SnoopyStyle Dr. Jennifer Pailey (Joanna Going) returns to the small town of Snowfield, Colorado with her sister Lisa (Rose McGowan) to find dead bodies. Is it disease, toxins, or is there a killer on the loose? They run into Sheriff Bryce Hammond (Ben Affleck) and his deputies Stuart Wargle (Liev Schreiber) and Steve Shanning. Strange things keep happening and Shanning is gone. Hammond calls for outside military help to put up roadblocks. Wargle is attacked by a mysterious creature. The FBI interviews academic Dr. Timothy Flyte (Peter O'Toole) who thinks this is an ancient evil which wiped out many civilizations before. He is brought to the military as an adviser.This starts out good as the two sisters find a desolate town. It's got a nice creepy sense. The starting five is solid. It would be great if O'Toole joins the group as the sixth inside the town. Instead he's outside and the movie brings in the military. It tries to explain things which don't necessarily make sense. It's a whole new set of characters taking the point in the battle. By the time O'Toole joins the Paileys and Hammond, the mess has already been made. The second half collapses after a promising first half.

view_and_review Sometimes titles truly belie their content. I was looking for ghosts, apparitions, specters, etc. and I got some other creature."Phantoms" wastes no time jumping into the action. Within five minutes of the film's opening credits we're treated to a dead body in a cozy little vacation town. The cause is unknown but soon the two female protagonists show us more dead bodies. They meet up with three armed men (and later more armed men) but that only produced an increased body count.The movie was mildly entertaining but it lacked any real umph. The scene was bleak enough with the absence of people and a slight haze, but the actors were too nonchalant and cavalier. There was no real sense of danger, I don't even think I saw any of them sweat. Even the most threatening and tense moments were met with a slight apprehension at most. It was all too clean and too textbook.

siderite Based on a Koontz book (and with Koontz writing the script), this film is a fantastic opportunity that was unfortunately missed. It could have been great. The premise is really scary, combining successfully concepts from The Blob and The Thing, but dismissing the need for otherworldy intruders altogether (thus making it even more scary). Instead we are confronted with a terrifying monster who is just now learning to think. So many ideas are popping into my head right now about how the movie could have been. Alas...The first thing that is wrong is the title. There are no phantoms in the movie and the term is indeed only used once in its entirety, hardly a reason to call the film for it, even if the book had that name.Then there are the characters. I don't know how the book was, but in the film Liev Schreiber is playing an obviously deranged cop - he is a great actor, but the character made no sense! Most of the actions of the characters make no sense, in fact.And then there are these scenes with pointless dialogue that brings nothing to the story, yet so many things happening without anyone bothering to explain how or why. Finally: the direction. How come in all the army scenes there are people in uniform running around? Is that what the army is, a bunch of people running around aimlessly? I wonder what Carpenter would have made with this material.Bottom line: this is a film that screams for a remake. Or a sequel, maybe. The concept needs reimagining, though, and it needs a really good director. As a scifi-horror fan, I was surprised that I haven't seen this movie before. As it is, it feels like a TV movie that someone forgot to tell you about, but if you go past the bad way the movie was made, you can see what immense potential lies there.

DustinRahksi Reading the description of this film on net-Flix made out to be better then it actually was. The film has enormous potential, imagine all the things you could have done with a ghost town. But no, it turns into some science fiction BS that really lets you down. Throughout the whole film, I was constantly making my own version of what could have happened. It really fails at bringing any horror, and doesn't offer enough suspense. I would gladly take the concept of a town where the residents disappeared, and make it into a better film. I'm not saying it's bad, it just didn't work. Don't even get me started on the Stu monster making jokes.Ben Affleck was good, the two sisters were just fine. Liev Schreiber was creepy as all hell. Overall, I didn't really care for it. Give it a watch if you are interested.