him in the care of child protection services, but really… what is Jody’s deal?

I mean, his friend just died, right? Why isn’t he more upset? For that matter, why is he taking the line that it was a suicide?

“Oh yeah, we found your friend in the graveyard with his pants around his ankles, and a hole in his chest, but we couldn’t find a knife. We’re ruling it a suicide.”

“He always said he wanted to go out that way…”

Maybe that’s a deleted scene.

Jody meets a blonde at the bar, they share a beer, and then she leads him towards the graveyard to drown his troubles in… um… you know.

Michael continues to watch from behind a tree. Icky.

This lasts right up until Michael hears a noise in the bushes behind him, and a dwarf wearing a brown hooded robe appears and chases Michael.

Michael runs away, in the process zipping past Jody, who has the girl’s underwear in his mouth. Jody apologizes and goes to chase after Michael, leaving the girl only slightly more disappointed than she would have been had things continued.

Jody sends Michael home, where Michael dreams that his bed has been transplanted to the graveyard, The Tall Man is standing over him, and hands are reaching up from the ground to grab him. I’m sure it’s a metaphor of some kind, but you know how dreams are.

After dealing with Michael, Jody heads back to the graveyard, where he finds that the girl is no longer there. Which prevents him from being ruled a suicide who had his pants around his ankles, underpants in his mouth, and a hole in his sternum.

The next day, Michael goes for a talk downtown, where he sees The Tall Man walking along. The Tall Man stops by Reggie’s ice cream truck and sniffs the air. Creepy? Sure! But I have no idea if he was smelling Reggie, Michael, or fifteen pounds of frostbitten vanilla.

Later, Michael lying under his brother’s car, doing… some sort of maintenance thing. He sees dwarf legs go scampering by, and the car is dropped off of its supports, trapping Michael.

Until the next scene, wherein Jody frees Michael.

Michael tells Jody how he ended up stuck under a car, but Jody doesn’t buy it.

So Michael, who can fix cars but is not smart enough to keep away from places you could easily be killed, heads back to the cemetery. Which is called Morningside, by the way.

Michael breaks a window and sneaks into the funeral home, and then goes on a sneaking around tour of the building. He’s almost caught by a minion of The Tall Man, only he escapes by hiding in a casket.

A smarter kid would take this as a clue to run to safety, but not our Michael. Instead, he goes for a walk in the mausoleum, which is going great right up until a shiny silver ball comes flying through the air.

Michael makes a run for it, only he’s caught by the minion. So Michael bites him, escapes from his grasp, and the audience gets to see what happens when a shining metal object with spikes on the front of it plunges right into a minion’s head.

Did I mention that a drill comes out of the ball once it’s stuck on the minion’s head? And that it bores right into his skull? At which point blood comes flowing out of a hole in the back of the ball? No?

I’ll remember to mention that next time.

The minion becomes dead. Or more dead. Or possibly a different kind of dead. Who knows? Death is kind of a fast and loose thing in the “Phantasm” universe.

The Tall Man appears in the hallway and Michael leads him on a merry chase. That is, until Michael runs through a door, slams the door on The Tall Man’s fingers, hacks off those fingers with a hunting knife, and then takes one of the yellow-blood-bleeding, still-moving fingers and runs off with it.

Michael escapes through the window he broke earlier, but loses a shoe to an angry dwarf in a robe. As far as I can tell, the lost shoe is not important.

The next morning, Jody finds Michael sleeping on the stairs with a loaded shotgun. His sole reaction is to carefully take the shotgun away and unload it. He is probably the worst brother ever.

Michael shows Jody his brand new “box-o-finger,” which contains the still-moving finger and some yellow blood. This finally convinces Jody that something strange is going on. Michael tells him the whole story, including the bit about the fact that The Tall Man can lift an entire not-empty coffin all on his own.

Finally, someone in the movie makes a smart decision, and Jody tells Michael to get the severed finger – they’re going to take it to the cops.

Michael goes to his room to get the “box-o-finger,” only it’s stopped moving. So he opens the box, not realizing that this is a very bad idea.

A giant bug leaps out.

There is running and screaming and Jody and Michael stuff the bug down the garbage disposal.

Then Reggie shows up, the bug pops out of the disposal, and there’s some more running and screaming and the bug is stuffed down the disposal again.

Reggie demands an explanation.

Then I guess he figures, you know, whatever, and leaves. Because the next scene is Jody loading a shotgun and handing it to Michael, with the advice: “Don’t shoot a man unless you intend to kill him.”

I was going to make a snide remark here about how maybe he should give his brother some more generally practical advice. Maybe about how to properly treat women. But then I thought better of it. This is clearly all Jody has to give.

Then Jody heads to the funeral home alone. He sneaks into the still-broken window, and is pretty much immediately attacked by a dwarf. He shoots the dwarf four times and makes a run for it.

As he escapes the front gate of the cemetery, The Tall Man’s hearse races up behind him. He gets out of the way, and the hearse goes screaming past him.

Then another set of headlights appears, and comes towards him. It’s Michael, who is driving Jody’s car.

They race off, with the hearse in hot pursuit. There is some gunfire, and the hearse rides off the road and crashes into a tree.

The boys walk over to check out who was driving the hearse, and they discover it was a dwarf. In a hooded robe. Like all the other dwarves. Only this time, they pull the hood back and reveal that the hooded dwarf is Tommy!

You remember Tommy, right? Stabbed in the heart at the start of the movie? Yeah. Him. Only he’s about three feet tall now. And he bleeds yellow.

Reggie shows up. I guess they called him on their 1979-era cell phone. No matter. They stick Tommy’s body into the ice cream truck. Because Tommy loved ice cream. He would have wanted it that way.

They all drive back to Jody and Michael’s house, and Reggie is startled by Myrtle the housekeeper. Who either works really late nights or really early in the morning. Regardless, I’d be suspicious of her, even if her existence does explain how two teenage boys can keep such a clean household. In real life, there would probably be a bucket in the living room so they could poop there if they felt the urge to go during a particularly exciting TV program.

The three guys discuss the dwarves, and wonder aloud if Michael and Jody’s parents are dwarves now. This culminates in the two older guys taking Michael to visit their friend Sally, who runs an antiques place.

At the antiques place, Michael finds an old photo of Morningside. A photo with The Tall Man in it. A photo with The Tall Man in it where the picture moves, and also he’s driving a horse and buggy, so you know how old the picture is.

Michael demands to be taken back to his brother.

Jody, meanwhile, falls asleep and dreams he’s in the mausoleum being attacked by dwarves. This dream is, of course, about his inability to commit to a relationship.

Reggie, also meanwhile, is driving his ice cream truck along when he hears thumping in the back that is likely his dead dwarf friend coming back to life and preparing to lay the smack down on someone.

Michael, Sally, and another girl, also also meanwhile, are driving along the road, when they see Reggie’s overturned ice cream truck. Michael investigates, and the girls don’t stop him, because they figure if he wants to approach an overturned ice cream truck, well, that’s his problem.

Michael gets back in the car, and the dwarves attack. After much fighting, Michael is shoved out the back window, and he runs home. He tells Jody that the two girls and Reggie are missing, and Jody decides to lock Michael in his room.

Then Jody heads out to Morningside. Again. Because things went so well the last time he tried that alone.

Michael escapes from his room using a hammer, a tack, some tape, and a shotgun shell, and runs downstairs. Upon throwing open the front door, he discovers The Tall Man, who says, “I’ve been waiting for you.”

Then he grabs Michael and throws him in the back of the hearse.

They go to Morningside. As they pull into the gate, Michael pulls a loaded gun out of his pocket, shoots out the back window, and then shoots out the hearse’s back tire.

He jumps out the window and the hearse explodes.

Jody, who is down in the mausoleum, pulls his dad’s coffin out of the wall. Then we get a shot of the room with a red filter, which can only mean one thing: Ball Cam.

Michael also enters the mausoleum, and also finds his dad’s casket, and he opens it up and discovers that his dad is missing. This will have no repercussions later in the movie.

Jody shows up and shoots a ball out of the air.

Reggie shows up and says he found their female friends and a bunch of other girls and led them to safety.

They all head down the hall to the door where the gypsy woman’s granddaughter (Remember her? Doesn’t that seems like two movies ago?) was last seen.

They go in, and they find a bunch of barrels with dwarves in them, and also two metal poles in the middle of the floor. The metal poles make a whining sound, and if you’re like Michael (curious, and not real bright) you’ll discover that if you walk between them you can enter another dimension, where a bunch of dwarves are wandering the desert.

And this is where the exposition comes in, as Michael explains that he dwarves are slaves, and that the reason they’re short is they’ve been crushed down to handle the gravity on the other planet he just got a peek-see of.

Michael also mentions “the heat,” because as we all know, shorter people have a special cooling mechanism that isn’t found in the DNA of tall folks.

At this point, the lights go out.

Jody ends up outside.

Michael also ends up outside, but out of eye and earshot of Jody.

Reggie is still in the room. He decides to play with the two metal poles, and he discovers that by pressing on the top of them, the noise they make stops. At which point the room becomes a wind tunnel which attempts to suck you between the bars and into another dimension.

Reggie escapes and gets outside, where he is stabbed through the heart by the girl who killed Tommy. Sadly, he doesn’t get to underwhelm her with his bedside manner first.

Jody locates Michael, and they both locate Reggie, figure he’s dead, and make a run for it.

Back at the house, Jody talks about an old mine shaft, and figures that perhaps they can lure The Tall Man into it. Despite the fact that the last time he left Michael alone in the house, Michael was captured by The Tall Man, Jody opts to leave Michael in the house again so that Jody can go disguise the old mine shaft.

As a lemonade stand, perhaps?

No matter. The minute Jody is out of the house, The Tall Man appears and starts chasing Michael. There’s a bunch of running, and a lot of Michael talking about not fearing, but the long and short of it is that Michael tricks The Tall Man into falling down a mineshaft. At which point Jody drops a bunch of rocks on top of it, so The Tall Man can’t get out.

Then Michael wakes up, and we find out that Jody died in a car wreck, and Reggie is taking care of him. Man, I would hate to be Michael’s social worker.

Or maybe it wouldn’t bother me that much, because in the next scene Michael walks into his room, and we see The Tall Man reflected in his mirror. Or rather, we see The Tall Man’s reflection for about a second, and then a pair of hands break through the mirror and pull Michael into the dark.

Which officially makes Reggie the worst babysitter/guardian ever.

Return to Sleepaway Camp

And here we are at the end, once again faced with a dilemma.

When we last left Angela, she was standing on a beach in the buff looking all crazy… unless, of course, you watched “Sleepaway Camp 2” and “Sleepaway Camp 3.” In which case we left Angela in the back of an ambulance. Oh, and also, she really was a she, having gone through elective surgery to make it so.

But forget all that, because yes indeed kids – as far as “Return to Sleepaway Camp” is concerned, parts 2 and 3 never happened.

In one way, this is a good thing. It means that instead of being a movie wherein a lot of random teenagers with loose morals die, instead we get an element of mystery.

That element of mystery is, of course, WHO is killing people, and why?

Which brings us back to our dilemma.

Discussing the ending of the original movie is, ultimately, more or less okay now. After all, it’s been more than twenty years and two major video formats since it came out. So if you haven’t seen it, the onus is pretty much on you.

On the other hand, “Return to Sleepaway Camp” is a fairly recent film. So revealing who the killer is, their motivation for killing, and whether or not we’ve met the killer before feels somewhat unfair to me.

So I’m going to sidestep the problem. Once again, if you wanna see this movie, walk away now, because I’m going to reveal who does the killing. What I’m not going to do, however, is explain the big reveal.

Okay, ready? Here we go. No turning back: Angela did it.

Trust me. You think you know everything now, but you know nothing. Nothing!

(And I’ll totally revise this if they make another sequel, and tell all.)

All right. Here’s how “Return to Sleepaway Camp” goes.

The movie fires up with a credit sequence that features various newspaper headlines, which bring you up to speed. Don’t worry about reading them too closely, though, because everything gets handled in exposition later.

Then the movie fires up literally as (yes, really) we start off at camp with a bunch of boys who are torching their own methane.

Moments later, Alan walks into the cabin. Alan is a rather large boy who is also kind of bully. Oh, and he’s also a total martyr, who whines and cries whenever someone hassles him.

This is our hero, folks. Hope you like him, ‘cause he’s all you get.

He wants to play too, only the other guys start hassling him, at which point he takes a lighter and a can of hairspray and gets ready to go to town.

At the moment, however, a British counselor, Randy, shows up and disarms Alan. Why mention that he’s British? Because the dude is British. It’s weird, frankly. I went to a lot of camps as a kid, and I have to say that the closest I ever got to an exotic accent were a couple of Canadian counselors. And I live in Wisconsin.

Plus, I think if you’re from the U.K. you need a special work permit in the States, which says that you’re an expert in something, and you can only work in that one thing. So this fellow had to write that he was an expert camp counselor on his paperwork.

Probably not the best use of government resources, filling out this guy’s work VISA.

Alan runs off, and Randy says, ominously, “He’ll get his boys, he’ll get his.”

So maybe that was meant to be a red herring? Or is it foreshadowing a later scene, where… but I’m getting ahead of myself.

Okay, it’s morning, and at the main eatin’ place, and Frank, who owns the place, stands up, gets everyone’s attention, and then tells them a cop is going to talk to them about the dangers of smoking.

The cop is actually Sheriff Jerry, who talks using one of those things you jam up against your throat when cancer has rotted your talking bits away. There’s some laughter and derision, though it’s all pointed at the cop’s voice, instead of his astonishingly fake beard.

Back at the breakfast table, we learn that Alan has a brother and a crush on a girl. Oh, and he doesn’t like the food, which leads to a knock-down, drag-out fight with Randy.

Alan is escorted to the kitchen, where he asks the Chef if he can have something else to eat. The Chef says he’s headed out, and directs Alan to talk to Mickey, the other cook. Heated words are exchanged. Alan takes some ice cream, and in a fit of rage Mickey eggs him.

Yep. He throws an egg and hits Alan. Really.

Then Alan throws a pan. Followed by a pretty large kitchen knife, which sticks into the wall.

The fight is brought to an abrupt halt, and in a running theme (pardon the upcoming pun) Alan runs away (I said I was sorry! Leave me alone!).

Michael, Alan’s brother, is sent to find Alan. Michael, it should be noted, goes out of his way to state that Alan is just his step-brother. Which is guess it what makes it possible for him to take a mallet and… but I’m getting ahead of myself.

Michael confronts Alan, and angry words fly back and forth. Alan notes that, “They don’t care that I was sick once…” which I suppose could be a red herring, or possibly a plot point, but if that information is important later, I didn’t notice.

Alan and Michael fight. Michael’s knife comes out, and ends up in Alan’s hand. Michael looks wary for a moment, then grabs the knife from Alan.

By the by, somewhere in the whole argument/conversation, Alan reveals that he really loves the frogs by the lake, and considers them his friends.

Back in the kitchen, the cook is making himself a burger and some fries for dinner. He stands, cleaning the fryer, and guess what? First victim.

Long, suspenseful sequence, too, with a black-clad assailant lifting the cook up higher and higher, suspending him over the fryer, not quite getting him into the hot oil. It’s pretty brutal. A complete 180 from the last two films.

And then: Ronnie is back! Yes, the meathead from the original who had the privilege of seeing Angela’s man-bits is working for the camp, and we’ll discover later that he’s also part owner. This information doesn’t lead to anything.

Subsequently, at first I was going to say that the scene had no purpose – it’s essentially Ronnie, Frank, and The Chef talking about the fact that Mickey needs to be let go – but then I remembered that after Mickey got boiled in oil, he was also bagged up and thrown into a dumpster.

So really, this scene is explaining why no on goes looking for Mickey later. It does not, however, explain where The Chef goes after this. The Chef, by the way, is played by Isaac Hayes, and I will pause for a moment here so that you may come up with your own joke.

Either way, movie, you used your scenes in a logical manner. I’m sorry I doubted you.

The next night finds everyone in the gymnasium which, it must be mentioned, also has a large stage on one side of it that’s usually hidden behind a curtain. I’m telling you this now because it plays into some later sequences, and I don’t want to have to explain it then.

Just remember: Gym. Stage. Behind curtain. Lock that down in your brain.

Okay.

Behind the curtain, two stoners are making a “joint” using cow manure. They are not smoking it. No, indeed. They are intending to use it for a hilarious practical joke which will most certainly not end up with one of them being dead.

In the gym, Alan shows up, he tries to hit on the girl he likes, and we learn that he smells bad and hasn’t changed his shirt since the night before.

As near as I can tell, he never changes his shirt during most or all of the course of this film. So let’s just add that to things to remember. Gym. Stage. Behind curtain. Dirty shirt.

Eventually, Alan gets into a fight with one of the other boys, which ends with Alan being thrown out. So Alan goes backstage, encounters the stoners, and is given a very special joint to take a few pulls from.

Alan smokes, then does some retching. More kids head backstage where they give Alan a hard time and a very special nickname, which I’m just not going to get into. Really. It’s not worth your time. Moving on.

A counselor named Petey shows up to rescue Alan, with Ronnie tagging along for moral support. Or something. It’s not important. Just remember, Petey and then Ronnie. Add that to the list above.

We’ve building a clue list here, people. Keep your head in the game.

Later, we encounter the two stoners and a couple of girls on the beach, where they’re sitting down while lighting up. The two girls decide to take off, as does one of the stoners, who feels like abandoning his buddy to a hideous fate.

The remaining stoner passes out, more or less, and here comes our friend all dressed in black. The man in black ties the stoner to the chair, forces him to drink a bunch of gasoline, and then makes him take a toke.

The stoner explodes, something I am sure is impossible, but what do I know? It’s not like I’ve had a lot of experience with stoners and pyrotechnics.

At this point, Ronnie, Frank, and cancer-cop show up. Ronnie explains that he has a bad feeling about the exploding stoner, because if there’s another reaction to have to something like that, I don’t know what it is.

No, I’m sorry. What I mean to say is that it reminds him of when dude-girl killed a bunch of people years ago.

The three stooges then chew through a quick explanation of what happened in the first movie, for all the people who rented “Return to Sleepaway Camp” who are juuust starting to suspect that it is not a sequel to the Disney Sunday Movie they saw back in the early 90s.

We do get one interesting bit of information, however – Angela’s cousin Ricky is still alive, and living nearby.

But we’re going to ignore that for the moment, and cut to the next day, where the girls are all playing croquet.

Alan runs up and starts kicking everyone’s balls around (joke to be filled in later goes here). He refuses to stop until Karen says she’ll meet him at his “secret” spot, which she later finds without, say, getting directions from Alan. Who obviously doesn’t understand what the word “secret” means.

Karen finally agrees to meet up with him, but she wants to bring a friend.

You might be thinking, “I’ll bet that’s important later.” Nope.

Alan then runs off to catch up with the boys, who are all playing paintball. This ends with everyone on both teams shooting him. What the movie is trying to convey is that he has a popularity problem.

Also worth mentioning: Still hasn’t changed his shirt.

Cancer-cop goes to visit Ricky. Exposition happens, mostly revolving around whether or not Angela is girl or a guy, and we learn that Ricky is a surprisingly good actor, seeing as how he only had one role between “Sleepaway Camp” and “Return to Sleepaway Camp.”

Long story short, Angela has been locked up since the end of the first movie. This must be one of those alternate timelines they talk about in “Back to the Future Part II.”

By the lake, Karen and pal go to visit Alan, who still hasn’t changed his now paint-covered shirt. Things are going poorly when, suddenly, dead skinned frogs start to appear.

Karen figures there’s something wrong with Alan (er… wrong-er) and she runs. A couple of dudes come out of the woods brandishing a knife and talking about frog-skinning. Alan says, “I hate you so bad…” and takes off after Karen.

He catches up to her on the dock, and after some yelling, Randy shows up and has a bunch of boys give Alan a wedgie that ends with his underwear being ripped in half and Alan flying into the lake.

Petey comes to his rescue again. And they run into Ronnie again.

Later, all the kids try to get Karen to pull a prank on Alan, because the fact that the stoner guy is WAY dead will never deter them from continuing their hijinks. Karen thinks this is a bad idea. It does not prevent her from doing it anyway.

On the other side of camp, Frank, camp owner, has discovered that his talking bird now says bad things that only Alan says. So he goes to confront Alan.

Over at the canteen, Alan hassles some geeks so he can get through the candy line faster, and a girl spitballs him. Alan throws a cup of soda on her. Frank shows up in the nick of time, and prevents Alan taking a beating from a girl.

Alan runs away. Again.

He runs out the door and sees Karen, who says that a bunch of girls are playing spin the bottle and that he’s been invited to join what until this moment was apparently a gathering of hedonistic Sapphic love.

Alan says yes, and ends up backstage. Remember that place? Just a curtain separating it from the gym?

Results: Alan on the stage in his underpants.

Petey saves him again. Ronnie shows up moments later, again.

This finally pays off with Ronnie yelling that, “It’s not Petey, it’s PETER!” Because he figures Petey is the artist formerly known as Angela back when she was a boy.

Cancer-cop shows up again, because they probably just have buttons all over the camp that someone presses when they need an officer of the law, like, right now.

A bunch of kids in the woods taunt Alan, who opts to try the “running and screaming,” method of escape. Ronnie goes after him. (Why does Ronnie never catch him? The dude is buff. Freaky buff. And Alan, as previously mentioned, is a little on the heavy side. Plus he leaves behind that miasma, which you could probably follow…)

Back at Frank’s, things aren’t looking too good for old Frankie. By which I mean his bird is pulled out of its cage, Frank is tied to a chair, the cage is bolted around his head, and some rats are shoved into the cage.

Meanwhile, all the girls go out for ice cream, to help Karen feel better about pushing Alan over the edge of the cliffs of insanity. As the girls head out, the scene culminates in a menacing shot of the black-clad killer. Things are going to end badly for someone.

Randy the counselor takes his special lady, Linda, out into the woods for some pine-needles-in-a-bad-place action, only first he makes her go get some blankets and beer while he relieves himself.

One minute later, he ends up tied to a tree with fishing wire looped about his manly bits. Oh, and the other end is tied to his jeep, which Linda, once frightened, drives away. There’s some suspense but, assuming Randy wants to live after what happens to him, he’ll probably need some reconstructive surgery. That’s all I’m going to say about that.

Oh, and Linda runs the jeep into some barbed wire. Bad things happen to her.

Back at his cabin, one of the boys opts to keep looking through a hole in the floor, despite the fact that a large pointed stick popped up through it mere moments ago. Let us say he kind of gets what he deserves. Not for being mean, but for being dumb enough to keep sticking his eye over the hole like that.

Ronnie finds Frank. Or rather, he finds the bits the rat hasn’t eaten.

Over in the girl’s cabin, the girl who shot spitballs at Alan comes in, lies down in bed, and then discovers that the bunk above her has been replaced with a board of nails, spiky side down.

At which point our black-clad assailant leaps from the rafters and shoves the board down on her.

You know what, though? This sounds like an impossible amount of work. I mean, first, you need to have a TON of nails, which you then have to nail through a board that has to be perfectly suspended over another bed, but which won’t fall with minor rocking.

Then you’ve gotta hide in the rafters, and hope no one spots you.

Then you’ve gotta hope that whoever is on the top bunk doesn’t show up first, or they’re going to go to bed, the bed will collapse, and there’s still a dude just standing in the rafters, biding his time, waiting for the right victim to come along.

All in all, way too much complication. Probably would have been better off, say, wiring a bomb to her mattress. A little more pre-work, sure, but a much better chance that it would have succeeded.

Only it did succeed, so I guess the point is moot.

Karen and her buddy find the dead girl, and Karen figures that Alan is the killer and that she’s pretty much got a death notice pinned to her head.

All of our main players gather together – Ronnie. Karen. Cancer-cop. The kids are all ordered back to their cabins. For safety. Or something.

Oh, and Ricky shows up, because the cop called him. Only the cop didn’t.

Karen runs off into the woods, where she eventually bumps into Randy and Linda, who are both still alive.

She ends up unconscious, and when she wakes up she’s in a noose hooked to a basketball hoop, and the black-clad killer is pressing the switch to raise the hoop. Only she’s saved at the last minute by Michael, Alan’s half-brother.

(Remember him? Sure you do.)

Oh, and the black-clad killer runs out, and moments later, cancer-cop walks in.

Michael grabs a croquet mallet and goes to “talk” to Alan rather harshly. Alan claims he doesn’t know what’s going on. Which as it turns out, is true. Based on the black-clad hand that grabs the mallet in the middle of Alan’s beat-down.

Everyone else finally catches up to Alan and there, in the shadows is… Angela. Which I already told you.

And Angela, who really needs an awesome closing line, says, “Michael though skinning frogs was cool. Ask him how cool it is now.”

As you might have guessed, Michael has been skinned.

At this point, the movie ends, except for a tag after the credits that explains how Angela… well… that’s another story, isn’t it?