- Director: Don Coscarelli
- Writer: Don Coscarelli
- Stars: A. Michael Baldwin, Bill Thornbury, Reggie Bannister
- Run Time: 1 Hour, 29 Minutes
Synopsis
We open on a funeral home and a young couple making out in the cemetery. Tommy and his girl are having a really good time, when she pulls out a knife and stabs him to death. Later, at the Morningside Cemetery, Jody and Reggie come to Tommy’s funeral. Jody goes inside into the mausoleum to visit someone, and he hears something inside the walls. Rats?
Meanwhile, Mike rides his motorcycle through the cemetery like a hoodlum, and he sees a Jawa run behind a headstone. The Jawa-thing makes the same sound Jody heard inside. Jody runs into the creepiest mortician of all time: The Tall Man. We learn that Jody and Mike are brothers and that their parents are dead. The funeral ends and Mike watches the Tall Man lift the heavy casket back into the hearse all by himself.
Mike goes to see his friend’s grandmother, a blind gypsy. He wants to talk to her about Jody, who is leaving… Jody is concerned that Mike knows he’s going to leave him behind. Old Grandma says not to worry, Jody will take Mike with him if he goes. She tells Mike to his hand in the box, and inside is only pain. “Fear is the killer” says the girl. The pain was all in his mind. Nobody had read “Dune” yet in the 70s, so I guess that was all right.
We see that Reggie is a musician, and he does a thing with his fingers and a tuning fork. Mike follows Jody and a girl he picked up to the cemetery, which apparently is the only place in town to have sex. They start going at it, and Mike hears growling from the bushes. Mike goes screaming through the cemetery, and Jody goes after him. “It was little and brown and close to the ground,” he explains. Jody thinks Mike has an overactive imagination. When Jody returns to the girl, she’s vanished.
Mike has a dream of the Tall Man and the little brown people that night. The next day, he seems the Tall Man in town, and the Tall Man sees him as well. The little guys come after Mike that night, and Jody asks, “Are you sure it wasn’t that retarded kid Timmy from down the street?” Ah, the 70s.
Later that night, Mike breaks into the mortuary’s basement. He hides in a coffin so the caretaker won’t see him. He explores the mortuary, and hears that growling again. He also spots a metal ball zooming around. The caretaker grabs him, but in the film’s most memorable scene, the ball sprouts spikes and gets the caretaker in the forehead. The Tall Man approaches, and Mike can’t explain anything. Mike cuts off the Tall Man’s fingers and takes one home with him.
Next morning, he shows Jody the still-moving finger, and it’s hard to doubt that part of the story. When he opens the box later, the finger has turned into a really big bug that attacks him. They struggle to fight the bug, and it eventually winds up in the garbage disposal. Reggie comes over just in time to witness the last part of the battle.
Jody goes to check out the mausoleum, and he’s attacked by one of the Jawas, which he shoots repeatedly. They are chased in a hearse driven by one of the dwarves, and that dwarf turns out to be Tommy, who has somehow been shrunk. They put its body in the back of Reggie’s ice cream truck. Why are they taking the bodies and crushing them down to half size? What about Jody and Mike’s parents? They were up there too.
Reggie drops Mike off at Sally’s place to stay. She runs an antique store, and she has an old photo of the Tall Man from very long ago. Reggie, who for some reason, plays ice cream truck music in the middle of the night, hears the creature in the back come back to life. Mike sees the truck on its side in the road, but Reggie is nowhere to be found. It’s a Dwarf attack with a double dose of screaming!
Jody locks Mike in his bedroom, but Mike figures out how to blow a hole in the door in the most unnecessarily random MacGuyver-sequence ever. The Tall Man has been waiting for Mike. Everyone heads to the mausoleum. Mike shoots the hearse’s tire and the car explodes with the Tall Man inside.
Meanwhile Jody has opened the tomb of his parents and they aren’t inside. The ball comes for Mike, but Jody shoots it. They meet up with Reggie, who was only hiding; he rescued some of the missing girls. They open up a door, and behind it they find dozens of little barrels and a pair of vibrating silver rods.
The barrels each contain a dwarf. Mike finds that going between the rods takes him to a strange world where dwarves are crossing the desert. The dwarves are being used as slave labor on the other side. They have to crush them because of the gravity and heat. Reggie remembers the tuning fork trick and touches both ends of the vibrating rods, which turns the thing way up, sucking everything through the portal.
Everyone runs away from the mortuary as the sound from inside intensifies. The wind picks up. It’s sucking in everything! Reggie finds a girl outside, but she stabs him to death. The girl then turns into the Tall Man, who isn’t dead at all. Mike and Jody drive away as the whole mausoleum glows and vanishes.
Jody has a plan to drop the Tall Man down a mine shaft and bury him forever. While he’s working on that the Tall Man chases Mike around his house. Mike learns that he has to confront his fears. Mike lures the Tall Man to the mine shaft and down he goes, buried under tons of rock by Jody. We’ll never see him again, right?
Later, we see Mike talking to Reggie, who is not dead. They mention Jody’s funeral last week. Reggie takes care of Mike now. Reggie says Jody died in a car wreck, and it’s as simple as that. All the rest is Mike in denial. Or was it? The Tall Man appears and pulls Mike through a mirror to the other side.
Commentary
The soundtrack is awesome. It’s Halloween meets the The Exorcist. Halfway through the film, I set it up as my new ring tone. There are a couple of shots of phone booths, but otherwise, it holds up really well.
The most iconic scene from the film, is obviously the first time we see the sphere, but the fingers are cool as is the glimpse of the other world at the end. Angus Scrimm as the Tall Man was probably cast due to his resemblance to Christopher Lee, but over the course of a few sequels, he became iconic all on his own.
It’s got a lot of drama with Mike recovering from the loss of his parents and fear of losing Jody, but the real winner here is the mystery behind all of this. Who is the Tall Man? Why is he doing this? What’s up with the spheres and the dwarves?
Some of the dialogue is a little clunky, and Michael Baldwin, who plays Mike, is too young to be much of an actor, but the film still works really well. It’s just very different from anything that came before it, and they didn’t waste time trying to explain it all.