Metacritic reviews

Pic's virtues all stem from taking its genre imperatives absolutely seriously rather than condescending to them or playing cute. Even venerable O'Toole resists what must have been an obvious temptation to wink at his role, and delivers a solid, enjoyable turn.

Well-crafted in most aspects, Phantoms is finally more ambitious than satisfying. It also could have used more humor. But it can't be accused of insulting the intelligence of its audiences.

Until it coughs up a ridiculously convoluted explanation of why an isolated town in Colorado suddenly goes deader than a weekday matinee of "The Postman," Phantoms delivers the shivers.

Phantoms is fear-less.

Hot Damn! A full-on gory (relatively) unpretensious horror movie!... Far better than it has any right to be.

For about 20 minutes, Phantoms, based on Dean Koontz's bestseller, keeps you guessing. After that, it barely keeps you awake.

Sometimes in horror movies, bad acting is effective, its very woodenness contributing to the sense of robotic horror. That ain't happening here. These guys are just bad actors.

A movie, based on the popular Dean Koontz novel, that seems to have been made by grinding up other films and feeding them to this one.

A horror movie that has the distinction of not even being scary... Although Koontz wrote the screenplay, the suspense for which he is supposed to be famous doesn't translate to the screen.

Since neither (Chapelle nor Koontz) seems to have any idea as to how to make an actual movie, they abandon form and reason and throw every stock trick in the book at the screen to see what sticks. And what sticks is the murky goo of storytelling gone bad.