I picked up "Phantoms" at a four-movies-for-twenty-bucks sale. Why did I choose to buy it? I heard Affleck was the bomb in it.

*cough* Okay, seriously - I have a rather morbid fascination with Ben Affleck's staggering inability to choose a decent script, Kevin Smith movies being the exception. I've heard that this one, out of all the outstandingly bad movies he's made, is largely considered the nadir of his career.

I turned on "Phantoms" with a couple of things in mind:

* The fact that no one seems to actually like it, not even hardcore bad movie fans,

* And the fact that "Phantoms" is based on a Dean Koontz novel.

I'll admit it. I like Dean Koontz. Not much as I used to, because I realized how pretentious and purple his prose gets at times, and because the ending to one of his recent novels made me want to cry in despair, but I still hold a fondness for his work. I read "Phantoms" after I saw the movie, and I'm glad I did it in that order. The book is incredibly boring and tedious and has practically nothing in common with the movie. The only similarities the two have are some character names and some very basic plot elements. And yet Koontz wrote the screenplay himself. I don't get it.

The opening credits are all lower case letters. You can tell when this movie was made, because Rose McGowan and Liev Schreiber, both "Scream" alumni, are credited ahead of Ben Affleck.

The first ten minutes or so are enthralling. Joanna Going and Rose McGowan as (respectively) Jenny, the doctor, and Lisa, her younger sister, are convincing in the sudden jump from mundanity to horror -- they discover the first body about three minutes in. "Phantoms" doesn't waste any time getting right to the point - mainly, that the entire town has been mysteriously deserted while Jenny and Lisa were gone. I watched in fascination and thought, "They were wrong. This is good, and I'm going to like it."

Then -- and I prefer to believe that this is merely an unfortunate coincidence - Ben Affleck shows up. And the movie goes right to hell.

My theory? It's the karma from the hats. The three law enforcement characters all wear silly hats. Affleck's in a cowboy hat, which looks even stupider than it sounds, and Schrieber is wearing some ski cap thing.

At any rate. Schreiber, whom I now think of as Cotton Weary because I couldn't remember the actual character name while I was watching the movie, provides the first laughs as Cotton becomes unnecessarily interested in a corpse. Yes, kids, necrophilia is funny! The scene is just so surreal -- Cotton comes off as this weird pervert who is as funny as Steve Buscemi's "Armageddon" character was supposed to be. Except Cotton isn't supposed to be. You follow?

This is one of many instances where I got the feeling that substantial character background got lost in the transition from book to movie. I was partly right: all the character background, for every character, got lost in the transition. There are tons of examples of this here, like Affleck's character. His name is Bryce Hammond, but I spent the whole movie addressing him as Sheriff Ben, so that's what I'm gonna call him. Sheriff Ben, we learn, was kicked out of the FBI and relegated to the position of Sheriff of this tiny town after inadvertently killing a young boy. While this is completely different from the backstory in the book, the idea remains the same. Sheriff Ben is an example of a Koontz Character Archetype: The Cop With the Tragic Professional Past. If there is a cop as a main character in a Koontz novel, rest assured that he (generally not she) has made a tragic mistake at some point in his career that resulted in loss of life, demotion, and a heavily burdened conscience. Also, there may well be a family member whose death he feels he could have prevented if he had Done The Right Thing. This character will see his current situation as a way to make up for his past mistakes: "If I can save this person or persons, then perhaps the fact that (insert name here) died horribly by my hand will cease to matter." This character will also survive, shaken but better for having lived through the events of the past five hundred pages. In the movie, Sheriff Ben's past comes up a few times and amounts to nothing.

So everybody wanders around the deserted town full of corpses and is scared. Nicky Katt dies. The song "I Fall to Pieces" is played way too much, and only a moron could miss the clumsy symbolism, considering the multiple decapitations already encountered. (I, having never had any feelings toward this song one way or another, came to hate it violently by the end of the movie.) Their wanderings include a stop at a hotel which features a complete lack of windows in the bathrooms. This is a plot point. (Okay, so it's not so weird, but this movie has a gift for making you assume that even the details that are correct are somehow wrong.) Finally, they end up at what I suppose is the police station. Cotton is growing increasingly demented and unhelpful, so Sheriff Ben grabs him, holds him about three inches away from his own face, and yells at him for a while, thus providing the homoeroticism that can be found in every movie Affleck has ever made.

Then, Rose McGowan's lipstick changes colour and a giant moth eats Cotton's face. I'm not kidding. The whole scene is set up hyperdramatically and it's supposed to be all scary, with the frantic editing and strobe-y lighting and scary music and a thing glomped on to a guy's face (well-known as a major YUK factor), but dude - it's a MOTH. Complete with camouflage colouring. It may be the least scary monster I've ever seen, and it's definitely the funniest one I've ever seen.

So, Cotton is dead, but not gone - he keeps showing up to remind us that boy, is this Phantom scary. There's one scene where Sheriff Ben escorts Rose to the bathroom, then waits outside while she, trying to smoke a cigarette, hears the toilet flush by itself. (The camera, meanwhile, begins its tradition of constantly zooming in on various sink drains to remind us that boy - is water ever scary. Right? Right?) So - say it with me now - instead of running, she goes to investigate. It's nothing, so she turns around to find a black-eyed Cotton leering at her. (By the way, there are way too many of these fake-out scare tactics: "There's-a-bad-thing-right-there-wait-no-there- isn't-because-IT'S-BEHIND-YOU!!!!" After a while it got so tiresome I started screaming random obscenities at the screen.) In a stunningly bold flouting of horror movie tradition, she actually escapes unscathed.

Then, bored with the current set-up, the movie switches gears and focusses on some governmental stuff for a while. Sheriff Ben has called the outside authorities (must I even mention that it has been made impossible to leave this town? I thought not) and let them know that someone scrawled "Timothy Flyte 'The Ancient Enemy'" in lipstick on a bathroom mirror. For some reason, they believe him and track down Peter O'Toole - I mean, Timothy Flyte. He is not the Ancient Enemy; he merely wrote about the Ancient Enemy. For a tabloid. They grab him anyway and fly him, along with a big ol' team of - I don't know, elite experts on giant moths or something to the town in question.

Naturally, every single FBI agent dies horribly - there's this one really cool "Alien"-esque scene involving a tentacle shooting out of a dog and killing everyone in a church. This is about when the Phantom starts communicating. Generally, it sounds like the Borg hive, but this time it manages coherency. Apparently, the reason why Jenny, Lisa, and Sheriff Ben are still alive is so that they could bring in Flyte. (Why are they still alive now that he's here, and what do Jenny and Lisa have to do with anything since it's Sheriff Ben who made the call? Who knows?) You see, the Phantom (or whatever it's called - the movie never gives it any name except the Ancient Enemy, and I'm having a hard time spelling "ancient" right now) knows that Flyte wrote about it and wants him to witness its most recent appearance so that he can "write the gospel." It wants him to "tell the world" about it, because the world reads the tabloids. ...Okay, good plan. Furthermore, the Phantom seems to think that it's a god.

Flyte promptly provides an explanation for this. In a nutshell: the Phantom absorbs the knowledge possessed by its victims, which is how it knew about Flyte (one of the victims had a copy of the tabloid at the time of his/her death), and presumably where it learned to rip off "Alien." From this, it has concluded that it is immortal and a god. Flyte seems to concur; it takes about ten minutes with a sledgehammer for Sheriff Ben to hammer into Flyte's brain the fact that just because it thinks it's immortal, that doesn't mean that it is. It just means that nobody's found the right thing to kill it with yet. This scene is hilarious for one thing: up until this point, the movie's gone pretty light on the profanity. Now, all of a sudden, Flyte and Sheriff Ben are throwing the F-word around left, right, and sideways. It's as if the movie suddenly remembered that it was rated R. And then, after this, the profanity level drops once more.

Anywa, Flyte finds the solution, and it's this big stupid boring science-y thing, the kind of thing that you tuned out of during biology class in high school. Basically, they need to infect it with a synthetic bacteria designed to scarf down oil, because it's oil-based. Or something. And they just happen to have some of it on hand, because the FBI dudes thought it would be fun to bring along every bacteria known to man. This explanation is greeted with Sheriff Ben asking if it will work. Flyte gives a long answer that boils down to "Probably not." Sheriff Ben then delivers one of the few funny-because-it's-supposed-to-be lines in the movie: "Actually, I was kinda going for a 'yes' there." Or something like that, I'm paraphrasing, but that's okay because what makes the line is not the wording, but Affleck's delivery.

Then, we get a scene that is unmistakeably Koontz, and really close to being good and scary. It consists of Sheriff Ben retrieving some tranquilizer-like guns and facing down a couple of the Phantom's manifestations (it can take on the form of what it's killed, hence the random appearances of post-death Cotton Weary). Despite another one of those annoying fake-out scare tactics, some heavy handed music, and the fact that Affleck can't quite pull it off, this scene is neat. It takes its time, lingering to watch as Sheriff Ben tries to assess whether the Phantom is going to kill him or not, knowing that he can do nothing if it decides to go for him. He unconsciously moves slow and easy, as if the Phantom is a skittish animal that could be startled into attacking. We also get the impression that the Phantom is deciding whether killing Sheriff Ben is necessary; it's not particularly hungry and doesn't perceive him as a threat to its "godhood" - but what difference does one death more or less make? This scene, along with the beginning, shows what the movie could have been.

The rest of the movie goes like this: Blah blah blah more non-suspense blah blah hey Sheriff Ben, remember the kid you killed? blah blah oh good we managed to shoot it with the bacteria blah blah blah de blah it's dead now, but did we get it all?, with a little "romantic tension" between Jenny and Sheriff Ben thrown in just because.

Finally, the movie cuts to a shot of a random TV showing Flyte discussing his latest book on the Ancient Enemy. The random TV turns out to be in a random bar, signifying for the truly dull-witted that the movie is coming to an end. At this point, I made a final request of the movie.

Me: "Okay, cue the surprise ending." Cotton Weary: *obligingly appears via a dramatic pan to the right* Me: "Thank you." Movie: *cues up "I Fall to Pieces" one last time* Me: *is too busy twitching and foaming at the mouth to say anything*

Much to my amazement, there is no bit of random weirdness/stupidity waiting to be viewed by those who sat through the end credits/forgot to hit the stop button. It's just the kind of thing I expected from this movie.

I have drawn a couple of conclusions.

A: Dean Koontz books are pretty solid when read, but should never be translated to the visual medium. It just ruins it. His books are too intricate to fit anything short of a mini-series, and the pictures your mind creates are way better than anything that can be created for you.

B: Liev Schreiber has only to don a hat and ugly glasses to render himself unrecognizable. (Other actors should be so lucky.) I knew only that I recognized him from somewhere until he took off the head- and face-gear.

C: "Armageddon" is still the worst movie of Affleck's career.

Scene to watch for: The moth.

Best line: "It's the devil, doncha think? Come up from hell to dance with us tonight?"

Things that make you go "huh?": They hire Rose McGowan to provide the eye candy and then bundle her up in an ugly down jacket for most of the movie?

I give this movie four turkeys, five if you have a masochistic taste for bad Ben Affleck flicks. Sure, there are a lot to choose from, but this is the funniest of the batch. It's one of my favourite bad movies.