STORY SUMMARY: Struggling musician Winslow Leach tries to get the attention of famous (and rather mysterious) record mogul Swan, only to have Swan steal his work and twist it into vapid pop music. After a series of misfortunes, Winslow returns to enact revenge on Swan as THE PHANTOM, but because of the contract he signed, is unable to kill Swan or himself. Leveraging Swan's own contract with the literal actual devil, Winslow manages to end himself and Swan (and a number of other people) in a live-boradcast grand finale. Oh also there's a girl here her name is Phoenix she's cool :).
THE MUSIC: The music for the film was written by Paul Williams, who you might know from like a million other things including his work with The Carpenters, Three Dog Night and several Muppet films (he wrote Rainbow Connection!) This film is a rock opera with a lot of really compelling ballads and upbeat tunes. I've linked the soundtrack up at the top, you should definitely give it a listen! Standout music moment for me has to be Winslow's first time singing as THE PHANTOM, where Swan (Paul Williams) is present and tunes Winslow's new voice box to sound like himself, rather than like Winslow.
WHY I LIKE IT: I love this movie for a lot of reasons, of course the soundtrack and all of the incredible acting performances. The costuming and set design also really appeals to me, although you can tell it was pretty low-budget. This film was kind of a massive flop when it came out, but clearly DePalma managed to recover anyway. I'm a huge DePalma fan anyway, between this, Carrie and Scarface. This movie rules, go watch it!!! (I watched it when it was free for a brief period of time on Youtube Movies, but it's not a hard film to find lurking around in dark corners of the internet...Don't think it's on streaming though :( )
The characters are also really fun to draw lol.
Shoutout to Beef, the realest one here lol.
