Well well well...here's something rare: a decent sequel (in my opinion).
Here's something else that's rare: the movie succeeded in being creepy, which a lot of other so-called "horror" movies fail to do. They either claim to be "scary" by having (this is kind of hard to explain here in text) a person in a scene back up, not being right in the center of the Point Of View of the camera, but off to the side...so the filmmakers will hope we won't see someone grab them from offscreen and that we'll be scared, which has been done about a billion times since the first horror movie ever came out (whatever it was), or they throw in a bunch of gore and claim that it's "scary" that way. (Some people also don't know what scary is, like when a friend of mine once said she didn't like them scary movies, like Freddy Krueger and all...come on, Freddy wasn't scary, he was just cool!)
Actually, I didn't think this movie was scary either, but creepy, as I kind of liken the atmosphere of this movie to Steven King's Children of the Corn short story, which I thought was really creepy due to a town being totally empty, for some reason...except for the weird children. Well, it wasn't creepy onscreen, since an empty town with nothing going on made it...BORING. Here the towns are empty...and so are all of the graves; they looked like they were freshly dug for the newly deceased to be placed into, but it was actually just the opposite (and by the way, was I the only one to notice that every SINGLE small town had absolutely HUGE graveyards?!).
Granted, some of the script bites, I didn't think the new Michael could act (some people on here thought he could, but he just seemed to only have one facial expression and only said his lines with only one or two [mono]tones...THAT'S acting?) and some of it didn't make any sense...and I don't mean in the ways as to why the Tall Man is compressing humans into the evil dwarf minions, what the spheres are, etc., but I'm talking about what that priest had to do with it and all; his scenes are confusing and unexplained and should've been left out or explained as to what exactly he was doing (or what he was hoping to accomplish).
Some people have complained about how the atmosphere isn't the same as the first one, but I can't really comment on it, since I only saw the original about 15 years ago on tv, but rest assured, I WILL be re-renting it in the near future! All I can say is that this sequel was pretty brightly lit--rather than making it dark so we can't see who or what is going to pop out from the shadows, hoping to scare us (oh PLEASE!)--yet it was still creepy. So a new atmosphere was added! I'm just looking forward to Phantasm's End, slated for release in 2002!
Here's something else that's rare: the movie succeeded in being creepy, which a lot of other so-called "horror" movies fail to do. They either claim to be "scary" by having (this is kind of hard to explain here in text) a person in a scene back up, not being right in the center of the Point Of View of the camera, but off to the side...so the filmmakers will hope we won't see someone grab them from offscreen and that we'll be scared, which has been done about a billion times since the first horror movie ever came out (whatever it was), or they throw in a bunch of gore and claim that it's "scary" that way. (Some people also don't know what scary is, like when a friend of mine once said she didn't like them scary movies, like Freddy Krueger and all...come on, Freddy wasn't scary, he was just cool!)
Actually, I didn't think this movie was scary either, but creepy, as I kind of liken the atmosphere of this movie to Steven King's Children of the Corn short story, which I thought was really creepy due to a town being totally empty, for some reason...except for the weird children. Well, it wasn't creepy onscreen, since an empty town with nothing going on made it...BORING. Here the towns are empty...and so are all of the graves; they looked like they were freshly dug for the newly deceased to be placed into, but it was actually just the opposite (and by the way, was I the only one to notice that every SINGLE small town had absolutely HUGE graveyards?!).
Granted, some of the script bites, I didn't think the new Michael could act (some people on here thought he could, but he just seemed to only have one facial expression and only said his lines with only one or two [mono]tones...THAT'S acting?) and some of it didn't make any sense...and I don't mean in the ways as to why the Tall Man is compressing humans into the evil dwarf minions, what the spheres are, etc., but I'm talking about what that priest had to do with it and all; his scenes are confusing and unexplained and should've been left out or explained as to what exactly he was doing (or what he was hoping to accomplish).
Some people have complained about how the atmosphere isn't the same as the first one, but I can't really comment on it, since I only saw the original about 15 years ago on tv, but rest assured, I WILL be re-renting it in the near future! All I can say is that this sequel was pretty brightly lit--rather than making it dark so we can't see who or what is going to pop out from the shadows, hoping to scare us (oh PLEASE!)--yet it was still creepy. So a new atmosphere was added! I'm just looking forward to Phantasm's End, slated for release in 2002!