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WATCH: Oliver retro-reviews The Phantom

February 6th, 2014 by Irwin Fletcher Comments

Welcome to Oliver Harper’s Retrospectives & Reviews. Like us all at FTN, Oliver LOVES cinema, and like us he has passions that not everyone shares, but he feels obligated to put the word out. This week Oliver looks at Batman & Robin – we’ll let him tell you the aims of these videos himself. Over to you, Oliver…

Every week FTN will be hosting videos looking back at classic films from the 80s and early 90s…

The videos will be a retrospective look back at a particular film covering all sides of the production and discussing how the film turned out. Many people on the net generally like to discuss films with a negative attitude and take joy in bashing films for comedic effect which does work but often many of the reviews aren’t researched well or films are taken out of context for the purpose of making a joke and I feel websites such as youtube have become over-saturated with these types of videos, I wanted to do something different.

“Often you come across films with no extras available on the DVD and you want to know more about it, so with some of the upcoming videos I will be discussing films that don’t get the respect they deserve or the ones that aren’t as bad as people think…”

The Phantom (1996)

In 1996 The Phantom hit the big screen and was big flop for Paramount Studios. Produced on a large budget of $45 million and made by fans of the comics, it struggled to the get the attention it needed. The star of the movie, Billy Zane, felt the studio didn’t market the film properly. For me, in my teenage years, I never saw it in theatres, it didn’t play at my local multiplex. It suffered the same fate as the Shadow and The Rocketeer – both films set in the 30s. Im not sure why these films failed to get the attention they deserved, it may be down to the studios struggling to find what age range to market them at.

The Phantom certainly gets a lot of undeserved hate. Let’s take a look at what’s good about the film and of course address some of its problems.

Oliver’s review:

Original trailer:

 

I'm an LA journalist who really lives for his profession. I have also published work as Jane Doe in various mags and newspapers across the globe. I normally write articles that can cause trouble but now I write for FTN because Nerds are never angry, so I feel safe.