You can put all of the so-called masters of horror in one room, give them a $50 million budget and they still couldn’t come up with anything as effectively unsettling and downright creepy as a 1970s TV movie-of-the-week made by any random journeyman hack.

An absolute perfect storm of high concepts and low budgets, cheap film stock and sparse locations, overemotive acting and rushed finales, 1974’s Where Have All the People Gone — not based on the Peter, Paul and Mary flowers song, sadly — stars the eternally cloud-crowned Peter Graves (Airplane!) as an exceedingly levelheaded father who finds himself and his two grown kids in the middle of the cheapest apocalypse ever.

While spelunking as part of a family vacation — yep, they are those types of white people — a massive solar flare blasts the earth, causing Styrofoam rocks to bounce all over scenic Southern California and, in a startling turn of events, unleashing some sort of nonsensical virus that transmogrifies living people into decidedly non-living piles of clothes and dust. (I guess that plot point saved them a few dollars on mannequin rentals.)

As Graves’ patriarch admirably keeps it together, the only mission impossible here is trying to keep his two grating adult kids (The Evil’s George O’Hanlon Jr. and Event Horizon’s Kathleen Quinlan) from constantly suffering histrionically emotional breakdowns every time they see something that reminds them of their mom back in Malibu. With seemingly no automobiles working, he and his crew fashion a horse-and-buggy apparatus, pick up a catatonic mom and an orphaned rascal named Billy, search for groceries and fight packs of wild dogs on their way to the ’Bu, with predictably dystopian ’70s made-for-TV movie results.

From Circus of Fear director John Llewellyn Moxey — who I am willing to bet wore an ascot during production — this no-budget speculative thriller is surprisingly effective, considering it is honestly just a camera following a group of actors on a hike for an hour and 10 minutes, stopping every once and while to relay some sort of flimsy scientific theories about what’s going on, the unnatural sunshine beating down and emphasizing the desolation decently enough.

Featuring an open ending where most things are cleared up by Quinlan voice-overing about what mysteries the future might hold, this, like nearly all ’70s made-for-TV movies, felt like a pilot for a show that was never meant to be — something that probably would have been Cormac McCarthy’s The Road with a wardrobe furnished by the good people at Sears. —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.

By this time in the franchise’s history, Phantasm fans are either still all about that silver ball, happy to team up with ice cream man Reggie as he blasts his way through ghouls, or have given up their fear of the sphere a long time ago, tired of chasing down the Tall Man via numerous nonsensical sequels that seem to go nowhere.

Starting way back in 1977 or so, the hallucinatory series has detailed the adventures of Reggie (the affable Reggie Bannister, Bubba Ho-Tep), a locked-and-loaded ice cream man with a penchant for folk music and the ladies, and his best friend’s orphaned younger brother, Mike (A. Michael Baldwin, Vice Girls), and their fight against the reality-warping and dimension-hopping mortician nicknamed the Tall Man.

Portrayed with dour aplomb by the perfectly monikered Angus Scrimm (Always Watching: A Marble Hornets Story, the Tall Man seemingly has the sole goal of kidnapping the recently dead and turning them into diminutive Jawa-esque slaves — for what purpose, who knows. Try to stop him and he unleashes these iconic floating silver spheres that are programmed to drill deep inside your head and spew the contents in a shower of blood and viscera all over the darn place.

While subsequent sequels have managed to broaden the Phantasm mythology, they’ve also managed to confound even the most religious of viewers as well, operating on a totally collapsing reality that contradicts and swallows its own rules as soon as it makes them, kind of like what living in a waking dream slash nightmare must be like; this gaslit universe that finally has come to some sort of (in its own way) definitive conclusion with the long-awaited (almost 20 years) fifth and supposedly final entry in the series, Phantasm: Ravager.

Taking the directorial reins from franchise creator Don Coscarelli (John Dies at the End), new blood David Hartman (Roughnecks: The Starship Troopers Chronicles) does a good job of inceptioning himself right into the atmospheric dreamworld of the series. He even opens where we last left off, with a ragged Reggie wandering the desert, shotgun in hand and reiterating the basic plot points of the past few outings. After a few minutes of that, Reggie recovers his beloved Hemi ’Cuda, and the action starts with said silver spheres tracking him down and getting buckshot in the process.

Things take a trademarked bizarre turn, however, when he wakes up in a mental hospital, a clean-cut Mike in tow, telling a confused Reggie that he has been diagnosed with early onset dementia since the death of his wife and kids, and that the Tall Man and all that have been products of the psychosis. Unwilling to believe him, Reggie fights back and forth, alternating between both worlds — and maybe a few more — until, in a final twist of fate, they collide in a way that truly does finish the series off while still allowing it to continue for possibly forever, as we see in the red-tinted image under the credits.

If you’re confused, welcome to Phantasm. —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.