Such a frustrating disappointment

Plot so thin, it passes unnoticed.

Gripping story with well-crafted characters

It is interesting even when nothing much happens, which is for most of its 3-hour running time. Read full review

Mike and Reggie continue to hunt the mysterious Tall Man...According to Reggie Bannister, Universal Studios refused to theatrically distribute the film due to a conflict with Coscarelli. The film was released direct-to-video in 1994. In 1996, the Los Angeles Times reported that "Phantasm III" was one of the top 100 highest selling direct-to-video titles.Some say this is the weakest in the series. As I have not seen part four yet, I cannot comment with authority, but I will say it is not as great as the original or the sequel. I still enjoyed it, and it has some fun moments and good special effects, but little seems to happen overall. But I suppose any time you see Reggie with a flame thrower, that is a good thing.

Phantasm III is very much like Phantasm II, but a little better if only because the original Michael is in it. But not for very much. Many of the other elements were in II and frankly, you could skip II and go right to this one and not have missed one thing.Not a big-budget series of films, this seems like one episode of a weekly TV series, where they are on a road trip looking for the Tall Man. Their mission: to explore strange old mausoleums, to seek out new death and decimated civilizations, to oldly go where they have gone before.Each new entry apparently requires a new style of sphere (I'd like to see the "action figure" for those!) and new quirky characters. The Tall Man remains creepy but that may get diluted because of his indestructability. There is no real ending for this movie, obviously set up for yet another sequel. I'm hoping they are setting up Michael to be an eventual successor to The Tall Man. But the story has to end somewhere.That said, it is a decent waste of 90 minutes, not all that scary.

Angus Scrimm is back again as the evil tall man, here joined by returning cast members A. Michael Baldwin as Mike, and Bill Thornbury as Jody, who returns from the dead(!) to warn his brother Mike that the tall man is more determined than ever to not only succeed in his plan of human enslavement, but that he also wants Mike himself this time. Reggie Bannister returns as friend Reggie, former Ice Cream vendor turned wandering warrior.Awful sequel is loaded with too many annoying characters who add nothing, while film lurches back and forth between heavy-handed humor to gruesome violence, all in an increasingly incoherent story that leads nowhere. The least in the series.

Phantasm III (1994) * 1/2 (out of 4) Reggie (Reggie Bannister) and Mike (A. Michael Baldwin) are again looking for the Tall Man (Angus Scrimm) who is (once again) going from town to town killing everyone. This time the two have the help of a 8-year-old boy, a tough black chick (Gloria Lynne Henry) and Mike's dead brother Jody (Bill Thornbury). This third film in the series takes a giant leap into the territory of horror/comedy as we get a lot of slapstick bits but in the end both elements fail and the final product is another disappointment. I'm really not sure why this series is so popular outside of the atmosphere of the first one and the gore of the second, this third entry has very little going for it. Once again Bannister manages to be entertaining in terms of his dramatic style and I must admit that his comic timing got a few laughs. Scrimm is once again back of the Tall Man and he fits the the role perfectly. Both Baldwin and Thornbury, members of the original film, are back and both are decent but nothing great. The gore this time out doesn't come anywhere close to the previous film and even the classic sphere isn't used as nicely as the previous films. I'm really not sure why the director decided to cut out the red stuff while adding more laughs but that's exactly what happened. The movie runs out of gas around the hour mark and this here makes the final thirty-minutes rather hard to take and the screenplay really doesn't give us too much.