All The Films Of Don Coscarelli Ranked Worst To Best

Don Coscarelli directed the 1984 music video for the title track of heavy metal band Dio's "The Last in Line" by faithfully recreating the aesthetic of its album cover, and reflecting the admittedly unsubtle social commentary of the song's lyrics, written by frontman Ronnie James Dio.

Former "Voyagers!" star Meeno Peluce plays a fresh-faced teenage metalhead delivery boy, whose suburban bike ride to an outwardly shiny office building becomes a literal elevator ride to a post-industrial Hell, as he's herded alongside what appear to be zombies, nuclear mutants, and cyborgs through a cavalcade of tortures conducted via contemporary mass-media. These include a video game arcade where teen players are chained to the cabinets and electrocuted if they lose and a theater full of viewers who have been ball-gagged and fastened to racks, with their foreheads primed for lobotomies.

Coscarelli remained so proud of directing "The Last in Line" that he paid tribute to Ronnie James Dio on Twitter on the 10th anniversary of his death. Both the best and worst one can say about this video is that it looks like an '80s high school metalhead's notebook scribbles come to life.

Mick Garris' "Masters of Horror" anthology TV series kicked off in 2005 on Showtime with the episode "Incident On and Off a Mountain Road," co-written by Don Coscarelli, Joe R. Lansdale, and Stephen Romano, adapting a short story by Lansdale with Coscarelli directing.

A car accident on a remote forested highway forces lone motorist Ellen (Bree Turner) to evade, then outwit, and finally fight a towering, bald, unnaturally white-skinned serial killer whose muteness gives way to angry growls at the nickname "Moonface" (John DeSantis). While Moonface and his wilderness cabin never transcend generic Leatherface-lite fare, even with the always watchable Angus Scrimm playing the outwardly delusional Buddy, the only captive whose life Moonface has spared, what's far more fascinating are the interspersed flashbacks recounting the breakdown of Ellen's relationship with her survivalist husband, Bruce (Ethan Embry).

Bruce is initially charming enough for Ellen to miss the early red flags of his ruthlessly social Darwinist worldview, but their time together is ultimately reduced to nothing but punishing combat training sessions, which help Ellen develop the strength and strategic thinking to deal with not only Moonface, but Bruce himself. It's welcome to see a victimized woman weaponizing the abuse she's endured from monstrous men, but it leaves a sour aftertaste when she adopts those predatory men's merciless outlooks.

Yes, between "Phantasm III: Lord of the Dead" and "Phantasm IV: Oblivion," I'm assigning a slightly higher ranking to the sequel with the woman who has sentinel spheres where her breasts should be.

When film critic Joe Queenan ranked "Exorcist II: The Heretic" versus "The Exorcist III," he wrote, "Only a Jesuit could tell which of these monstrosities is the worst. And whatever my other failings, I am no Jesuit." My judgment is not nearly so harsh, because, in spite of its isolated splatstick moments, writer-director Don Coscarelli's "Phantasm IV" mostly stepped away from the self-parody of "Phantasm III," interweaving an unabashedly plotless narrative with unaired archival footage from the series' preceding films to produce an ominous, moving elegy to a loving father's worst fears, with Reggie Bannister's Reggie all but openly acknowledged as the surrogate father to A. Michael Baldwin's Mike.

Because he wasn't able to save Jody (Bill Thornbury) — whose brain remains bound in a sentinel sphere — or be there for Mike when he was younger, Reggie fears that Mike might fall under the Tall Man's sway, and become his no-less-malevolent successor. This dark possible future is foregrounded when Mike and Jody discover the Tall Man was himself a kindly 19th century mortician named Jebediah Morningside, whose experimental attempts to connect with the world of the dead destroyed whatever man he once was.

The premise and cast might sound like a direct-to-VHS rental, but writer-director Don Coscarelli's 1989 wilderness thriller benefits from a script that emphasizes empathy and teamwork over toughness and competition, as well as his ability to draw strong performances from both proven genre talents and a few future luminaries.

"Aliens" castmates Lance Henriksen and Mark Rolston are set at odds. Henriksen plays humane mountain man Hank Chambers, who guides the Survival Quest group through outdoor excursions to foster self-improvement. Rolston plays dictatorial soldier-of-fortune Jake Cannon, who subjects the heavily-armed "weekend warriors" of Blue Legion to quasi-military exercises, as both camps explore California's Sierra Madre Mountain.

Hank's crew includes future Academy Award-nominee Catherine Keener as insecure divorcée Cheryl, and her future real-life husband, "Young Guns" star Dermot Mulroney, as alienated convict Gray (they met while making this movie). Jake encourages his Blue Legion to bully Hank's Survival Quest trekkers when they cross paths, but cadet Raider (Steve Antin) takes it further than Jake intended, first shooting Hank, then stabbing Jake and framing Hank, to persuade his Blue Legion teammates to hunt down the rest of Survival Quest.

Beyond the gorgeous on-location nature footage, what's uplifting about this film is that Survival Quest never descends to Blue Legion's kill-or-be-killed ethos.

This slice-of-life tale of pre-teen pals in American suburbia in the '70s, both written and directed by Don Coscarelli in 1976, is a woefully overlooked gem, generationally resonant enough to deserve broader recognition. Its plot arc follows 12-year-old best friends Kenny (Dan McCann) and Doug (A. Michael Baldwin), plus their 11-year-old sidekick Sherman (Jeff Roth), through a relatively mundane succession of episodic benchmarks of growing up, from facing bullies to dealing with the death of a beloved family pet and working up the nerve to talk to your first crush.

But both the script and the child actors — Baldwin arguably demonstrates stronger acting chops here than he does in certain installments of the "Phantasm" series — invest the narrative with such authenticity and heart that it practically qualifies as a time capsule of the era.

Reggie Bannister tucks his trademark ponytail under his collar to play Mr. Donovan, the "cool" teacher at Kenny's school, while Terrie Kalbus, who would go on to play the fortuneteller's granddaughter in the first "Phantasm," makes her radiant debut as Kenny's crush Marcy. And Don Coscarelli casts his own mom, Kate Coscarelli, to play Kenny's sensitive and insightful mother, making this film feel more like an informal get-together of friends and family.

What if, instead of Marvel's Doctor Strange or the Ghostbusters (most of whom at least have doctorates) protecting humanity from supernatural threats, it was an aimless, perpetually traumatized slacker in his 20s and his idiot burnout best friend?

Hopelessly out-of-his-depth David Wong (Chase Williamson) and his recklessly enthusiastic sidekick John (Rob Mayes) routinely battle weird foes ranging from zombie skinheads to monsters made of reanimated meat, but their minds aren't fully blown until they experiment with a drug nicknamed "Soy Sauce" right as they find themselves facing an invasion of cultists from an alternate timeline of human history.

"John Dies at the End," which premiered at Sundance in 2012, benefits from Don Coscarelli directing his own adapted screenplay, based on the eponymous novel by the pseudonymous David Wong (real name Jason Pargin), whose fertile imagination throws a slew of college philosophy thought experiments at his in-story surrogate as tangible life-and-death dilemmas for him to solve. Coscarelli imbues this inventive material with the plummeting pit-of-your-stomach sensation of an intense drug trip gone traumatically wrong, with the able assistance of Williamson's frantic, scrambling-across-the-floor performance as Wong.

A host of genre luminaries fill out the cast, including Clancy Brown (the Kurgan from "Highlander") as a professional spiritual investigator, Doug Jones (the fish-man from "The Shape of Water") as an alien man of mystery, and the Tall Man himself, Angus Scrimm, as an initially benevolent priest. And the film's epilogue is hilariously pitch-perfect.

"Phantasm" is Don Coscarelli's "Citizen Kane." He wrote, directed, photographed and edited this 1979 independent film, whose cast and crew were mostly amateurs.

After the death of a mutual friend, 13-year-old Mike Pearson (A. Michael Baldwin) tries to convince older brother Jody (Bill Thornbury) and family friend Reggie (Reggie Bannister) that something suspicious is going on at the Morningside Cemetery, whose mortician is a towering, scowling, sinister figure all three come to know as "the Tall Man" (Angus Scrimm). Mike and Jody's parents are already dead, and Jody confides in Reggie — without knowing that Mike is listening in — that he plans to leave town, so it's easy to interpret Mike's hallucinatory fears as flights of imagination inspired by his desire to keep what remains of his family together.

Coscarelli heightens this sense of surrealism by recreating the stylistic tics of Italian giallo horror, as characters morph into each other, riddles are solved through seemingly stream-of-consciousness associations, and what little plot there is proceeds from the sort of logic that only makes sense in our dreams.

The actors' relative inexperience makes their performances all the more emotionally genuine, with the standouts being Bannister as Reggie, essentially playing himself as a good-time buddy who'd lay down his life for his friends, and Scrimm as the Tall Man, who got as much mileage out of cocking an eyebrow and growling the word "BOY" as Robert Englund did from wielding his razor-fingered glove as Freddy Krueger.