Booga-booga me with a spoon, it’s Burl! Yes, ha ha, I’m here
with a review of a 1980s mall picture for you, and you know what that means!
Valley Girls! Well, ha ha, not really, since they were seven or eight years
passé by the time this picture was made, but you can be sure their successors
are present and accounted for in this
mall!
As you can surely tell from the title, Phantom of the Mall: Eric’s Revenge is a Phantom of the Opera update, and I’m pretty sure it’s set in the
same mall as Fast Times at Ridgemont High
and Chopping Mall, and it looks
awfully like that mall they used in Commando
too! Ha ha, maybe it’s just that all 1980s California malls look the same to
me!
I won’t give you the plot in much detail, because, ha ha,
that would waste all of our valuable time! Be it known, however, that a young
lady who takes a job in a new mall has many flashbacks to the times a year ago
when she was keeping company with her true love, Eric! But then, ha ha, a
horrible housefire kills Eric’s family and purportedly him, although not really
because he’s now got a puttyface and is stalking the back rooms and ductworks
of the new mall – the very same new mall within which his one-time inamorata is
employed!
Well, from then on it’s killings! The victims are mostly
security guards to begin with, so nobody really notices! Ken Foree, back in a
mall again a decade after Dawn of the
Dead, is the only one sharp enough to be aware of a sudden decline in the
mall’s heretofore robust population of perverts, peeping toms and general
scumbags! Somehow, even when the mall owner’s astonishingly delinquency-prone
son is trapped screaming all the way up to the top of an escalator where his
neck is snapped like a cannoli, nobody sees a thing!
Our young protagonist has several pals, the goofiest being Pauly
Shore, the comic actor best known for his role in that pregnancy drama For Keeps! She also has many enemies,
principally the killer arsonist who originally set Eric’s house on fire – he’s
played (I believe) by Gregory Scott Cummins, the star of Action U.S.A.! And Tom Fridley from Jason Lives plays the aforementioned mall owner’s son, who was so
nasty he reminded me of the customer who enrages Dick Miller at the beginning
of Starhops! And then there’s the
town mayor, a role essayed by Morgan Fairchild from Deadly Illusion – we don’t know if she’s friend or foe for most of
the movie, but, giving it away here for just a second, she’s foe! So naturally
she gets tossed off a balcony and impaled on some kind of pointy sculpture! Ha
ha! It’s just like what happens to that lady in Mausoleum!
When he’s not murderizing people, Eric is listening to “Our
Song,” the tune he and his young ladyfriend unaccountably loved, and which is
the most horrible song imaginable! It gets played and replayed until your ears
want to fly south, and frankly it’s probably the real reason Eric went
homicidally banana-monster! I have to say, that terrible song really lets the
movie down!
Otherwise, for one of these things it’s not half bad! It’s
not great either, of course: it’s never scary or suspenseful, and the romance
part, a critical element to any phantom picture, falls flat! On the other hand,
it gives us a lot of nasty characters to boo and their murders to cheer; and
there are a few Special Makeup Effects here and there, including Eric’s
puttyface; and I liked that it really created a feeling of community within the
mall, even if it’s a dysfunctional community populated entirely by jerks and
airheads!
On
balance it’s a generally enjoyable friton-bleu,
though hardly essential! I was glad to have finally had the chance to see it!
I’m going to give Phantom of the Mall:
Eric’s Revenge two exploding eyeballs! Ha ha!
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