The Dumb Cool Weird Podcast
It is a podcast that covers old movies from the 20th century that are funny and ridiculous. We cover what is dumb, cool, and weird about each movie. We are raw and don't show mercy!!
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The Dumb Cool Weird Podcast
Absurd Horror and Spooky Laughs: Exploring Phantasm II (1988) - Episode 59
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Ever wondered what happens when horror meets the absurd? We're about to take you through a wild ride as we humorously dissect the bizarre 1988 horror flick, "Phantasm II," on the Dumb, Cool, Weird Podcast. Imagine a world where a quadruple-barrel shotgun and mysterious orbs unlock interdimensional gates, while a quirky midget army follows an enigmatic Tall Man. Our conversation covers everything from a bizarre casting change for Mike to the oddball weaponry and the chaotic fun of a house explosion. We even throw in some comparisons to horror classics like "Nightmare on Elm Street," "Hellraiser," and "Evil Dead," so grab your popcorn and brace yourself for some spooky laughs.
What makes a movie so baffling yet entertaining? That's the enigma of "Phantasm II," and we're here to explore it all. From a house of horrors and a mission to save Liz, to bewildering plot points that defy physics—like a car that leaks gas before catching fire—this movie keeps you guessing. We also get into the Tall Man's anti-climactic defeat and ponder his potential resurrection with a mix of skepticism and humor. Plus, the fun doesn't stop there, as we delve into the weirdness of the story's self-aware narrative and the road trip shenanigans that resemble a car commercial.
Looking for a unique way to navigate life's chaos? We think "Phantasm II" might just be the unexpected escape you need. Whether you're dealing with election stress or seeking a quirky holiday treat, this film is the perfect remedy. We wrap up with a hearty recommendation to watch the first installment of "Phantasm" to truly appreciate the madness. So, tune in, share the laughs with your friends, and stick with us for more entertaining movie breakdowns on the Dumb, Cool, Weird Podcast, where we take you through the dumb, cool, and weird in under 20 minutes.
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dumb cool weird podcast.
Speaker 1Welcome to the dumb cool, weird podcast, and uh well get it again phantasm 2 it started right where it left off in the first film yep, and it turns out that every single sequel going forward is going to do the same thing. Yeah, so, um, yeah, buckle up. It's going to be a wild ride over the next couple weeks. But this one definitely took the cake and it burnt the cake, and then it regurgitated the cake and then it shit out the cake and then um one of those little droney ball things, finger fuck the cake, I guess yep, so well.
Speaker 1Um, you know, when you watch this movie, you're gonna notice that it's not the same mike. It's a different actor. They get a lot of Mike.
Speaker 2The original Mike, I think, comes back in like the third one.
Speaker 1Third one, fourth one and fifth one. I guess he probably had a film career after the first one and then it died down by the time the third one rolled around.
Speaker 2I was going to say that kid looked pretty familiar from like other 70s and 80s films and then he was like you know, I guess I can't do commercials anymore. Phantasm 2. Yeah, fuck it. Yeah, reggie was like in one commercial and the rest of his career is stuck in Phantasm.
Speaker 1Yeah, so apparently what happened was the jump scare at the end apparently really happened. Michael was really grabbed and the tall man was trying to get him out of there. Happened was the jump scare at the end apparently really happened. Uh, mike was really grabbed, um, and the tall man was trying to get him out of there with his midgets with his midgets, yeah army of midgets and then, um, apparently the?
Speaker 1uh, the house explodes after mike uh and reggie get out of there, and then it turns out that didn't really happen. Apparently, seven years passed by and Mike's been in an insane asylum.
Speaker 2Yeah, and then we get another angle of the same house blowing up yeah, because we made that joke. You're like, do you think they blew up two houses? And I'm like, yeah, no, I think they actually just took a different angle on this one.
Speaker 1Probably what they were doing is they shot one side of the house in the dream where they blew it up, and then they shot one side of the house in the dream where they blew it up, and then they shot the other side of the house at the same time while they're blowing it up, just so they could have both.
Speaker 2Yeah, apparently, reggie also. Uh, in the when the house actually blew up, lost his wife and kids was it his wife and kids?
Speaker 1yeah, it was his wife and kids. That's weird, because they didn't even establish that yeah he all.
Speaker 2He was like he's like, yeah, you know I've got the wife and you know my kid, the girls are waiting to meet their uncle mike. And then it was like he has like this weird like thought process. Like mike, the house is gonna blow up. We gotta get them out of there. It just explodes right then.
Speaker 1and there, well, mike says that to reggie yeah, that was it, um, but but prior to that they were talking about Thanksgiving dinner, apparently. Yeah, and so Thanksgiving. I mean, I don't know if it was Thanksgiving dinner, but he sure sounded like it was Thanksgiving.
Speaker 2I don't know anybody eating a turkey on any other day except Thanksgiving. That's a whole ass turkey.
Speaker 1Yeah, that's, that's. That's a good point, that's a really really good point. You know, I don't know a turkey connoisseur and I don't know a turkey connoisseur, and what happens is they basically go on this whole vendetta Like they're going to track down the tall man.
Speaker 2Yeah, and that's where it gets really fucking awkward. It starts looking like a car commercial. Yep For like a few hours, Mm-hmm. The movie also can't decide whether it wants to be Nightmare on Elm Street um Hellraiser and uh, evil Dead, oh and the Thing. And Evil Dead, yeah, and Evil Dead.
Speaker 1It's definitely all over the place. You know, they basically go on this cross-country trip trying to find out where the Tall man is. They go to different towns that have apparently been sucked dry by the Tall man.
Speaker 2Yeah, the Tall man apparently has to, has to uh, kill as many people as possible.
Speaker 1Yeah, he's got to make his midget army as much as he can. And, you know, the interesting thing is is, like, throughout this whole time, we're also hearing about this other character. Um, liz, liz, yeah, liz, you know, and apparently we saw a vision of liz, and we can't tell if that was a dream or not, but but apparently she had fucking, you know, the, you know, like a, like a Freddy Krueger tumor on her back. You know.
Speaker 2Yeah. And then uh, it comes out and it's like nice try, boy yeah.
Speaker 1Boy is like Angus scrims like favorite word to say Also that's my favorite, favorite actual name for an actor. Angus Scrimm.
Speaker 2Yep. He doesn't have very many lines or appearances in this movie.
Speaker 1Yeah, he's just kind of there. You know his henchmen get more scenes than he does.
Speaker 2And he has henchmen. I just want you to know that.
Speaker 1Yeah, like normal human henchmen, by the way. Yeah, that was the confusing part. I guess he manipulates them and brainwashes them. Who fucking knows manipulates them and brainwashes them? Who fucking knows it?
Speaker 2wasn't very clear. Lcs zombies too.
Speaker 1Yeah, zombies, he has a priest that's under his control.
Speaker 2Who then betrays him? Yep.
Speaker 1He turns his back on them and basically you know we go through this whole movie where they pick up a hitchhiker. I think her name was. What was the girl's name?
Speaker 2It doesn't matter. Oh, it was Alchemy.
Speaker 1Alchemy yeah, they pick up.
Speaker 2That's the most and it's funny they're going to Oregon. That's the most Oregon-ass name I've ever heard.
Speaker 1I'm a white girl named Alchemy. Oh yeah, I expected that, and basically they end up going to the. They finally get to their final destination, which is Alchemy's hometown, and it turned into a shithole. Turned into a shithole.
Speaker 2Like regular Oregon.
Speaker 1Yep, and it's really funny because this movie is very self-aware, right? Oh yeah, like the whole fucking time they're just making one-liners here and there, and then they set up this whole thing where Liz and her grandmother and her they just buried the grandfather and it's really hilarious because Also they never explain what happened to her sister. What? Because they never explained what happened to her sister. What was her name? Jizz, I can't remember whatever the fuck.
Speaker 2She just disappeared. Oh yeah, she just disappeared, and that's what I'm saying is like they never showed her as a midget or anything, nothing yeah, what happens is grandma turns into a midget, and you know it hits her in the head and she just jokingly goes. Oh sorry, grandma yeah, like that was hilarious, though that when she hit her with the vase. That shit was just too funny.
Speaker 1Well, it's sad because I know Grandma was like really Really disappointed about Grandpa. Yeah.
Speaker 2And I mean she was traumatized by watching Father McGregor just stab right through her.
Speaker 1Right through Grandpa. Yeah, it was pretty crazy, but you know, we kind of get towards. Like you know the part of the movie where you know they're in the town, they're set up in this house. They have like a grenade set up, a hand grenade and a half-cut Budweiser can like it's Vietnam.
Speaker 2Yep and then they have a shotgun set up which, by the way, when that grenade goes off, there should have been so much more debris and shrapnel everywhere.
Speaker 1Yep and Reggie's getting laid and he's basically.
Speaker 2The funniest way possible.
Speaker 1And she's like licking his forehead, kissing and licking the top of his head Saying oh, I love your head.
Speaker 2Yeah, and then she rides him while choking him. Yep, that was like.
Speaker 1I know you like that.
Speaker 2Yeah, that was pretty good, know you like, I know you like that. Yeah, that was, that was pretty, that was pretty good.
Phantasm 2 Movie Recap
Speaker 1That's my favorite position and um, yeah, basically it ends up happening though uh, it's, it's a pretty simple movie goes off and she just acts, very confused though she's like reggie. They come on back and while they're downstairs inspecting, the tall man steals liz away to go back to his.
Speaker 1You know fucking house of horrors window, yeah, waiting at the window, and um, yeah, so you know, we have a quadruple barrel shotgun, we have a flamethrower and all this other interesting stuff. A drill bit. We also have a tiny little chainsaw. They show up to the tall man's house to save Liz and we basically get the main part of the movie where everything goes crazy and they end up fighting the henchmen, yeah the henchmen, yeah henchmen, and then minions, and we finally get to see that retarded quadruple barrel shotgun finally be used in this whole movie.
Speaker 1Yep, and then they used it one time, and that was it.
Speaker 2Yeah that was very underwhelming, but not as funny as the scene we skipped over in the house before Liz got kidnapped, when her and Mike are sleeping next to each other and they're looking at each other and their lips aren't moving as they're communicating and they're like we're dreaming. Mike, oh wow, that's fucking horrible.
Speaker 1The acting was terrible. Yeah, and let's talk about the fact. In the last movie, every time a car would hit something, it would explode. In this scene, the car flips over, doesn't explode, and then it actually uses real-life physics, with the gas fucking leaking out and catching on fire.
Speaker 1Yeah, and let's remember that the only thing that really blows up in this movie is the houses yep, yep, the houses blow up, the cars not so much, and basically we, we, we, you know, we find out, by the way, because so we have a big showdown where they're all fighting these different guys. One guy gets cooked in an oven, another guy gets fucking like decapitated or gets destroyed from the inside by one of the fucking balls.
Speaker 2It turns out, the balls are also keys.
Speaker 1So the balls apparently are just like pocket knives. They have like 20 different functions.
Speaker 2Yeah, it lobotomizes people, it shoots three prongs in them, it cuts off their ears, it has laser beams, it has a scanner.
Speaker 1It can scan everything it can. It's a key, apparently.
Speaker 2It can grind its way into your body and turn your insides into fucking liquid pulp shit you know, yeah, it's like, but but you know, like, after explaining all that thing, all that shit and then finding out it's also a key yeah you know, nickel nickel was really puzzled by that yeah, yeah, it murders everything. Oh, and, by the way, it's a key yep, it's a key.
Speaker 1And when they get the key they open up the interdimensional like gate to where they send the fucking barrels of midgets to this other dimension where you have to be shrunk down for whatever fucking reason by the way the midgets are when they get out of the barrel.
Speaker 2They're like slimy goo babies.
Speaker 1Slimy goo babies and literally poor Reggie's stuck in this other dimension, and one of them touches him, and he's just like Mike get me out of here.
Speaker 2Just get me out of here. Help Mike, and he's like. I don't want to get touched by this thing.
Speaker 1Yeah, and they end up having their final battle with the tall man, and it's pretty anti-climatic because earlier reggie filled one of the little vats up that they apparently pump into these fucking bodies.
Speaker 2Bombing fluid was filled with hydrochloric acid.
Speaker 1I'm guessing that fluid. What it does is it goes into the regular size body and it like digests the body and makes it small into a midget. That's the only thing I can kind of figure.
Speaker 2Well, I mean, I don't really know what embalming fluid does other than preserve the insides of the body. But you know, that's the thing. If you're embalmed, why are you embalming them if you're going to?
Speaker 1put stuff on them. I don't think it's embalming fluid, I think it's some kind of solution that like shrinks the body or weird. It doesn't make any sense, but I'm just, it's a funeral home and then it's not. Yeah, I mean we're trying to inject logic here. You know where there's no logic, oh yeah.
Speaker 2Another thing we were able, every time you like want to predict something like as a joke. It's like when I was talking about oh yeah, you know, reggie's probably picking up this chick dick wet since his family died, and then at the end of the movie you're like, oh, he's just gonna pop up in the front seat. Yeah, and he did that same thing. It's like you could predict this shit.
Speaker 1Just trying to be funny yeah, it's just, it's it's self-aware at this point, I mean literally they get into a final battle with him. He gets hit by the fucking, you know, by the, the metal ball, and it does the same thing that it does everybody else and the fucking tall man just rips it off his fucking forehead and crushes it like a beer can, like you said.
Speaker 2Yeah, and then he has a tentacle come out of his skull.
Speaker 1Yep, and that was never explained, because before we could even get an explanation for that, all of a sudden they inject him with the acid-infused balming fluid. That fucking turns him into liquid shit and he dissolves and falls on the floor.
Speaker 2So here's the thing right, he dies, but then he comes back. Does he just feel like pain, like it sucks, every time he dies? But he can come back.
Speaker 1Yeah, I mean, that happens sometimes, you know.
Speaker 2It sounds annoying. You never know man.
Speaker 1I mean, you know, and then when they light up the place, you know they catch everything on fire. And you know, by the way, they didn't catch him on fire, they just caught the place on fire. They didn't even bother catching the tall man on fire when they were leaving, no, they just went with it. Yeah, and that's when they meet up with alchemy again, and you know, reggie thinks yeah and reggie thinks he's gonna get lucky. And before it happened, like I said, like nick said, I fucking I called it. I was like that's the tall man dude it's obviously the tall man he's.
Speaker 2He's brushing her hair and then a large chunk of her skin just falls off. Yep, and then, um, you know reggie's's hanging out on the outside of the car asking for help. You think he's dead.
Speaker 1Falls on the ground, you think he's totally fucking dead. And then you cut Just taking a nap, just taking a nap, and then the two, liz and Mike, are in the back. Oh, it's just a dream, it's just a dream. And then we get the best fucking line in the entire movie. He just literally the tall man, opens up the fucking the front window thing and goes oh no, it's not.
Speaker 2It's not a dream, it's not a dream. And then, and then the movie stops. And then we know that the third movie is going to start at that position, right there, yeah, we already expect it.
Phantasm 2
Speaker 1We expect it to be, we expect, we expect it to be, we expect you know. I'll be honest with you. I expect this movie to be even crazier. More Cenobites, probably, yeah, something like that. But that was Phantasm 2. Let's talk about the dumb cool and the weird.
Speaker 2Let's start with the dumb. You know what? Let's limit it to like one dumb thing, because this whole movie's dumb. Yes, the fucking orbs. Okay, the orbs being this all-encompassing Swiss Army knife murder machine that's a key and then a key Like that is the most annoying, dumb thing ever. It's like yeah, so these things will track you down, lobotomize you, turn your insides into gobbledygook or shoot laser beams after using the infrared tracking system. Oh and it's a key. It opens up, it works for my car, it works for these doors.
Speaker 1You know fun things well, um, you know, to kind of add, we talked about earlier. You know, we talked about the beginning of the movie. You know the dumb thing that I'm. The one dumb thing I noticed is all these fucking small towns have no fucking police force.
Speaker 2Yeah, Nobody's like you know, everybody's dying at a very strange rate here. There's a lot of crime happening with this one, no nothing. No, nothing. Grave robbery would have been the top thing that this small town police force would have been all over trying to figure out. Yeah, no, grave robbery would have been like the top thing that this small-town police force would have been like, all over trying to figure out.
Speaker 1Yeah, exactly, and let's be honest, the cool thing about this movie is when they blew up the fucking house.
Speaker 2Yeah, that was pretty cool. That's where all the budget went, besides the room with the tuning fork portal.
Speaker 1Yep room with the tuning fork portal, the house and the car exploding. That's obviously and I guess you could say the visual effects for the tall man fucking melting. Yeah. So but yes, I think the explosion of the house was the coolest part of that whole fucking movie.
Speaker 2And I guess we gotta go to the weird. Yeah, you can go first, man, because I know you got something to say the fact that this movie can't figure out what horror genre it wants to belong to. Are the fact that this movie can't figure out what horror genre it wants to belong to? Are we Cenobites? Are we Deadites? Are we Jawas? Am I the Crypt Keeper? No, what the fuck are you? This isn't the thing.
Speaker 1Yep, and is this a science fiction movie? Is this a horror movie?
Speaker 2I mean, Is it a comedy?
Speaker 1Yeah, Is it a?
Speaker 2car commercial. Is this a horror movie? I mean, is it a comedy? Is it a car commercial?
Speaker 1Yeah, literally a car commercial. It literally looked like a car commercial that one time in the movie.
Speaker 2Most of the angles when they're driving. It looks like it's trying to promote that car Like let's go places.
Speaker 1Yeah, let's go places. You gotta go murder the fucking tall man next week. You're going places.
Speaker 2Cross country to murder a tall, mysterious man. Get yourself a Mustang.
Speaker 1A Mustang. Yeah, I think the weirdest part about this entire movie is the fact that Reggie tried to pretend at the beginning of the fucking movie that none of that shit really happened and it was all in Mike's mind. That is a bunch of bullshit, dude.
Speaker 2What I thought was funny is like you told everybody that a bunch of midgets that you blew up my house full of midgets that attacked you. Come and find out, that's Reggie's house.
Speaker 1Yeah, it's Reggie's house.
Speaker 2That's Jody's house.
Speaker 1That's weird.
Speaker 2Yeah, you know, I want to know the story about, like when the older brother from the first movie did. He just get through part of the movie and he was like I don't ever want to come back for these again.
Speaker 1Yeah, so then they had to come up with a different plot, I guess.
Speaker 2Because like everything seemed fine.
Phantasm 2 Movie Recommendation
Speaker 1I mean, yeah, and this is Phantasm 2. I mean, if you wanna watch A movie that is fucking Bat shit crazy Off the wall, watch this movie, but you need to watch Phantasm 1 first.
Speaker 2You know, with all the troubling Things in the world, watch Phantasm To make sense of your life.
Speaker 1Yeah, You're really upset About the election. Just watch Phantasm.
Speaker 2You know you shit your pants, watch Phantasm.
Speaker 1Phantasm. It's recommended for the holidays.
Speaker 2And any delusions of grandeur.
Speaker 1You want to sign us out, Nick?
Speaker 2Stay sexy Atlanta.
Speaker 1Thanks for watching the Dumb, Cool, Weird Podcast, where we cover some of your favorite movies in 20 minutes or less for your convenience. We go over what is dumb, cool and weird about movies and check out our Wayback Wednesdays. We do sometimes for other stuff, and please share us with your friends.
