Phantoms (1998)

Inappropriately titled, like the book itself by Dean Koontz, Phantoms is a surprisingly effective monster movie, especially in the first half. The best monsters are the ones which are very difficult to kill; in addition, these types of monsters can destroy fragile human beings with ease. This is what is confronted here, with humans little more than insects to be crushed and absorbed. Of course, certain insects can cause a lot of damage when they put their minds to it. The atmosphere in the first half hour is very eerie and there's a lot of mystery. You have pretty much an empty town, a couple of young women (Joanna Going & Rose McGowan as sisters) just arrived, and a couple of dead bodies - no answers. There's this gloom and a foreboding of doom in the first act, and this may not be too difficult to create, but we hardly see it anymore, even in horror films. Even if one has seen this film once before, however, they may be compelled to watch that first half hour again just to get that sense of doom all over. When some cops show up, things get even worse. Then an entire army shows up and, of course, we think things are under control now, but it makes no difference. At least the pic is consistent with its menace.
This picture was virtually ignored on release and I don't think video has helped it much. When the monster is revealed, it obviously takes away all the suspense built up earlier, but it's still creepy going (without revealing too much, the monster is a more advanced version of a famous one from the late fifties; think also along the lines of "The Thing" remake by Carpenter in '82). Writer Koontz was involved in the adaptation, which always seems to help. Actor Peter O'Toole is top-billed but appears only around the midway point as the only so-called expert on the creature, all based on conjecture, of course. He lends a bit of gravity to it all, tho I suppose he's slumming here in a 'typical' fright flic. His character, though an authority on past disappearances and an actual biologist who correctly theorizes on the creature's nature, has been reduced to writing exploitation articles for a sensationalist magazine-newspaper. He's obviously the premiere actor in the ensemble, though he looks a bit too aged. The rest of the younger cast do fine, though Ben Affleck is a bit irritating, as usual, and maybe too snot-nosed in the role of the cop/ex-FBI agent with a tragic past. I'm not sure what Liev Schreiber was aiming at with his performance, but he was almost as creepy as the creature. There's a bit of a twist ending, which wasn't really necessary. BoG's Score: 7 out of 10
Phantomic Trivia: released close to the same time as this was Deep Rising, a very similar monster movie, just taking place on the ocean, while this one took place on land. Both films did poorly at the box office, despite being better samples of traditional monster scares.