We have no photographs to show you from Phantoms. Why not? Because this is another prime example of a studio (in this case the Dimension Films division of Disney's Miramax Pictures) withholding a press kit because they are aware of a film's OBVIOUS problem(s) and don't want reviewers to publicize this. If one could drive an 18-wheeler through the plot holes of I Know What You Did Last Summer, the holes in Phantoms are huge enough for a supertanker to sail through.
Phantoms may be summed up as 5,000,000 Years to Earth, Quartermass and Cujo meet The Puppet Masters and The Andromeda Strain at the Overlook Hotel -- except that instead of some extra-terrestrial or ghostly menace, the phantom of Phantoms is a giant, walking, talking, hundred-million-year-old oil slick! Think of the Exxon Valdez with a serious attitude problem.
Confronted with the malevolent oil slick, which he claims can destroy all life on Earth, what does Oxford don turned tabloid hack writer Peter O'Toole propose to do? Shoot it with hypodermic darts filled with a military-bioengineered bacterium which eats petroleum of course! This plan works perfectly . . . except for the obligatory come-on ending for a hopefully-never-to-be-made sequel.
Given that the Army's on-site super-computer keeps repeating -- endlessly -- that the diabolical oil slick is made up of methane and other hydrocarbons, one must ask oneself why sheriff Ben Affleck doesn't just bum a cigarette from Rose McGowan, flick a smouldering butt at the pillar of petrol and just blow it up instead of constantly risking vicious attacks from the monster's petrolatum police dog and Baalzebub's butterflies? Why ask why? It wasn't in the shoddy script, which shows signs of having been re-written over and over again by the clueless and the careless.
It's nice to see former adolescent role model and future superstar Ben Affleck not drinking and smoking in a movie (even if that would destroy the Satanic sludge), but one must ask why in the world (aside from the paycheck) he agreed to appear in this mess? And Peter O'Toole? Yikes! At least he was semi-believable in Hemdale's dreadful The Seventh Coin, but his career hits slimy bedrock in Phantoms . . . and then sinks to even lower geological strata.
I give this farrago of drivel my absolutely lowest rating: "Dinosaurs died to make the film stock on which Phantoms was produced. It was a poor-trade off."