Wonderful, excellent, delightful, for an utter piece of crap. Utilizing much the same story, budget and Z-movie trimmings as Ed Wood's best-known film, PHANTASM is eminently watchable trash. It is as delicious for its awfulness as much as for its willingness to do all kinds of absurd things, like turning corpses into Jawas and storing them in an ice cream truck. <br /><br />Complete with screamingly bad acting and ridiculous, unnecessary, illogical plot contrivances, this movie also features a gateway to another dimension, an abandoned mineshaft, a flying ball-bearing, some severed fingers, a couple of unmotivated sex scenes, a giant housefly on wires, a few shotgunned dwarfs, a bald guy with a ponytail and a 1970 Barracuda. Plus Angus Scrimm as Tor Johnson.<br /><br />It says something about the acid generation that while PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE was a dismal box office failure in 1959, twenty years later PHANTASM was popular enough to achieve international release, spawn at least four sequels, and launch the career of questionable auteur Don Coscarelli. Thanks, Timothy Leary.