Phantom of the Mall: Eric’s Revenge (1989) – Film Review

Director: Richard Friedman
Cast: Derek Rydall, Jonathan Goldsmith, Rob Estes
Certificate: TBC

By Sarah Morgan

I’m not sure I’ve watched a more 1980s-looking film than this in a long, long time.

The shoulder pads are big, the hair even bigger and the jeans… well, they’ve been stonewashed to within an inch of their lives.

“Deranged”

The source material, however, is rather older – it’s Gaston Leroux’s 1910 novel The Phantom of the Opera, which by then had already been filmed several times, most notably the iconic 1925 silent movie starring Lon Chaney, 1943’s take with Claude Rains, and Hammer’s version, released in 1962 with Herbert Lom in the lead role.

It wasn’t new to transport the story to a different setting either – Brian De Palma’s 1974 Phantom of the Paradise was a rock musical inspired by it.

This time, the action takes place in – you guessed it – a shopping mall. The place recently opened and is designed to bring wealth and prosperity to the local population, but we know right from the off that it’s more likely to inspire death and destruction when a security guard is bumped off by a mysterious masked assailant.

It turns out the killer is Eric Matthews, a teenager thought to have died while saving his girlfriend, Melody, from an arson attack on his home. However, he’s very much alive, although heavily disfigured – he’s clearly been left deranged by his near-death experience too.

“Miscreants”

Melody has landed a job at a restaurant in the mall and is trying to put the past behind her by embarking on a relationship with handsome young journalist Peter. Eric, meanwhile, is determined to keep her out of the clutches of miscreants in a variety of inventive if bloodthirsty ways, but he really takes umbrage when he realises she’s ready to love again.

Phantom of the Mall is never going to win any prizes for originality or great acting; it’s all, well, a bit bland. The cast, which includes Rob Estes and Kari Whitman, are your typical west-coast-looking types who seem to have just stepped out of a salon whenever they appear, rather than facing a life-or-death battle.

Others to look out for include Derek Rydall who, as Eric, has to wear perhaps the worst make-up of any Phantom ever, genre stalwart Ken Foree and Miss 1980s herself, Morgan Fairchild.

The film does, however, have one thing going for it – it’s slightly better than Dwight H Little’s adaptation of Leroux’s book starring Robert Englund, which was released in the same year.