''Phantoms'' is a 1998 American

science fiction Science fiction (sometimes shortened to Sci-Fi or SF) is a genre of speculative fiction which typically deals with imaginative and futuristic concepts such as advanced science and technology, space exploration, time travel, parallel unive ...

horror film Horror is a film genre that seeks to elicit fear or disgust in its audience for entertainment purposes. Horror films often explore dark subject matter and may deal with transgressive topics or themes. Broad elements include monsters, apoca ...

adapted In biology, adaptation has three related meanings. Firstly, it is the dynamic evolutionary process of natural selection that fits organisms to their environment, enhancing their evolutionary fitness. Secondly, it is a state reached by the po ...

from

Dean Koontz Dean Ray Koontz (born July 9, 1945) is an American author. His novels are billed as suspense thrillers, but frequently incorporate elements of horror, fantasy, science fiction, mystery, and satire. Many of his books have appeared on ''The New Y ...

's 1983 novel of the same name. Directed by

Joe Chappelle Joseph Chappelle is an American screenwriter, Film producer, producer, and Film director, director of film and Television director, television. He is perhaps best known for his work on the critically acclaimed HBO series ''The Wire'', where he d ...

with a screenplay by Koontz, the film stars

Peter O'Toole Peter Seamus O'Toole (; 2 August 1932 – 14 December 2013) was a British stage and film actor. He attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and began working in the theatre, gaining recognition as a Shakespearean actor at the Bristol Old Vic ...

Rose McGowan Rósa Arianna "Rose" McGowan (born September 5, 1973) is an American actress. After her film debut in a brief role in the comedy ''Encino Man'' (1992), McGowan achieved wider recognition for her performance in the dark comedy ''The Doom Generati ...

Joanna Going Joanna Catherine Going (born July 22, 1963) is an American actress known for the television series ''Kingdom'', ''House of Cards'', ''Mad Men'' and the movie ''Wyatt Earp''. Early life Going was born in Washington, DC, the eldest of six childre ...

Liev Schreiber Isaac Liev Schreiber (; born October 4, 1967) is an American actor, director, screenwriter, producer, and narrator. He became known during the late 1990s and early 2000s after appearing in several independent films, and later mainstream Hollywoo ...

Ben Affleck Benjamin Géza Affleck (born August 15, 1972) is an American actor and filmmaker. His accolades include two Academy Awards, three Golden Globe Awards and a Volpi Cup. Affleck began his career as a child when he starred in the PBS educationa ...

Nicky Katt Nicky Katt (born May 11, 1971) is an American actor. Katt often plays unsympathetic characters, such as an irascible motorhead in ''Dazed and Confused,'' an ill-fated white supremacist child rapist in ''A Time to Kill'', and an embittered busi ...

and

Clifton Powell Clifton Powell (born March 16, 1956) is an American actor who primarily plays supporting roles in films, such as in '' Ray'' (2004), for which he received an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Motion Picture nomination. Care ...

. The film takes place in the peaceful town of Snowfield,

Colorado Colorado (, other variants) is a state in the Mountain West subregion of the Western United States. It encompasses most of the Southern Rocky Mountains, as well as the northeastern portion of the Colorado Plateau and the western edge of t ...

, where something evil has wiped out the community. It is up to a group of people to stop it or at least get out of Snowfield alive. While Koontz's novel included many literary tips of the hat to the work of H.P. Lovecraft, these are largely excised from the film. ''Phantoms'' was filmed on location in

Georgetown, Colorado The historic Town of Georgetown is the territorial charter municipality that is the county seat of Clear Creek County, Colorado, United States. The town population was 1,118 at the 2020 United States Census. The former silver mining camp along ...

. The Hotel de Paris Museum was used to depict the bakery and hotel where several scenes were set.

Plot

Dr. Jennifer Pailey brings her sister Lisa to the resort town of Snowfield, Colorado, a small ski resort village nestled in the Rocky Mountains where Jenny works as a doctor. Once in town, the sisters find no one around but a few corpses. At first their suspicions are that of a serial killer on the loose in town. The sisters stumble upon the severed heads of the town baker and his wife in an oven when they are found by Sheriff Bryce Hammond, a former FBI agent, and his deputies Stu Wargle and Steve Shanning. Hammond and his deputies are investigating the killings. The group arrives at a nearby hotel and find the writing of a victim on the mirror reading "Timothy Flyte". Shanning leaves to investigate a sound outside but doesn't return. The others find only his gun, hat and shoes while the rest of him is gone. They return to the sheriff's office to request aid and create roadblocks around Snowfield. The group gets a strange phone call but are interrupted by an attack by a bizarre moth-like creature that rips Wargle's face off before Hammond is able to kill it. Lisa later encounters Wargle while in the bathroom. They quickly return to the morgue and find his body missing. Hammond's FBI associates find Flyte, a British academic who theorizes the town has fallen victim to the Ancient Enemy, an entity he generalizes as "chaos in the flesh". It periodically wipes out civilizations including that of the

Mayans The Maya peoples () are an ethnolinguistic group of indigenous peoples of Mesoamerica. The ancient Maya civilization was formed by members of this group, and today's Maya are generally descended from people who lived within that historical reg ...

and the

Roanoke Island Roanoke Island () is an island in Dare County, North Carolina, Dare County, bordered by the Outer Banks of North Carolina, United States. It was named after the historical Roanoke (tribe), Roanoke, a Carolina Algonquian people who inhabited the ar ...

colonists. They are soon joined by an Army commando unit and a group of scientists led by General Copperfield who has come to Snowfield. They, along with Flyte, investigate the town. The creature kills soldiers investigating the sewers, while a dog approaches Flyte and the scientists and transforms into a gruesome monster that converts the group, except for Flyte. Flyte regroups with Hammond, Jenny, Lisa, and Copperfield. The creature attacks Copperfield through a manhole, converting him. Copperfield vomits a sample before melting into a puddle of black liquid. Through it, Flyte and the group learn the nature of the Ancient Enemy. Revealed to actually be an Earth-based amoebic life form that mimics its absorbed victims while gaining their knowledge, the Enemy creates Phantoms as temporary detachments for it to act through before absorbing them back into it. Furthermore, the Enemy absorbs all of the thoughts of its victims, making it extremely intelligent, and because of the previous civilizations' perception of it, it believes itself to be a god. It had arranged all of the prior events so Flyte can assist the creature in revealing its existence to the world. Flyte also learns that the creature's body is physiologically almost identical to crude oil, and could be killed by bacteria bio-engineered to ingest fossil fuels. They deduce that with the limited amount of the bacteria they have, they need to get the bacteria into the nucleus that is within the main body of the Enemy. They form a plan to use the Ancient Enemy's extreme arrogance and god complex against itself. To do so, Flyte acts as if he is turning against the group by revealing their entire plan to the Enemy. In anger (and believing itself indestructible due to being a god), it reabsorbs all the Phantoms and then emerges from the sewers to assume a Mother Mass form. Hammond and the Pailey sisters fire the bacteria into the Ancient Enemy before it retreats underground with Hammond in pursuit. While the Pailey sisters find themselves dealing with Wargle's Phantom, Jenny seemingly kills it with a gun containing the bacteria. Hammond finds the Ancient Enemy as it has assumed the form of the boy he accidentally killed during an FBI drug raid. When the boy grabs the last vial from him, Hammond shoots at it to expose the creature to its contents. It dies from the bacteria. Though Hammond reassures Lisa and Jenny that it is gone, with the former stating the townsfolk are at peace, Flyte admits the Ancient Enemy did achieve its victory as he has decided to tell the world what happened with a book based on what occurred in Snowfield. Some time later, watching Flyte being interviewed about his book, ''The Ancient Enemy'', two bar patrons argue about the existence of alien life. Hearing laughter nearby, the patrons turn to see Wargle as he asks them if they want to see something interesting.

Cast

as Dr. Timothy Flyte *

as Lisa Pailey *

as Dr. Jennifer Pailey *

as Deputy Stu Wargle *

as Sheriff Bryce Hammond *

as Deputy Steve Shanning *

as General Leland Copperfield * Rick Otto as Dr. Lockland *

Valerie Chow Valerie Chow (born 16 December 1970) is a Canadian former actress, fashion publicist, and entrepreneur. She has starred in numerous widely popular films and television series, most memorably in Wong Kar-wai's internationally acclaimed 1994 feat ...

as Dr. Yamaguchi * Adam Nelson as Dr. Burke * John Hammil as Dr. Talbot * John Scott Clough as Dr. Shane * William Hahn as Dr. Borman * Robert Himber as Dr. Walker *

Bo Hopkins William Mauldin "Bo" Hopkins (February 2, 1938 – May 28, 2022) Issucover/ref> was an American actor. He was known for playing supporting roles in a number of major studio films between 1969 and 1979, and appeared in many television shows and ...

as FBI Agent Hawthorne *

Robert Knepper Robert Lyle Knepper (born July 8, 1959) is an American actor best known for his role as Theodore "T-Bag" Bagwell in the Fox drama series '' Prison Break'' (2005–2009, 2017), Samuel Sullivan in the final season of the NBC series ''Heroes'' (2 ...

as FBI Agent Wilson *

Linnea Quigley Barbara Linnea Quigley (born May 27, 1958) is an American actress, film producer, model, singer, and author. She is best known as a B-movie actress, and is often referred to as a " scream queen" due to her frequent appearances in low-budget horro ...

as Woman In Room 204

Reception

''Phantoms'' received a 13% rating on

Rotten Tomatoes Rotten Tomatoes is an American review-aggregation website for film and television. The company was launched in August 1998 by three undergraduate students at the University of California, Berkeley: Senh Duong, Patrick Y. Lee, and Stephen Wang ...

, based on 31 reviews.

Roger Ebert Roger Joseph Ebert (; June 18, 1942 – April 4, 2013) was an American film critic, film historian, journalist, screenwriter, and author. He was a film critic for the ''Chicago Sun-Times'' from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, Ebert beca ...

gave the film 1 star out of 4, saying: "If only we could learn to think more kindly of those who digest us, this movie could have ended happily". The film grossed $5.6 million at the box office.

References

External links

* * * * {{DEFAULTSORT:Phantoms 1998 films 1998 horror films 1990s science fiction horror films American science fiction horror films Films based on American horror novels Films set in Colorado Films shot in Colorado 1990s monster movies American post-apocalyptic films American zombie films Dimension Films films Films based on works by Dean Koontz Films directed by Joe Chappelle Films produced by Joel Soisson 1990s English-language films 1990s American films

Plot

Cast

Reception

See also

References

External links