Terrible acting, screenplay and direction.

Captivating movie !

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

I didn’t really have many expectations going into the movie (good or bad), but I actually really enjoyed it. I really liked the characters and the banter between them.

About half way through Phantom of Death last night, I almost gave up and turned it off. Much of the first act seemed so schizophrenic to me. What I thought was going to be a straight forward giallo ended up being anything but. I'm glad I stuck around. It's not great, but Phantom of Death provides a rather unique twist on the giallo that fans ought to check out. Robert Dominici (Michael York) is a 35 year-old concert pianist with the world at his fingertips. However, he is stricken with a rare disease that makes him age at an alarmingly rapid pace. He goes through bouts of uncontrollable, murderous rage. His target (as with most all gialli) – beautiful young women. Inspector Datti (Donald Pleasence) is tasked with putting a stop to the killings. For the aging Dominici, it becomes a cat and mouse game as he taunts Datti at every opportunity. The rapidly aging plot device is used very effectively in Phantom of Death. The police aren't sure who they're after. Physical evidence suggests the killer might be in his 30s or in his 50s or even in his 70s. It's a nice twist. And York does a phenomenal job with the aging Dominici. His performance here is much better than I ever expected to find in a film like this. Even though he's a ruthless killer, York is actually able to make the audience feel sympathy for Dominici and his situation. This is especially true in the film's finale. It's really remarkable. The make-up here is also fantastic. With hair falling out, teeth rotting, and other age related transformations, York really appears much older than he is. Nice job.As is the usual case and as my rating indicates, there are some issues I had with Phantom of Death. I love Edwige Fenech, but she's horribly underutilized as Dominici's love interest. Her role is such that I'm in the fourth paragraph of this and I am just now mentioning her. I don't think Pleasance gives one of his better performances. He often looks tired and lost. He's not helped by a script that makes him and the rest of the police look incompetent. How they didn't catch Dominici earlier is a mystery that can only be answered by one of the film's writers. One of my biggest complaints is with the editing. There are several occasions where a scene will jarringly end and switch to something completely different. A monkey on speed could make smoother transitions. Finally, the pacing is off kilter at the start of the film. As I wrote previously, it felt schizophrenic.

A successful pianist, surrounded by beautiful female admirers, is dogged by a string of murders that seem to follow him around. The movie follows him as his life begins to unravel. I admire Shameless for bringing these movies out for us to experience, but this is not a good film. It's badly made, and it looks AND sounds horrible. The sound quality is really bad, the volume leaps between low muffled spoken dialogue one minute, to heavy, blaring orchestral music the next. I was playing with the TV remote to whole time to compensate for this. And when stars Michael York and Donald Pleasance speak their lines, the audio quality is appalling - totally different to the person they are having a conversation with. Donald Pleasance in particular speaks in every scene (no matter where he is) with the tonal quality of being in an echoey, tiled chamber, while everyone else's vocals sound really close and flat. There's no way to get immersed in the performances with sloppy dubbing like this.The editing and flow of the various scenes is also really bad. Case in point, the scene when one victim is knifed at a train station, the scene carries through her death scene to the police arriving, body being covered up and Michael York watching in anguish, with the same intense score, as though these thing are all happening at the same time. That's not artistic, thats bad movie crafting. Michael York (as the main character) seems to dash all over the place with no sense of any real time passing. You'd think that with the experience that director Deodato has under his belt, there would be a bit more polish than this. So what are we left with? Some splashy but cheap gore (who has a bedroom lampshade with a 2ft spike on it?), some attractive ladies who's appeal is sadly ruined by terrible late 1980's fashion disasters. The acting is dire. The killer seems to have no motive for the way he is behaving. Donald Pleasance looks troubled and unwell the entire time. Michael York is shrill and hammy. Sorry, but I'd give this one a miss. You are very likely to lose interest before the whole sorry thing limps to a close.

The usually insipid and unexceptional Michael York gives a surprisingly good performance -- intense, anguished, severely tormented and even fairly touching -- as a melancholy pianist suffering from a rare ailment which causes him to age at an alarmingly accelerated rate, making poor Mikey transform into an increasingly ugly, balding, rot-toothed, wizened old pruneface ghoul. Mike subsequently goes lethally batty nuts and starts viciously killing beautiful young ladies who possess the youthful vitality and pulchritude he's rapidly losing. Late, great fright flick favorite Donald Pleasence, who often gave feverishly wired, riveting, fabulously idiosyncratic performances in almost every last movie he acted in, proves to be curiously phlegmatic and underwhelming as the concerned homicide detective investigating the brutal murders York commits.While the killings are nastily satisfying (women have their throats cut wide open so blood can spew forth in a thick arterial crimson torrent), there are a few fairly steamy and explicit sex scenes, and the production values are both solid and polished, "Phantom of Death" fails to make the cut as a total success due to draggy pacing, uninteresting characters (although York is rather pitiable, he's overall far too arrogant to be wholly sympathetic and Pleasence's obsessive policeman never rises above the level of a flat one-note cipher), so-so make-up f/x, and a grindingly predictable by-the-numbers plot. Ruggero Deodato's direction manages to be competent throughout, but never amounts to anything more than merely acceptable and surprisingly unremarkable; the distinctly mean, unrelenting kick-you-in-the-teeth potent ferocity which distinguished such previous pictures as "Jungle Holocaust," "Cannibal Holocaust" and "The House on the Edge of the Park" is largely absent here. The gorgeous Edwige Fenich looks positively smashing as York's caring French girlfriend, plus there are nifty cameos by legendary spaghetti splatter whipping boy John Morghen as a priest and Deodato himself as a creepy dude at a train station. To sum up, this one's strictly decent and diverting, but nothing terribly special or noteworthy.

This film became an instant must see for me after reading the plot outline - how could I resist a film about a killer who was unlucky enough to catch a disease that makes him age rapidly? This film is quite heavily flawed, but it's safe to say that director Ruggero Deodato hasn't squandered it, as Phantom of Death is a very fun little thriller that makes good use of its central idea and features some very nice scenes of gore. Yes, you've got to expect a lot of the red stuff from a man whose biggest film credits include The House on the Edge of the Park and Cannibal Holocaust, and the film certainly doesn't disappoint; as we've got a woman being stabbed though a window, another having her throat sliced open, a decapitation and other such macabre happenings. The plot focuses on a piano player who, after losing some of his hair, discovers to his horror that he's one of the few adult sufferers of a disease that speeds up the aging process. As you might expect, this has a profound effect on his mind as well as his body; and it ultimately leads him to murder...One of the main weak points of this movie stems from the plotting. The screenplay is very disjointed, and the film doesn't always flow well. Furthermore, it suffers from the common Italian thriller flaw of not always making a great deal of sense - so it's lucky that the ideas and their implications are usually enough to carry the film. The acting is a strong point for the movie, however, and this one features some rather risky casting. Michael York takes the lead role and brings class and sophistication to it, which ensures that the classic British actor is always more than the common sleazy killer seen in most Giallo's. Donald Pleasance is his opposite number, and while he isn't given an awful lot to do in his role as the police officer on the case; he's a hell of a lot better than he was in the Halloween movies in which he made his name. The central cast is rounded off by classic Giallo temptress Edwige Fenech, who still looks great despite this film being made over a decade and a half since her immortal roles in Sergio Martino's classy Giallo's. Overall, this isn't great or a classic; but Phantom of Death shows some great originality (something Giallo's aren't well known for) and entertains despite its obvious flaws. Well worth seeking out!