Vidmark Entertainment | Review by Dan Taylor
This entry comes courtesy
of Ruggero Deodato, a favorite of mine simply
for his epic CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST. Sadly,
none of his work that I've seen since can
even compare to that classic, and PHANTOM
OF DEATH comes nowhere close!
The film starts with concert
pianist Michael York (yes, the same Michael
York later seen in the AUSTIN
POWERS films) playing piano intercut
with some ninja combat training and a woman
getting sliced in the neck, complete with
a Deodato-style artery spurt! At this point,
yours truly and all present are absolutely
clueless. "No matter," we say,
"it's Italian; we're not supposed to
understand it."
Pretty soon we get a total
Argento rip-off as a girl gets spiked in
the neck and shoved through a plate glass
window (also complete with artery spurt)
and a classic line of 'Fucking Obvious Dialogue':
"It takes two to go to bed together!"
Everyone in the film immediately
feels safer once Donald Pleasance arrives
on the set. [Did you ever notice that he
just doesn't look like the kind of guy you'd
feel comfortable calling "Don."]
The person that feels the safest is obviously
the killer as he begins calling Pleasance
on the phone and taunting him.
York then travels to his mother's
house in Italy, and then its two months
later. I guess time flies when you have
no fucking clue! The next thing you know,
York is beating some guy senseless in a
public restroom because he made a remark
about the star's receeding hairline. "Oh
my God," I thought, "is this really
about the horrors of male pattern baldness?!"
Eventually we learn that York
has progeria, the rare disease that causes
the body to age very rapidly. We also learn
that he knocked a chick up who thinks nothing
of not hearing from him for months on end
(it reminds me of the scene in Woody Allen's
TAKE THE MONEY & RUN where he tells
Janet Margolin that the symphony is going
on tour for "five to ten years."),
and he's afraid the baby will be born with
the disease. (Has anyone else noticed the
similarities to Cronenberg's THE FLY??)
One Vaseline-lensed flashback and death
by light fixture later York is in his kitchen
talking to his dog and making some totally
crazed analogy between dogs and old people.
You know, sometimes it's really
sad to see once-popular stars reduced to
playing psychotic, aging killers in Italian
flicks. This, however, isn't one of those
times.
Basically, the old York enjoys
taunting and harassing Pleasance, but then
again who doesn't? In the end, Deodato takes
his variation on THE FLY to the nth degree
and makes us all feel pretty cheated at
having sat through the whole thing.
Overall, it's pretty terrible,
but Deodato always provides a couple "price
of admission" scenes that make it all
worthwhile. And remember, in the words of
Don Pleasance (see?): "There's room
for everyone in Rome." [Inexplicably
the box touts this as the ORIGINAL UNCUT
VERSION! However, the flick is so tame that
I can't figure out what might have been
cut.]
