Phantoms

Two sisters (Rose McGowan & Joanna Going) visit a town in the Rockies, which is mysteriously absent of people except for a few corpses. They eventually encounter a Sheriff (Ben Affleck) and his deputies as the mystery deepens (Liev Schreiber plays one of the deputies). Peter O'Toole is on hand as an eccentric British writer who assists the group while Clifton Powell plays the commanding officer of an Army unit sent to the town.

The movie came out in 1998 and was written by heralded horror author Dean Koontz (both the screenplay and the novel). The story is basically "The Thing" (1982) set in a Rockies town with various nuances, like the addition of two females. Speaking of whom, Rose and Joanna have stunning faces, but their beauty is never really capitalized on in the film. Joanna, for instance, wears ridiculously baggy tan slacks the entire runtime.

The first half is nice & mysterious with several genuinely creepy sequences whereas the second half focuses on the incredible source of the horror and the complexities thereof. People complain about the latter portions, and I can see where they're coming from, but I like the way the protagonists put their heads together to try to figure out and defeat the diabolical phenomenon.

The film runs 1 hour, 36 minutes and was shot in Georgetown, Colorado.

GRADE: B-