1989’s “The Phantom of the Mall: Erics Revenge” is a bit of a tepid oddity of the late 80s slasher genre. It’s what i’d affectionately refer to as a “Grayzone” film due to the fact that it’s kind of stuck in the middle of the slasher genre quality wise, too good to really be considered a bad or poor offering, not good ENOUGH to really be memorable or to have cut through to the social consciousness. It’s one of those movies that, up until recently had fallen through the cracks in terms of memorability. But; with it’s recent resurfacing by Arrow Video in 2022 I figured now would be a decent enough time to take a look at this thing to see exactly WHY it kind of ‘failed to launch’.

The film follows Melody, a young bright and hopeful woman looking to enter the working world for the first time. And in the opening moments of the film we get the good news that she’s been offered a job as a waitress in the food court of a brand new mall thats been built in the town of Midwood. A short time after being introduced to Melody, we see the owner of the mall and the towns mayor holding a ‘grand opening’ event for the press in which a local photographer called Peter spots Melody in the crowd and almost immediately becomes smitten by her.

Peter catches up to Melody shortly after the opening ceremony has been completed and it’s revealed the pair actually kind of know each other, as Melody is the survivor of a brutal and mysterious house fire in which her partner Eric and Eric’s parents were supposedly burnt to death. The plot twist? Erics house used to stand on the foundations that the mall now stands on and Erics family refused to sell up to the mall owner in order to allow the malls construction…so their mysterious case of arson was a little TOO convenient to go unnoticed…But! The case was hushed up, wasnt investigated properly and instead the house was torn down and the mall was put up in it’s place.

But theres one more thing I forgot to mention, Y’see Eric isnt dead. Eric is alive and well and living in the walls and basement of the mall, hideously burnt and seeking revenge on assholes and anyone who may have wronged him. At first it starts with a repair guy who Eric feeds into a fan he’s repairing. But this quickly expands, as a security guard is sent down to the basement to try and identify a disturbance, only to be taken out by a forklift truck and a large amount of electricity.

Around this time we’re also introduced to minor characters Buzz and Suzie, Buzz runs the ice cream parlour in the mall and is friends with both Melody and Peter and Suzie is Melodies friend and basically seems to only be present here to have someone Melody can do the whole “Boys are CUTE!” schtick with intercut with occasionally she throws narrative points at Peter and Melody in order to progress the narrative.

Anyway, after her first day on the job Melody starts to head home, but a series of bizarre circumstances occur, Firstly; in her work locker someones left a bouquet of orchids…which were flowers that only Eric would ever buy for her, and later that night when she heads out to her car, she finds a gift wrapped package on the passenger seat which turns out to be a blue dress that Melody had REALLY liked and wanted to buy in the mall that day, but it was too expensive. While confused, she tries to shrug it off and leave, but her car wont start. She steps out to see if she can find out what the problem is, and almost immediately gets attacked by a mugger. This is short lived however as, off in the distance a mysterious masked man shoots our mugger with a crossbow before disappearing.

The Mayor, who was just passing by, offers to take Melody home after hearing her story and after a erotically charged nightmare, its the next day and Melody heads back in for her next shift. Its here that it’s revealed that a large amount of stock from the mall has mysteriously gone missing, AND that the mall owner has a son whos a little shit who keeps harassing the female employees, doing skateboards and robbing the place. Despite his Dad banning him, he cares not one fuck and continues acting the dickhead.

And really, its here that we end up getting the main thrust of the movie underway, as the owner of the mall hires in a guy he knows called “Christopher” to fill in for the security guard who got fork’d. And within minutes of his hiring, Peter spots him, realises somethings off about him, takes his picture to show Melody and inadvertently ends up in a mad pursuit across the mall trying to get away from the guard who wants his camera. Non of this particularly matters mind, because it’s pretty much made perfectly clear from the off that Christopher is the guy who burned down Erics house, a fact that Melody and Peter almost immediately figure out and Eric (who’s now using the malls CCTV to spy on Melody) is also slowly figuring out.

And what follows is a…well a fairly middle of the road slasher thriller. As Melody, Peter and Christopher butt heads on multiple occasions and Eric continues to pick off the assholish inhabitants of the mall, Will Melody realise who the “Phantom of the mall” really is!? Will Christopher take Peter and Melody out of the picture! And How did Eric get a full couch and punching bag down to his evil sewer layer, but he didnt find the time to at least get a few decent lights and some nice wallpaper down there? Hell even a touch up with some paint probably wouldnt have hurt…Oh well, all this and more will be answered if you take a chance on “Phantom of the Mall: Erics Revenge”

And the problems with this movie pretty much start at the top and work all the way down through this thing, and I need to make it clear from the off that I didnt hate this thing, I thought it had a few decent moments and more than held up as a watchable picture. It just didnt do anything more than that and as such its really a bit underwhelming as a standalone feature.

Almost immediatley theres confusion in this thing because of the title of the film. “Phantom of the Mall: Erics Revenge” sounds like a sequel. And I wouldnt begrudge an audience for thinking this was a sequel because subtitles within movie titles generally denote that this isnt the first entry in a series, with only a handful of exceptions. So audiences looking to check this out in 1989 may have well been within their rights to pass this thing by because, to someone who HASNT seen it, the first thought they may well have had is “Well…I havent seen ‘Phantom of the Mall’ so, why would I check out a sequel where eric (whoever he is) gets his revenge?”

This is before we even GET to the movie itself. Of which, the script is SO slow going. The biggest problem that it has is simply that there isnt enough plot beats or complications to sustain the movie across its full runtime. We have 2 VERY simple plots (Melody, Peter and Chris as one and the mystery of Eric as the other) and thats all there is for 90 minutes…sometimes LONGER depending on what cut you choose to watch. Everything happens very bluntly with no scope for overlapping subplots, more complex narratives or character progression. The film has the ILLUSION of a lot of stuff going on, but in reality almost everything outside of the two plots going on that I mentioned earlier, is filler. The Mall owner and his son are filler, suzie and Buzz are filler, the mayor is filler, the security guards are VERY briefly important to the plot (for literally 5 minutes) and then they become filler for the rest of the runtime.

And that wouldnt be such a bad thing if it wasnt all so one note for the entire runtime! Honestly while there is 3 acts in this thing, theres no sense of growth, ramping up or ramping down. It’s like a low drone that runs the whole films length, never changing pitch or volume, just humming away at the exact same level, and thats beyond frustrating given theres SO much scope to work with.

They could have introduced Eric a bit slower rather than just dumping him in right at the beginning as a way to help build tension as to whether it really WAS him hiding out in the mall, they could have made Melody and the mall owners relationship a bit more fractured to create a sense of tension at the fact Melody is almost certain the mall owner was involved in Erics house burning down, they could have more heavily played up the will they/wont they relationship of Melody and Peter, they could have given Buzz something more to do than just be a prat for most of the runtime. Security could have had more dealings with Eric rather than one getting bumped off and another one briefly highlighting a large number of thefts from the store and thats it.

They could have made Eric and Peter have a bit more of a ding dong over Melody to help drive that love triangle angle. They could have involved the mayor a little bit more, rather than just making her this weird sub character who only seems to turn up to rescue the characters from immediate death inadvertently, then refuse to acknowledge that there was ever a problem to begin with.

I mean, those are just examples off the top of my head without really even that much thought put into it. But the fact that SO LITTLE of the script actually ties together in a meaningful way, is a beyond dissapointing situation and that lack of detail gives way to SO much padding and over explanation of really basic plot points, that honestly? I found it astonishing that I could go on my phone and look up information about the film, WHILE WATCHING THE FILM and then jump back in to find that NOTHING had happened. It feels like they mustered up 30 minutes of story and stretched that out with overly long dialogue and Paulie Shore by an additional 60 minutes. Which made for a sluggish watch and very little else.

Topping it all off, the dialogue was fairly uninteresting too, we have an unintentional, almost woozy/dreamlike quality to the writing which feels quite unusual. Our characters basically warble through ultra basic and overly wordy dialogue thats absolutely NOT written with the audience in mind. Its elongated, frustrating and most importantly…dull. It tells the story, it gets the job done. But you have here the perfect opportunity to modernise the phantom of the opera plotline and maybe even have some fun with it, and the film makers just…dont really,barring a few black comedy moments…though I think I may know the reason as to exactly why this wound up the way it did.

The script was written by Scott Schneid, Frederick R. Ulrich, Robert King and Tony Michaelman. Two pitched out the story and 2 wrote the screenplay, and to say it was a bit of a mixed ability writers room on this one would be a bit of an understatement. Robert probably has the most experience in scriptwriting here with 23 writing credits to his name including “Bloodfist”, “The Nest” and “Dragonfire” but after this things quickly go downhill, with Tony and Scott having 7 and 4 writing credits between them, with there best known works probably being some contributions to the TV series version of “Friday the 13th” and “The Rugrats”. And this is Fredericks only writing credit…so, to me? Its no surprise that 4 mixed ability writers produced a script thats slow, uneven and inconsistent tonally.

The film was directed by Richard Friedman, who has 31 directing credits spanning a 40 year career and some pretty decent hitters within the 80s horror genre including “Scared Stiff”, “Doom Asylum” and TV credits including “Tales from the Darkside” and “Lois & Clarke the new adventures of superman”

Which means it should come as no surprise to find out that the direction for this movie is probably it’s strongest overall asset, given this was a lower budgeted feature, it more than cuts the mustard as a studio grade production, I should stress that for 1989, it isnt pushing any envelopes. But its doing what it needs to competently, and in places it does go above and beyond. Friedman has been able to successfully coral the crew into working fairly harmoniously on this and honestly, there isnt much more to say on that front, other than “they did a good job, and it looks fine”.

It’s stylish and largely competent due in no small part to the fact that the mall they used for filming is honestly just a really unique and interesting location AND it has had previous exposure in the horror genre being the same location they shot “Chopping Mall” at. I gues what im getting at ultimately is, while I don’t think i’d necessarily be able to IMMEDIATELY identify this as Friedmans work, I’ll settle for competent to good over incompetent anyday.

As for the cine? Well thats a bit more of a mixed bag in my opinion. About 50% of it is fairly passable, Studio grade standard once again, nothing that’ll set my socks on fire, but not bad by any stretch. 25% of it is poor by my reckoning with badly blocked shots, weird framing or attempts at experimentation that just didnt quite land properly, which is a shame. But as always; I’ll admire a film that tries, than one thats purely mediocre. And I’d say the remaining 25% was actually a pretty above board job, with the fiery reenactment of Erics parents house catching fire, Melodys nightmare sequences and the grand finale with Eric in the mall being definite highlights that more than created a spectacle and looked great doing so!

Theres a good range of colour use throughout whether its going for a warmer tone in the nightmare/fire sequences to really drive home the heat of the scene, or even small things like underlighting in the arcade sequence to give everything a greenish tint, its small touches like that that can really take a production to the next level and I appreciated that. They even do a decent job with the chiascuro throughout, giving Eric a wonderfully mysterious and malevolent presence that this kind of film absolutely needed!

Unfortunately; there is ONE thing that lets this film down and thats the editing. It doesnt feel finished. Or rather, it feels like an editor got the film so far and then that editor got fired and they got an amateur in to finish the film. Cuts sometimes are razor and really help to keep this thing chuntering along, even when it’s desperately trying to work against a fast paced edit. But then, there are sequences where the cuts are either WAY too slow or WAY to early which really effects the pacing, with probably the most egregious instance being a moment at the very beginning of the film where for a good couple of seconds you can see an instance where the film originally had an alternative opening shot which hasnt been completely removed from the theatrical cut.

Now in fairness there are multiple edits of this film floating around, a shorter version that had alternate sequences, new scenes and more formed the “TV edit”, theres the theatrical cut, and in recent times a version that merged the TV and theatrical edits together to create and extended cut have also done the rounds. But thats no excuse for why, when they were cutting the MAIN THEATRICAL RELEASE. That they’d use a print with technical issues like that inherent on it. It’s…weird to say the least.

Performance wise, its mixed to poor, up front I now know why the world hates Paulie Shore. Buzz is largely pointless here, he’s bad comic relief and Shore absolutely does not help matters by somehow making an irritating character so much worse. Kari Whitman as Melody is fine enough for a leading lady, I think she has a decent range here and even though she does come across as a bit spaced from time to time. I think overall she nails the character with enough sincerity that I was more than happy to spend the runtime with her, Rob Estes as Peter is innoffensive, he has a bit of a flicker behind the eyes to his character which just puts him above “Balloon with a smiley face drawn on it” in terms of performance, I liked him. I thought he did a good turn in this and he seems to have been enjoying himself throughout.

My most enjoyed character in this has got to be Gregory Scott Cummins as the psycho mall cop goon “Chirstopher” it genuinely caught me off guard when I first saw him on screen because he’s INSTANTLY recognisable as Macs Dad from “Its always sunny in Philadelphia” which made his character here TEN TIMES BETTER. I think he plays slightly unhinged really well, i’ve seen him do this type of role a few times, but I think here, he’s clearly having fun and it reflects in a genuinely decent performance that really won me over.

Ironically; the performance I was least impressed with was Derek Rydall as Eric. Very mild spoilers here, but given how much build up there was to Eric as a character, his backstory, and how he seems to be a bit nuanced. I was genuinely expecting his big reunion with Melody at the end to be something a bit more complicated than what ultimately happened. I was expecting Melody to maybe have to battle with her feelings for the man she loved or the man she is in love with. I was expecting a complex and deep performance from Derek as he himself deals with the reality that he’s been left behind, that Melody has moved on and how he finds his place in things.

But no. Instead we get a flat, dead behind the eyes (literally due to the prosthetics) performance thats 2d and amounts to little more than a dullened monotone delivery for half of his screen time, and Incel fodder for the second half. It was a disappointing reveal that in many ways would have been a lot better had they just kept him mute and had done with it.

The supporting cast are also underwhelming, best described as set dressing, they don’t really do much, theres the inkling of a character for some of them, but most of them are either TOO two dimensional and are just playing to stereotypes (the asshole punk kid, the evil mall owner, the untrusting mayor) OR they’re bland…SO bland like Suzies character, who gets one chance and one chance only to stand up for herself, but otherwise is just a sounding board for Melody. It was underwhelming to say the least.

Oh…and Ken Foree is in this…he doesnt do much…err…something something “Dawn of the dead” somethign something “Back to the mall”

AND FINALLY THE SOUNDTRACK! And this is probably the 2nd best thing to come from this movie outside of the direction. Its a fast paced, new wave punky score that absolutely packs a punch and doesnt disappoint, it reminded me a little bit of the “Return of the living dead” score. Not for how it sounds, but just for it being a movie that has almost its entire vibe established purely through the tone of the music they’ve chosen to play with. It’s a magnificent piece and I hope it gets a re-release sometime as i’d love to get my hands on it.

“Phantom of the Mall: Erics Revenge” was released on VHS as a rental tape in 1990 by Prism Distribution (later Prism Leisure). In the UK they chose the, probably wise decision to just release it as “Phantom of the Mall” though no doubt that has probably created temporary confusion with british film aficionados who SWEAR that “Phantom of the Mall” and “Phantom of the Mall: Erics Revenge” are TOTALLY different movies. Not helping matters at all the DVD release put out by Quantum Leap studios in 2001 flipped the titling on their release making the “Phantom of the mall” part REALLY small on the box and making “Erics Revenge” HUGE…ugh…still! Im delighted to say that everything pretty much got resolved in the end when, in 2022 Arrow Video released “Phantom of the Mall: Erics Revenge” as both a deluxe hard box and standard edition bluray.

I personally picked up the limited edition release, and with it, you get a lovely hard box display, a booklet with essays about the films history, a mini poster, some lobby cards and a 2 disc set with the first disc containing the theatrical cut and raft of extra features, and the second disc containing the TV and extended cuts of the film. I’ve seen all three cuts now and I think I like the theatrical and TV edits equally.

I paid something in the region of £25-£35 when this was available on preorder for the deluxe edition. And while it does look really nice, If I could go back, cancel the order, wait 6 months and grab the standard edition for a tenner. I absolutely would have preferred to do that. Its a gorgeous set with a keen eye to attention to detail…but I didnt enjoy the film enough to really benefit from the luxury version.

Ultimately; I came away from Phantom of the mall just a bit non plussed. While it had moments that I absolutely loved, there was a LOT of stuffing here and because the pacing wasnt great alongside other issues i’ve mentioned. I genuinely came away from the thing feeling like I was glad that I had seen it, but that it absolutely wasn’t essential viewing. If your big on your slasher movies with a slight comedic tinge, i’d absolutely recommend this one, I think you’ll really get into it.

Equally if you’ve seen pretty much every slasher the 80s has to offer 10 times each and want a change of pace, again. This could be for you its dropped in price quite significantly at this point, and for what it currently goes for, i’d say it was worth the punt. But if your just getting into the slasher genre, or your picky with your horrors. I’d maybe give this one a wide birth. It’s not bad…but theres a LOT better out there.

source https://letterboxd.com/tytdreviews/film/phantom-of-the-mall-erics-revenge/1/