Phantasm

Alex Pappademas: You can screen all 88 minutes of Don Coscarelli's 1978 barking-madsterpiece Phantasm on YouTube, and you should. From the budget-Kubrick white-marble mausoleum/hellmouth to the badass-1971-Plymouth-'Cuda-vs.-driverless-hearse car chase to the killer dwarves (who scuttle around like Satanic Jawas, or Neil Young's LED-eyed road crew from Rust Never Sleeps), it's a triumph of runaway nightmare-logic over structure and sense, the kind of movie you could imagine the burnout protagonists from a Mountain Goats song conceptualizing in a spiral notebook covered with death-metal band logos made entirely of thorns. But if you don't have 88 minutes, here's the introduction of the movie's breakout star, a flying silver death-orb that burr-holes people's skulls. Watch for the puddle of postmortem pee around 1:50, which almost earned the movie an X rating.