Phantoms

The late 90's are known to horror historians (heh) for discharging slashers at an exhaustive rate, but there was another trend at work - monster movies!  It wasn't a successful trend.  I stagger to confab how it became a trend at all, and you may contend that there was no modish furor behind it, but these films did exist.  The Relic, Mimic, Deep Rising, Virus...they refused to be brushed off as mild alternatives for those of us who tired of masked assholes wielding acicular silverware.  In the end, they were brushed off at the box office.  Whether or not they found legs on home video is irrelevant 25 years later, at least as irrelevant as this opening paragraph.  Let's talk about 1998's Phantoms.

A young Ben Affleck stars as Sheriff Bryce Hammond, a former FBI agent investigating the designs behind a dropped call.  He finds a pair of sisters and precisely no one else.  The setting is a desolate, hibernal town in Colorado that has been plundered of life.  Residents?  Vanished.  Cars?  Empty.  Cadavers begin to accumulate, however, and there are no clues to be found.  This is where I'll chime in with a note of praise.  The first act is beautifully set up.  You would never guess that these establishing moments of austere doom were directed by the same guy who manned Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers.  Could it be that, independent of intrusive studio fingers, Joe Chappelle is actually talented?  Go figure.

The flawless build is short-lived.  You can almost smell the spot in the script where it realizes (yes, it's sentient) that it might have to explain away the mystery it took such great care to constitute.  We never get a clear answer.  What kind of heavy are we dealing with here?  Um, it's ancient!  How does it attack?  Um, off-screen!  How does it know the name of a random scholar, the exquisite Peter O'Toole?  Um, it's ancient!  Other points of uncertainty are left dangling.  Like Deputy Stu.  I don't mind Liev Schreiber, but what's up with this fucker?  He's the most childish, featherbrained cop in existence.  We are led to believe that he's under the influence of "phantoms," but I'm calling bullshit.

The CGI is spotty, though my nostalgia has intensified to where I'm almost fond of those bumbling, graceless varmints.  Would it be presumptuous to claim that early CGI spectacles are my generation's half-baked redactions of stop-motion effects?  It's something to chew on (and spit out).  The ending is scientific drivel.  Our ancient enemy is ravaged by a compound used to combat oil spills or some fucking shit.  There is room left for a sequel, but mercifully, it's been radio silence on that front.  Robert Z'Dar says, "I'm genuinely happy for Bennifer."