Perhaps the best example of movie being better than the book. The most effective parts of the movie are the small, vivid, almost unbearably poignant human moments. Extras were clearly the worst part of the film. There is a scene were two extras look like they are going to attack the actors for no reason.Soundtrack doesn't seem to be as timeless as the film itself Part Platoon part Blade Runner. It is a fast paced thriller, that will throw on the breaks at the appropriate time. Liev Schreiber gave the performance of his career putting him in the elite stratosphere of Bogart and Don Baker. Although not a fan Ben Affleck; I found his performance to be most explosive.

Dr. Jennifer Pailey (Joanna Going) returns to the small town of Snowfield, Colorado with her sister Lisa (Rose McGowan) to find dead bodies. Is it disease, toxins, or is there a killer on the loose? They run into Sheriff Bryce Hammond (Ben Affleck) and his deputies Stuart Wargle (Liev Schreiber) and Steve Shanning. Strange things keep happening and Shanning is gone. Hammond calls for outside military help to put up roadblocks. Wargle is attacked by a mysterious creature. The FBI interviews academic Dr. Timothy Flyte (Peter O'Toole) who thinks this is an ancient evil which wiped out many civilizations before. He is brought to the military as an adviser.This starts out good as the two sisters find a desolate town. It's got a nice creepy sense. The starting five is solid. It would be great if O'Toole joins the group as the sixth inside the town. Instead he's outside and the movie brings in the military. It tries to explain things which don't necessarily make sense. It's a whole new set of characters taking the point in the battle. By the time O'Toole joins the Paileys and Hammond, the mess has already been made. The second half collapses after a promising first half.

Phantoms is probably better known for being a great punchline in Kevin Smith's Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back ("Affleck, you the bomb in Phantoms yo!") than it is as an actual movie. One of the many late 90s horror offering from Bob and Harvey Weinstein's Dimension Films, it was a box office flop when it hit theaters, and unlike several other Dimension releases from the same era, it hasn't become much of a cult favorite. Adapted by Dean Koontz from his novel of the same, Phantoms is Koontz's only screen writing credit. Reportedly, Koontz wasn't crazy about the final cut, blaming the editing in the postproduction process. While Koontz maybe right about the film's editing being messy, and while Phantoms is far from a great movie, I still kind of like it.Like most Dimension horror flicks, Phantoms has an amazing cast. Ben Affleck, Rose McGowan, and Liev Schreiber were regularly cast in Dimension Films, and it's not hard to see why. Their performances don't necessarily elevate the material, but they are a lot of fun to watch on screen, especially Affleck in a role he was especially too young for at the time of filming. Peter O'Toole is one of the most legendary actors who ever lived, and his presence definitely makes Phantoms seem classier than it would have been otherwise, although O'Toole plays his role straighter than I would have liked. Overall, the whole tone is a bit too serious considering how silly everything about the story is, but when Phantoms does show a sense of humor about its ridiculousness, the movie is at its best.Phantoms didn't have a huge budget, though visually it holds up better than a lot of the bigger budget offerings of the era. There seems to be very little CGI, and a lot of cool-looking practical special effects. Whether one likes or hates Phantoms, it's clear that there was hard work put into making the film look slick in a way very few horror flicks actually do. The cinematography looks great, the sets provide the film with the isolated atmosphere the story requires, and the directing is legitimately suspenseful in places. Phantoms is the type of film that almost never gets made anymore: an interesting R-rated horror flick not reliant on computers to make stuff look scary, and not reliant on twist ending after twist ending just for the sake of it. If made today, a movie like Phantoms would be either a limp PG-13 offering, or a much lower-budget, possibly found-footage VOD premiere not worthy of anyone's time.Unlike most horror movies made in the late 1990s and today, Phantoms wasn't made to launch a franchise. It was made to provide audiences with a 90 minutes' worth of scares and adrenaline, and more often than not, it succeeds at doing so. Phantoms may not even be close to the best the late 90s had to offer. With one more try to smooth things out in the editing room and a slightly firmer grasp on tone, Phantoms could have been a better movie, one that wouldn't be remembered just for being a joke (albeit an absolutely hilarious one) in Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back. As it is, the film is still fairly entertaining and worth checking out for genre fans. 6/10

Directed by Joe Chappelle and written by Dean Koontz, who adapts from his own novel, Phantoms (not the greatest title all things considered) is a considerably well put together amalgamation of horror/sci-fi/creature feature tropes. If at times it feels clichéd and formulaic, then that is ultimately a curse of the cinematic genres it lives and breaths in.Plot basically has two sisters played by Rose McGowan and Joanna Going arriving in the town of Snowfield, Cololrado, to find most of the inhabitants dead, diseased or dismembered. A trio of coppers turn up played by Liev Schreiber (shifty malevolence), Ben Affleck (square jawed bastion of heroism) and Nicky Katt (fodder of course), and thus a fight for survival ensues as Peter O'Toole's sharp doctor character comes flying in to become the fulcrum of the story. So yep! There's something very evil and nasty at work here and the makers expand upon the reasons why with a drip-feed mixture of mad science and intelligent thematic ideas.The effects work is more than adequate and the strong cast list perform well up to scratch (nice to see O'Toole doesn't phone it in to denigrate the story). Things are taken very seriously throughout, the makers in no way biting the hand that feeds them, while the requisite insertions of jump - shocks - twists and mayhem are handled with care and attention by the director. You may come away as I did with a hunger to dig out your copy of John Carpenter's sublime The Thing? Which in truth is never a bad "thing," but this is still sturdy stuff, a pic caked in genre cement, and crucially it doesn't waste the time invested by the genre compliant viewers. 7/10