The Phantom
- Thread starter Rulius
- Start date
Well, first off, if they were to make another Phantom movie, it wouldn't be a remake. It would be another adaptation of the Phantom comic.
Make that another who likes the Billy Zane Phantom. Saw it in the theater with a bunch of friends, we all loved it. Wish it had done better at the box office.
The Billy Zane version is hilarious.
It's really fun and so so bad.
I don't think it's bad. It probably wasn't enough of a blockbuster for modern audiences, but it was a good, old-fashioned, Saturday matinee adventure movie. I would have loved it when I was a kid, the same way I loved, say, Tarzan and the Lost Valley of Gold or The Golden Voyage of Sinbad.
This. It's just plain old fashioned fun. I keep thinking it would be a great double feature with The Rocketeer. Or The Shadow. Or the Indiana Jones movies, which granted at least the first and third are better.
Yes and yes. Good old-fashioned rollicking fun. I remember seeing it reviewed on a channel 4 movie show with Johnny Vaughn, the name of which now escapes me, which basically recruited people off the street to review films. When this came on, the reviewers all looked at each other sheepishly and all admitted guiltily that they'd enjoyed the hell out of it, despite expecting it to be awful. Zane really made a sweet and charming old fashioned hero in it. And in an age where Batman stars usually let their suit do the gym work for them, he was in fantastic shape.
And a role for Patrick McGoohan? Yes please.
I've heard of various efforts to relaunch the character on the big screen since then - futuristic, modern-day, pulpish, etc. The beauty is, it can be set any time, it's more a question of getting the tone right. This should not be The Dark Knight-like in its approach.
Personally, I'm a sucker for retro superhero movies, be it The Phantom, Captain America, X-Men First Class etc, so I hope it will be set in the past.
I've never watched the Billy Zane Phantom. Everything I've seen online about it looked awful. This thread encourages me to track it down.
If you enjoy the likes of the Rocketeer, The Mummy or the Shadow, you ought to get some enjoyment from it. It's not going to rival The Avengers or The Dark Knight but it's an enjoyable piece of escapism.
Yes, I enjoyed all of those-- though I had a couple of problems with The Shadow. I'll check On Demand tonight to see if Phantom is hanging out there.
If nothing else, you get a young Catherine Zeta-Jones as a pirate queen!
It's funny. Most articles and bios treat Mask of Zorro as her big movie debut. The fact that she had previously played the femme fatale in The Phantom tends to get swept under the rug.
Zorro always had a higher profile. Black is the new purple.
^^ My only big problem with The Shadow was that they made Lamont Cranston an irredeemably evil man who was forced into doing good through mind control.
Well, amazingly enough, The Phantom was on On Demand, and, even more amazingly, I found time to watch it already. It really was good. I never liked Billy Zane much, but he really played this part well. The movie itself was pretty much the perfect way to do an adaptation. It was faithful to the story and character, set in the right time frame, and consistent in ambiance. The action was over the top enough to be cartoony, but not into cringe-worthy territory like more contemporary movies (I'm thinking of stuff like King Kong, Avengers, Van Helsing, et al). The one exception to that being the part where he "jammed the stick" on the plane and it continued to fly straight and true for about five minutes.
The only other thing weird about it was the ghost of his father. I don't remember anything like that being in the comic strip.
Well, amazingly enough, The Phantom was on On Demand, and, even more amazingly, I found time to watch it already. It really was good. I never liked Billy Zane much, but he really played this part well. The movie itself was pretty much the perfect way to do an adaptation. It was faithful to the story and character, set in the right time frame, and consistent in ambiance. The action was over the top enough to be cartoony, but not into cringe-worthy territory like more contemporary movies (I'm thinking of stuff like King Kong, Avengers, Van Helsing, et al). The one exception to that being the part where he "jammed the stick" on the plane and it continued to fly straight and true for about five minutes.
The only other thing weird about it was the ghost of his father. I don't remember anything like that being in the comic strip.
^Yay, we converted another person! Glad you enjoyed it.
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