The sheer number of books Dean Koontz has written is ridiculous. Equally as ridiculous as the film adaptation of Phantoms. The hook of this horror trip is simple enough: the population of a small Colorado ski resort town have all but vanished and the remaining residents are found dead and rapidly decomposed. The only living people in town are Lisa (Rose McGowan), her sister (and the town’s doctor) Jennifer (Joanna Going), Sheriff Hammond (Ben Affleck) and his two deputies, Stu and Steve (Liev Schreiber and Nicky Katt). But Phantoms is less actively interested in solving the mystery of Snowfield and more concerned with running down the list of lite-horror tropes – cars that won’t start; phones that won’t work – until the FBI comes to save the day.
Let’s start with Phantoms’ biggest problem: its cast. Now, I don’t mean that the cast do a terrible job but rather that they are rarely suited to their roles. Likely to improve the movie’s chances at the box office, many of the characters were made younger and sexier. Going is definitely on the young side for a private practice doctor. But the worst offense is Affleck’s casting as a sheriff whose backstory has him being a former FBI agent who left the agency after accidentally killing a child. That he is a sheriff is a stretch in itself, but his professional progression and the attached emotional trauma is too much to believe from a 25-year-old Affleck. But the reasoning behind these questionable casting decisions is fairly obvious: the makers of Phantoms wanted the film to compete with contemporary horror flicks like Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer.
The difference between those very popular slasher films and Phantoms, though, (aside from the fact that it lacks their satirical bent) is that Koontz’s story, at its heart, is a sci-fi thriller with a latter half that goes heavy on the sci-fi. The “phantom” responsible for wiping out Snowfield isn’t anything as concrete as a serial killer but a “creature” that sucks people’s brains out through their eye sockets and, unfortunately, looks a hell of a lot like a mini Mothra in its favorite form. In the first act, the “horror” is mostly limited to creepy, and that creepiness is all thanks to Schreiber’s Stu. Whether he’s a budding psychopath or just on the verge of a breakdown is hard to say, but he creates many an uncomfortable moment by caressing half-naked dead old ladies and justifying his cryptic behavior with even more cryptic lines like “I’m just trying to learn to be a better cop.” Okay, that’s no reason to explore your twisted necrophiliac fantasies.
Even though there’s not much more to the Mothra (it’s a better name than “the Ancient Enemy”) attack scenes than gore and ear-shattering sound effects, they are an improvement on the actual exposition scenes. You see, when the FBI gets wind of a creature that kills en masse, SOP dictates they locate a discredited academic whose writings on this sentient primordial amoeba are regularly published in a tabloid that might as well be Weekly World News. Enter Peter O’Toole—clearly looking for a straightforward gig and a paycheck—as Dr. Timothy Flyte. He explains to the FBI and, later, our lone survivors in Snowfield that this “chaos in the flesh” is an ancient being almost atomically identical to petroleum that absorbs victims (from dinosaurs to the people of Roanoke Island) and stores all their knowledge. It can also create walking husks of said victims to attack new victims (death can’t keep Stu from being a creeper). But what is its purpose this time around? The Ancient Enemy thinks it’s a god and wants Flyte to spread knowledge of its existence throughout the world. Never mind the fact that no one has ever believed him before.
Any impetus the movie had built up to this point immediately deflates when we shift into science lab mode. Flyte has a hunch that the creature can be killed by fossil fuel-ingesting bacteria, and the team get to work sorting out a delivery system. Sure, random hazmatted Federal agents die gruesomely, but we’ve more or less been desensitized to that. When we finally see the “truer” form of the Ancient Enemy, it just looks like a giant slime ball. And that really doesn’t work when you’re trying to scare people. But Phantoms settles for a respectable horror premise and leaves everything else up to genre clichés and hokey visuals. With a philosophy like that, it’s no wonder the film wasn’t a hit.
