Holy shit. When I wrote the review for House, I thought I’d seen the worst the 80s had to offer in the horror genre. Then I saw Phantasm.

I legitimately cannot say which of these two movies is worse. I was interested in Phantasm because it certainly had one of the more unique ways of offing its victims. The little silvery flying murderball. I was hoping to find out more about that.

And yet, I did not, because the murderballs are disappointingly secondary.

Okay, here’s the plot: There’s a mysterious mortician who is apparently killing humans in a small town. Once he has their bodies, he shrinks them to half-size and reanimates them to serve as slaves in some wasteworld where the gravity is higher. He has a portal to it in a spare room.

Yet apparently he’s really operating on a shoestring because the only way he gets caught is that the younger of this orphaned pair of brothers sees the guy lifting 500-lb. caskets by himself and some of the dwarfzombies sneaking around.

Eventually he and his brother kill the guy. Sort of.

And then the younger kid wakes up to find his live brother dead, his brother’s dead friend alive, and he gets kidnapped through a mirror. Roll credits.

That’s it. The mysterious murderball is used exactly twice, once successfully when Big Bad decides to off a henchman, and then again when he tries to off Big Brother. Despite apparently being an alien, undead, or both, he cannot make murderballs immune to buckshot. So that was anticlimactic.

Is it better than House, or worse? Well, let’s put them head to head:

Do the characters act reasonably? Well, the protagonists in Phantasm eventually come up with something resembling a plan. It’s basic: go to the bad guy’s mortuary and perforate him with bullets. Essentially, this works. This beats the protagonist of House who forgets he has military training until the last 15 minutes. On the other hand, the Big Bad in House at least has a plan to get revenge. The Big Bad in Phantasm could have saved himself a lot of trouble by simply calling the cops and having the protags arrested for B&E.
House: 0, Phantasm: 0

Are the plots coherent? Phantasm‘s plot is simple, but makes sense: the bad guy is doing bad things. The good guys stop him. Contrasting this with House, where the bad guy is apparently haunting the house where the protagonist doesn’t live for several years, it’s a win for Phantasm.
House: 0. Phantasm: 1

Which movie is less boring? In House, strange things keep happening. They’re all red herrings, but things occur. In Phantasm, approximately half the film is taken up with Older Bro refusing to believe Younger Bro.
House: 1. Phantasm: 1

Do the endings make sense? In House the protagonist rescues his kid. So, yeah. In Phantasm, dead people are alive and alive people are dead, no fucks given.

Conclusion: Don’t watch either of these movies: do something more entertaining, like filing off your eyelids.