The Movie: I dedicate this DVD review to my old college roommate Kenny, who complained to me that I never give out any ratings of "zero" to movies. Maybe it's because I don't want to waste my time watching a movie that I know will be bad, but here's to Kenny, and my first "zero" rating on a movie.

I got interested in seeing this movie because of the numerous references in Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back to the movie Phantoms and Ben Affleck's performance in it, that seemed to suggest that this was a really, really bad movie. In JASBSB, Jay, on the set of "Good Will Hunting 2: Hunting Season" yells out to Ben Affleck, "Affleck you were the bomb in Phantoms, yo!!!", and earlier in the movie, even Ben Affleck himself (as Holden McNeil, his character from Chasing Amy) mentions that, "Affleck was the bomb in Phantoms."

And well, Phantoms turned out to be everything I thought it would be, and worse. First of all, Ben Affleck is cast as the town sheriff -- and he just did not seem to fit into this role at all. Basically, what you get is a semi-low budget horror flick with a lot of low-tech effects (and some high tech ones too). Maybe Dean Koontz' novel is a real suspenseful nail biter, but this movie had me everywhere but on the edge of my seat.

Even the appearance of Peter O'Toole (of Lawrence of Arabia fame) didn't do much to save this movie, it's ridiculous dialog, and entirely too predictable plot. Horrible, horrible movie. No wonder Ben Affleck and all of his friends make fun of it!

The DVD: Dimension/Miramax/Buena Vista put together a pretty horrible, minimal effort DVD to go with this pretty horrible movie. The 1.85:1 non-anamorphic letterboxed transfer has very poor blacks, and poor contrast overall, with a dim, murky image... not too good when most of the movie takes place in the dark! Also, artifacts abound, with everything from too much edge enhancement, to compression related artifacts, like tons of gradient stepping, graininess, ghosts, and all kinds of other stuff. Ugly, ugly.

The 5.1 audio wasn't too hot either... while there were good surround effects where appropriate, there was nothing above and beyond what you'd see in an average DVD, and the dialog was hard to hear at times. And extra features? What are those?

Anyway, I only rented this movie from Netflix because I wanted to see how bad it really was, so in that sense, I'm not disappointed at all that I saw it.