[versions] Phantasm (1979)

[LucasGodzilla]

Since Chewtobacca created a thread talking about Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, I decided to make a thread talking about one of my personal favorite cult-classic horror movies, Don Coscarelli's Phantasm. Although y'all can post whatever about the movie, the main thing I do want to talk about is the original first workprint cut of the movie.

If it isn't obvious from that excerpt from the Phantasmagoria documentary, the movie originally had around three hours of footage, most of which serve as unnecessary backstory. Obviously, much of this footage has been trimmed out by Coscarelli himself in order to speed up the pacing of the movie. Over the course of time, several scenes have been released through different home releases of the movie, tallying up about ten minutes of deleted scenes.

There's also a small chunk of deleted footage recycled in Phantasm IV: Oblivion which served as padding and minor backstory, however, this probably chocked up to another mere ten minutes of deleted scenes.

As you can tell though, unfortunately, much of this excised footage still remains to be officially released public which is a huge shame as a phan and as a general film enthusiast.

I actually ended up actually talking to Don Coscarelli himself at a screening of Phantasm at some independent theater in Santa Ana last October.

@LucasGojira (Oct 15 2018)

While he was signing some of my stuff, we talked a bit about the deleted footage and I ended up asking him if he would ever consider releasing an extended version of the movie with the cut footage added back in, to which he responded stating that although it wouldn't be the best version of the movie, it'd certainly serve as something worth checking out to all the hardcore phans out there in the world and that he may consider doing that as a fun side-project someday and that if it were to be made / restored, it would likely receive limited distribution.

As of right now though, I have no idea if that'll actually come to fruition, at least not anytime soon. The closest thing to that right now is this nine-year-old post...

"Newly Found P1 Deleted Scene" - DustinM (Phantasm Community)

Maybe Phantasm Exhumed has more stills of deleted scenes but I don't know, I'm currently waiting out for a new batch print of the Red Planet Edition.

On a side-note, I'd just like to post these behind-the-scenes images from an old tweet I stumbled across one day for anyone who's interested at just taking a quick peek.

@Barry_Cinematic (18 Apr 2016)

I wish there's more BTS footage and stills but it seems to also be rather sparse.

[CSchmidlapp]

Ive never seen Phantasm. But that is something I'm going to remedy.
Im a huge fan of Bubba Ho-Tep and have been meaning to watch more of Don Coscarelli work since its release!

What is the best version/disc to pick up?
Has a 'fan' put together an extended cut with the available footage?

[LucasGodzilla]

Ive never seen Phantasm. But that is something I'm going to remedy.
Im a huge fan of Bubba Ho-Tep and have been meaning to watch more of Don Coscarelli work since its release!

What is the best version/disc to pick up?
Has a 'fan' put together an extended cut with the available footage?

The best version is kind of any version in recent years. Ever since the release of Phantasm: Remastered, all discs have stemmed off of this new 4K transfer with little to no difference. However, if you want to check out some extras about the movie, I wouldn't recommend the basic Phantasm: Remastered listing on Amazon since it's pretty sparse with them, the Steelbook has a fair bit more. The Arrow release has the full Phantasmagoria documentary along with some other extras, however, it only comes in a full collection and it's OTP in the U.S. market, however, it is on sale in the UK for a decent price.

Also, yes, there have been a handful of extended cuts of the movie. There's one on Original Trilogy and one by a Dr. Saperstein. Although I've never checked out the OT version, it's pre-Remaster so it's probably in poor quality. I did actually watch and I can confirm it's also pre-Remaster and is riddled with several problems, including horrible color grading and audio pitching.

"This looks fine"

On the plus side though, least his cut comes with an open-matte of the movie, but I wouldn't recommend it either, too much spacing.

[oswarez]

Somebody needs to take all the footage and make Phantasm V again so we can forget that awful excuse that was Ravager.

[gilhodges]

Dunno why but since I saw the original when it first came out, it's always kinda freaked me out. Guess it did its job?