{"id":18494,"date":"2012-12-04T00:31:04","date_gmt":"2012-12-04T08:31:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.quartertothree.com\/fp\/?p=18494"},"modified":"2013-08-30T15:19:47","modified_gmt":"2013-08-30T22:19:47","slug":"worst-thing-youll-see-all-week-phantoms","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.quartertothree.com\/fp\/2012\/12\/04\/worst-thing-youll-see-all-week-phantoms\/","title":{"rendered":"Worst thing you&#8217;ll see all week: Phantoms"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"fancybox\" rel=\"18494\" href=\"http:\/\/www.quartertothree.com\/fp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/12\/this_is_how_you_react_to_killer_tar.jpg\"<\/a><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.quartertothree.com\/fp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/12\/this_is_how_you_react_to_killer_tar.jpg\" alt=\"\" title=\"this_is_how_you_react_to_killer_tar\" width=\"600\" height=\"337\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-18496\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Phantoms is forty five minutes of made-for-TV-level haunted house horror, and then forty-five minutes of scientificky sci-fi hoo-ha with soldiers and the dog from The Thing, but an adorable golden lab instead of an inscrutable husky.   During the scientificky hoo-ha part, Peter O&#8217;Toole &#8212; not the sad old man from the movie Venus, but an elder version of the fiery young Peter O&#8217;Toole &#8212; is yelling at Ben Affleck &#8212; not the stridently soulful Hollywood celebrity who made Argo, but the dumbass kid who stumbled into too many leading roles in the 90s.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;This thing is what wiped out the dinosaurs and they were pretty tough fucking customers!&#8221; says O&#8217;Toole, describing the monster, which is basically sentient primordial tar.  Later a bunch of zombies show up to make a zombie tornado that Ben Affleck shoots.  Liev Schreiber is one of the minibosses.  To beat him, you have to use the shotgun to shoot the syringe into his head.<\/p>\n<p>Rose McGowan sits behind O&#8217;Toole, trying various expressions.  That&#8217;s one of them up there.  She doesn&#8217;t have any lines during most of the exchanges, which is a shame. I&#8217;ve seen Planet Terror about a zillion times. She obviously channeled her Phantoms experience to know how to make bad horror oh-so-good. She spends a lot of Phantoms hanging out in shots where she doesn&#8217;t have any dialogue. It&#8217;s as if the director &#8212; a guy named Joe Chapelle who would go on to work on TV shows including The Wire, which I&#8217;ve been told is good &#8212; has the presence of mind to know a watchable actor when he casts one. Not that you&#8217;d know this from the amount of screen time given to Ben Affleck and someone named Jennifer Going. Miss Going, who I thought was either Joanna Whaley-Kilmer or Ally Sheedy for most of the movie&#8217;s running time, has an apt name given her credits since Phantoms.<\/p>\n<p>At the opening of the movie, the title card for Phantoms comes onscreen as follows:<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">Phantoms<br \/>\nDean Koontz&#8217;s<\/p>\n<p>In that order. Like it just wants to quickly remind you that these aren&#8217;t any normal Phantoms. They&#8217;re Dean Koontz&#8217;s. Based on his book. Dean Koontz&#8217;s. Made from his screenplay. Dean Koontz&#8217;s.  And now you&#8217;re about to watch a hilariously incompetent movie.  Dean Koontz&#8217;s.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[45],"class_list":["post-18494","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movies","tag-horror"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.7 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Worst thing you&#039;ll see all week: Phantoms - Quarter to Three<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.quartertothree.com\/fp\/2012\/12\/04\/worst-thing-youll-see-all-week-phantoms\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Worst thing you&#039;ll see all week: Phantoms - 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