Phantoms

The Thing’s long lost cousin (sort of) in an isolated town in the mountains of Colorado Two sisters (Rose McGowan & Joanna Going) visit a town in the Rockies, which is mysteriously absent of people except for a few corpses. They eventually encounter a Sheriff (Ben Affleck) and his deputies as the mystery deepens (Liev Schreiber plays one of the deputies). Peter O'Toole is on hand as an eccentric British writer who assists the group while Clifton Powell plays the commanding officer of an Army unit sent to the town. The movie came out in 1998 and was written by heralded horror author Dean Koontz (both the screenplay and the novel). The story is basically “The Thing” (1982) set in a Rockies town with various nuances, like the addition of two females. Speaking of whom, Rose and Joanna have stunning faces, but their beauty is never really capitalized on in the film. Joanna, for instance, wears ridiculously baggy tan slacks the entire runtime. The first half is nice & mysterious with several genuinely creepy sequences whereas the second half focuses on the incredible source of the horror and the complexities thereof. People complain about the latter portions, and I can see where they’re coming from, but I like the way the protagonists put their heads together to try to figure out and defeat the diabolical phenomenon. The film runs 1 hour, 36 minutes and was shot in Georgetown, Colorado. GRADE: B-

I had last seen this probably back in 2000 on DVD but don't remember a damn thing about it and really only remember the line in Jay and Silent Bob Stike Back, "Affleck was the bomb in Phantoms". In any case, some of the effects were decent and cool shots here and there, but the quick editing, likely to cover the deficiencies in the effects, was annoying. Watchable I guess but had so much potential to be better. Kind of surprising nobody has tried to adapt this in a mini-series. **2.5/5**