An interesting experiment, ‘Phantasmatapes’ is a special effort from Bleeding Skull to recreate the vibe and feel of the old 80s ‘late night horror’ slots on TV, presented in ‘Warm Fuzzy Glow’ VHS vision. The idea is simple enough, take two public domain movies (In this case; ‘The Revenge of Dr. X’ and ‘The Brain that wouldnt Die’) and recut, remix, rescore and represent these films using mixed media and experimental feedback techniques. and, I think the end result is both charming, interesting…But also not quite what i’d hoped for.

Based on the pitch for this film, I went in expecting a bumper length feature totalling around 90-110 minutes that tried to recreate the late night horror show vibe, with maybe a few modern twists and turns thrown into the mix to keep me on my toes…Instead, the entire feature runs to 72 minutes long (shorter than the shortest film featured on this set by 10 minutes) and realistically, probably isnt the best way to experience these movies.

I had seen ‘The Brain that wouldnt Die’ multiple times before watching this, but I hadnt seen ‘Dr. X’ before. and the way this film handles the features is to heavily HEAVILY truncate them down to about a third of their original feature running length, and using feedback experimentation and the scoring, they attempt to bridge large gaps in the narrative.

As a result, I found myself really struggling to follow ‘Dr. X’ as I feel they chopped WAY too much out to really make it make much sense, and the experimentation at times overrides all the visuals onscreen. meaning by the end of it, I felt like I had a vague idea of what the plot was, but really; it felt like I hadnt been shown enough to know what was going on. Luckily with ‘Brain’, because I HAD seen it plenty of times before, I was able to fill in the gaps, and as a result I had a much more pleasent time with that one.

4 or 5 times across the runtime, we also get treated to some commercial breaks, which again is nice…but does yield some mixed results. their were ads I really liked, that felt bizarre and hit the right tone of what I was looking for, there were some ones that felt a bit dull. on the whole I think it was okay, but that kind of leads me to my biggest problem with this release.

Having the entire feature run to 72 minutes (including commercials) results in it feeling more like a ‘vibe’ watch than anything I could actually see myself sitting down to watch again…It felt like the kind of movie that runs quietly in the background of a party to help create a sense of atmosphere…While not actually being something I think i’d conciously choose to sit and watch again.

I feel like the films really should have been 45 minutes a piece, with maybe 10-15 minutes of commercials/bumpers/station IDs and other goodies intercut. I feel like the films were cut down too threadbare and needed just a bit more narrative tipping back in to steady the ship, and I feel like the commercial sections needed more consistency in their utilisation, and maybe even a bit more variety. I enjoyed the goofy ads, but what makes the ads feel distinct and weird is when they’re contrasted with just fairly normal commercials. It kind of broke the illusion that this was supposed to be a ‘late night off air recording’ because everything was way too lean and concentrated.

I didnt hate ‘Phantasmatapes’ But I dont think it’ll be one that I put in regular rotation, I could in fact see myself being more likely to pull this off my shelf for the extras (including clean full length VHS versions of ‘Brain’ and ‘Dr.X’ alongside upscaled VHS oddities like ‘The Max Headroom Incident’) than for the main feature itself.

That being said, I believe they are planning a volume 2 in this set, and I feel if they let this thing breath just a little more and paced out the commercials a little better. This could become a firm favourite series for me. So…this one’ll probably go on the shelf for now…but i’ll be keeping an eye on it.

source https://letterboxd.com/tytdreviews/film/phantasmatapes/