Unlike a lot of PHANTASM fans, a fifth installment in the series isn't something I've been anxiously looking forward to ever since the 1998 release of PHANTASM: OBLIVION. It's not that I didn't want a fifth movie to happen, I just wasn't sure it was going to. With talk of a PHANTASM 5 coming and going over the years and several scripts being written and filed away, I took a passive "If it happens, it happens" outlook. If it didn't happen, I was fine with OBLIVION as the final chapter.
Now that a fifth movie has finally been made, PHANTASM: RAVAGER is one of my most highly anticipated releases of 2016. Directed by David Hartman from a screenplay he wrote with franchise creator Don Coscarelli, RAVAGER has the following synopsis:
For 37 years, audiences have followed small town friends Reggie, Mike, and Jody in their quest to stop the evil, dimension-hopping schemes of The Tall Man (Angus Scrimm in his final performance) and his armada of killer Sentinel Spheres. Now, Don Coscarelli’s acclaimed horror/sci-fi Phantasm franchise comes to a close in a truly epic finale, a multi-dimensional battle across multiple timelines, alien planets, and altered realities, where no less than the fate of Earth is on the line.
WellGoUSA will be releasing RAVAGER in theatres and on VOD on October 7th (you can see the list of theatres HERE), and the distributor has dropped a few new images online that give a look at returning stars A. Michael Baldwin and Reggie Bannister.
We've known that release date for a while now, but the question has still remained, when will phans be able to get their hands on a physical copy of the film? That question may have been answered now, as the Phantasm Archives blog notes that both Video ETA and Blu-ray.com have December 6 listed as the release date for PHANTASM: RAVAGER on DVD and Blu.
After an eighteen year wait (and more than two years after we heard that RAVAGER had already been shot), PHANTASM followers will soon be able to add the final film to their collections. The RAVAGER disc will be joining the previous films in my collection for sure.
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