Shock Interview: Reggie Bannister on the Phantasm Films

Actor Reggie Bannister reflects on the Phantasm franchise and dishes on the latest film Phantasm: Ravager

For almost four decades now, Phantasm’s Reggie Bannister has made a name for himself as being one of the genre’s great sidekicks turned leading men. Being the heart and soul of the series, Bannister’s “Reg” character has kicked ass, fought a barrage of flying spheres and taken on The Tall Man all in the name of being there for his buds and giving a sense of loyalty that is rarely found in the genre.

Now back for one more go-around, Bannister and his buds fight tooth and nail against the Tall Man and his creatures in Phantasm: Ravager (as well as the wonderful looking and sounding Phantasm: Ravager) and CS/STYD was able to talk to the nicest guy in horror regarding the film, the motivation of the Reg character and why the series has stood the test of time.

ComingSoon.net: I watched Ravager and Remastered, and I have got to say, as a fan, Ravager just made me absolutely giddy. Before getting in that film though that, let’s talk Remastered. Decades later, how does it feel to have the film look and sound so great?

Reggie Bannister: Yeah, it feels good.  It’s really funny because as I’m talking you man, I’m looking out the window here and I see the Hollywood sign, which is kind of a trip. It kind of reminds me of how I got here in the first place.  You know, at this point where I’m talking to you about the fifth installment of Phantasm and of course when we started doing them, we though well, we’re going to do this picture and that will be it.  Then Universal Pictures came along for the second film and said “We’d like you to do a second one,” and Don Coscarelli said “Ok, we could do that.” Then we a third one and they just kept kind of growing.  Now here we are, having just finished Ravager, and we’re very, very proud of it because it’s very integral to the other four parts of the story.  It has grown from the original film logically or fantastically into the fifth one, so we’re very tickled about it.

CS: As a fan, the series has always felt very unique to me.  It came out at a time way before A Nightmare on Elm Street and the Friday the 13th and Halloween sequels, and though I’m not taking anything away from those, I’ve always felt that the Phantasm series was so different and unique and just lived in that kind of dream world and dealt with death in ways that no other films of that kind had done. Is that something that attracted you to continue to be a part of the series, with every film?

Bannister: Yeah, absolutely.  That was a terrific aspect of the way Don wrote the characters into the film, and the fact that they were kind of like a team. You had the two brothers Jody and Mike, and then you have their best friend Reggie, who is going to throw himself under a bus for them, if necessary. And I don’t know, there was a sort of camaraderie of relationships, that you should really be able to have and you should be able to do this.  This is the way relationships should be you know, you should be able to have best friends that are like that, like Mike and Jody and Reggie. So it was a lot of fun to be able to put that forward and go “Look,  everybody should kind of check this out and see if it can apply to your life in some way.” Of course that’s the whole thing about, the creative aspect that draws us all in to create whatever form of art, whether it be music, filmmaking or the theater arts.  So yeah, it’s been great because it’s all been so pure.

CS: There’s always been such a huge character arc with Reggie, the first film begins with the viewer kind of thinking it’s going to be very much just a Mike and Jody film and Reggie is just kind of a sidekick. But Reggie is such a huge part of that first film, leading into being, in my opinion, the most important part of all of the films. And it’s great to see that with those five films, seeing the character arc and seeing the character grow into, in my opinion, the focal part of the series in a lot of ways.

Bannister: Yeah, you know, again I think the humanity of the Reggie character, in other words “Hey, don’t mess with my friends!  You want to mess with me?  You mess with my friends.”  And that’s really how Reggie’s whole attitude has been, what drives him because if he doesn’t get in the way between his friends and this Tall Man and all these guys that are minions that the Tall Man send to destroy him and his best friends, if he doesn’t get in the way and stand up, there’s going to be a problem, a problem for the world because basically the Tall Man represents an evil that wants to take over the whole world.

CS: It’s kind of comical how Reggie, in every film, he kind of ends up being the ladies man, but right before things get good, it’s always yanked right away, it always seems like the Tall Man and his minions always kind of ruin it for Reggie to have some good luck every once in a while.

Bannister: Yeah he always has a hot date, the hot dates are interested in him, you know? They always kind of make themselves available to him but just about the time he’s about to get it on, something happens.  He has to jump out of bed in some cases, and I love the stuff with Gloria Lynn Henry and the handcuffs (laughs.) The relationships between the Reg character and the women he likes, I think those are all very special relationships as well and I think that women of Phantasm have been able to enjoy some really good role, because Don (Coscarelli) doesn’t treat the female character like a lot of people treat the female character.  You know, they’re smart, they’re hip and they’re sexy as well so you got it all wrapped up in one.

CS: Speaking on Ravager now, David Hartman (co-writer and director of Ravager) was talking about how the film started as a “Hey let’s shoot this small thing” and then “Hey let’s shoot a little bit more” and it kind of going on and on. When you were approached to start filming what would eventually lead to what would become Ravager, were you excited to take the character on again?

Bannister: I was. You know, when we first started fooling around, and I’ll say fooling around with this concept of this new film Ravager, they were even discussing the idea of making it into a webisode kind of thing where you do these little episodic things on the internet. And then you know, the more we kind of got in to it, we came to a point where we were like “Hey, this has got to be a feature film. It HAS to be.“ And so at that point we just went for it and we now we got it.

CS: When it came to the actual shooting of the project, was it kind of liberating or did you find it a challenge to kind of shoot it a little bit here, take some time off, and then come back to shoot more as opposed to shooting an entire film all at once?

Bannister: I’d have to say that working on films with Don Coscarelli has always kind of been done this way and because it’s an independent film, you don’t have a studio giving you millions of dollars to shoot a film in 12-13 weeks or whatever and just do it all and you start here and then you finish somewhere down the line in a few weeks or whatever. No, independent filmmaking is a very special category of filmmaking. You shoot when you can and that means you shoot when you can afford to rent the equipment and you shoot when you can get all your actors together at the same time when you need a particular scene. So it’s really a cooperative effort and in the end, when you look at the finished product you really appreciate it that much more, I just know that I do appreciate it that much more. So I do have to say that generally the films that I made have been independent films and we help out as a production company, Gigi (Bannister, Reggie’ s wife) and I, with our company, Production Magic Inc, PMI. We help out as much as possible with locations, with actors, we, Production Magic makes things happen, we make magic happen.  You know, that’s really what it’s all about.

CS: It really shows, Ravager and pretty much every other film in the series has such a large amount of heart and you can tell that everyone was really in to it. Speaking of heart, and speaking of kind of a big part of the series, with Ravager being the last film that Angus (Scrimm) worked on, how was it looking back on working on this great horror/sci-fi series with such an iconic villain and just a nice guy in general?

Bannister: It was great. Working with Angus as The Tall Man, reflecting back on it, it was kind of like if I had worked with Bela Lugosi or Boris Karloff. I mean, he’s in that category in terms of having created the penultimate evil character. I’m really proud that I was able to be involved with him, especially when you look at the whole Phantasm piece and how it develops and moves forward. It’s been great and working with Angus was terrific.

CS: I loved the line of “A Hell of a way to start a trio.” Closing out Ravager, which brought brought everything full circle to the first film’s “Hell of a way to END a trio” line. You know, closing out the series when the first film started with the opposite and I think it’s the perfect way to wrap it up and I think you all just did an amazing job. And I just wanted to thank you for taking the time to talk to us today and more importantly, giving all of us Phantasm fans such a wonderful series to follow.

Bannister: Thank you, I appreciate it as well.