If the sound of that sonorous, ball-rattling growl wasn't enough to make you wet yourself, you needed to check your pulse to see if it was still there. Or as the poster and the previews so aptly put it: "If THIS doesn't scare you, YOU'RE ALREADY DEAD!!!"<br /><br />At the time that movies like THE EXORCIST, HALLOWEEN and THE FURY had already bolted from the gate in the Kentucky Derby of scaring up "boo" and "bling" at the Box Office, there were some nifty little gems that wormed their way between the cracks to scoop up some crumbs and some die-hard fans who became fiercely loyal to them and the franchises they eventually spawned. Of those films that surfaced at the time, the most imaginative and out- and-out frightening of them all was PHANTASM.<br /><br />Mike (A. Michael Baldwin), the youngest brother of Jody (Bill Thornbury) is always underfoot, always shadowing his big brother. Younger bros have a way of doing that to begin with, but Mike has some "abandonment issues" and it's not a surprise: their parents were both killed in a car accident, and Jody is not only Mike's legal guardian, but he's all the family the kid has. Well, not counting Jody's best bud Reggie (Reggie Bannister), a ponytailed, laid-back Sixties holdover who drives an ice-cream truck for a living.<br /><br />PHANTASM begins with the mysterious death of a mutual friend of Jody and Reggie's. Forbidden to attend the funeral, Mike sneaks off to Morningside Cemetery anyway to watch the service through binoculars. But the event that kicks this scarefest into high gear is not the funeral, but what happens AFTERWARDS.<br /><br />The moment the mourners are gone, a hearse arrives and a seven-foot tall, gaunt vision of terror dressed in the usual funeral director's outfit, picks up the casket WITH HIS BARE HANDS and dumps it into the back of the hearse like a grocery sack. <br /><br />Mike has just had his first encounter with the ghoul known only as The Tall Man, but it definitely won't be the last. <br /><br />He manages to get brother Jody and their friend Reggie roped into believing what he's seen, and trying to find out what The Tall Man is up to, and then how to stop him. The rest of the movie is catapulted into a world where dream states and reality exist almost as one, and you have no idea from moment to terrifying moment what the hell is going to happen next. <br /><br />Using every trick in the book that could be created before the benefits of CGI, director Don Coscarelli blends horror, sci-fi, comedy, fantasy and everything in between to keep the audience laughing and screaming, sometimes all at once. Referencing Mike Oldfield's haunting theme to THE EXORCIST, composers Fred Myrow and Malcolm Seagrave came up with a superb score that's just as haunting and memorable in its own right, underscoring the visuals perfectly. <br /><br />And if the acting is not top drawer from a then no-name cast, at least the performances are somewhat natural and not over-acted. The key scene-stealer is Bannister, a great instinctive Cheech-and-Chong-type comic, whose priceless expressions and timing would be enlisted for a whole slew of PHANTASM sequels.<br /><br />But the acting awards overall have to go to Angus Scrimm as The Tall Man. A former schoolteacher, Scrimm, with very little help from the makeup department, cut such a formidable figure of fright, that it would be impossible to imagine any sequels without him. (Indeed; he's in all of them.) <br /><br />And the spare special effects budget is used wisely on briefly glimpsed but highly effective set-pieces based on gore and intense action, especially the mainstay of the PHANTASM series: the ominous and terrifying Silver Spheres. <br /><br />If (Gawd forbid!) any talk of a remake actually leads to an upcoming movie, (and there HAS been talk), I would only hope that Don Coscarelli is hired to do it justice. No other director could bring to it the sparks of originality that spawned the series in the first place.<br /><br />A little on the dated side, but for anyone who considers themselves a true fan of the genre, this is REQUIRED viewing!