"Phantoms" was pretty decent book by Dean Koontz that I was looking forward to seeing on screen. When I went with my girlfriend, the theater we went to had only 5 other people there by themselves. I had the feeling there that this movie would suck from then on and I wish we would've left the theaters and got a refund. This was the slowest 90 minutes I've spent in the movies. I don't know how so many people can rave about this; it was basically every horror movie cliche taken and thrown into one movie. At one point, I was so bored, in my mind I was playing a game of "guess which movie this is ripping off of." Sure, another movie, "Virus" was exactly the same, taking elements from millions of horror films, but at least "Virus" was campy and it came off as mindless fun. The audience I went to in this seemed bored to death, I even heard some loud yawns behind me in the movie. For how much he complains about screenwriters screwing up his novels by bad adaptions, Dean himself did a pretty p**s-poor job adapting this one. This one makes "Watchers" look great. Enough with the script, the director (who brought us the crap-fest "Halloween 6") can't seem to know what to do with the script and just has the cast endlessly walking around a quiet town looking dazed by how quiet everything is, while we're stuck waiting for a cheap pop-out to appear or someone to shout out some stupid one-liner about how bad things everything thats happening around them is. The actors give it their worst and obviously needed a paycheck; Ben Affleck is miscast as a hick sheriff, Liev Schreiber makes an ass out of himself, overacting terribly as a retard deputy and deserves an award for actor most making an ass out of himself. Rose McGowan, who wasn't bad in "Scream," though her cleavage did the acting for her there didn't improve any bit from "Doom Generation," and what the hell was the great Peter O'Toole thinking when he signed on this film. Since I hated so much about this movie, the only good thing about the film was the performance by Joanna Going, she isn't given much to do, but she makes the best out of her one-dimensional character and is the only one who you hope won't get hacked to pieces. The make-up effects were really bad as well and were only a small improvement over "Plan 9 From Outer Space" (no pun intended on that movie). This is probably one of the worst movies I've had to sit through. .
