TrueJoshNight Truly Dreadful Film

Bereamic Awesome Movie

Dynamixor The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

Justina The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

wildblueyonder Hey look, if slow-mo machine gun fire an unexplained random "supernatural stuff" is yer thing... then go for it.I got sucked in by the cast - but O'Toole is laughable and Affleck shows why he has is a success - good looks and good one liners - otherwise no talent.Shreiber is great, but after that this is a total big hollywood bit of nonsense. If you don't need a real plot and like 'explosions and stuff'.. its fer you.

view_and_review Sometimes titles truly belie their content. I was looking for ghosts, apparitions, specters, etc. and I got some other creature."Phantoms" wastes no time jumping into the action. Within five minutes of the film's opening credits we're treated to a dead body in a cozy little vacation town. The cause is unknown but soon the two female protagonists show us more dead bodies. They meet up with three armed men (and later more armed men) but that only produced an increased body count.The movie was mildly entertaining but it lacked any real umph. The scene was bleak enough with the absence of people and a slight haze, but the actors were too nonchalant and cavalier. There was no real sense of danger, I don't even think I saw any of them sweat. Even the most threatening and tense moments were met with a slight apprehension at most. It was all too clean and too textbook.

TFSpectre Sadly the basis of the book was not translated very well to the big screen, now that special effects are much improved, it may be time to rekindle the dying embers of what should have been a great film.The taunting of the people in Snowfield, the arrival and setup of a cordon, the reason why Santa Mira police were there in the first place were all dismissed. Sadly in many ways, the whole point of the movie wasn't really realised because they were so focused on getting to the end that they seem to have entirely forgotten about the story, no suspense moments whatsoever, no what's gonna happen next..It was a major disappointment sadly because it didn't get the treatment it deserved; it should have been so much better, one can only hope that the script is redone; with a better understanding of the book and the nature of the story.

BA_Harrison Dr. Jennifer Pailey (Joanna Going) and her younger sister Lisa (Rose McGowan) arrive in the remote town of Snowfield, Colorado, only to find the inhabitants either dead or missing, having fallen foul of a subterranean creature that believes itself to be a god. While searching the town for signs of life, the sisters meet local sheriff Bryce Hammond (Ben Affleck) and his deputies, but even with the lawmen's added firepower, survival looks unlikely—at least until the arrival of a team of government agents and their unlikely expert on the 'ancient evil', tabloid journalist Dr. Timothy Flyte (Peter O'Toole).Based on the novel by Dean Koontz (who also wrote the screenplay), Phantoms starts off very promisingly with the Pailey sisters' nail-biting search of the town's seemingly deserted buildings: a few delightfully grisly discoveries, some truly eerie sounds and the gradually dwindling daylight keep the level of tension high and the viewer right on the edge of their seat. An attack by a bizarre flying critter that leaves Deputy Stuart 'Stu' Wargle (Liev Schreiber) minus his face and several subsequent well-executed supernatural scares serve to heighten the horror.Unfortunately, with the introduction of O'Toole as Flyte, matters start to go downhill, the plot becoming more and more far fetched, eventually losing all sense of credibility during the inevitable showdown with the monster that involves the use of a handy experimental chemical that can break down the structure of oil—which just happens to be what the Lovecraftian creature is largely comprised of.However, despite its flaws, I'm happy to rate Phantoms a more than reasonable 6/10 simply for the wonderfully atmospheric first half, which surely served as inspiration for the successful 'Silent Hill' series of computer games.