**SPOILERS** Kicked of of the faculty of the prestigious Oxford University because of his off-the-wall theories Prof. Timothy Flyte, Peter O'Toole, now writes for the supermarket tabloid Wide World News. You could imagine the surprise he had when one evening he was visited by these two FBI agents Hawtthorne & Wilson, Bo Hopkins & Robert Knepper.

It seems that Flyte was on to something in his writings of mysterious disappearances all throughout history since the beginning of life on earth. The disappearance of entire civilizations like the Mayans in 610 AD the English colony of Roanoke in the new world in 1590 and even more recently the 3,000 Chinese soldiers who vanished without a trace outside the city on Nanking in December 1939. This thing that was responsible, according to Flyte, for these strange phenomena has struck again and this time in the small town of Snowfield Colorado.

Sisters Jennifer & Lisa Pailey, Janna Going & Rose McGowan, traveling to Snowfield, where Jennifer runs a medical clinic, from L.A. they find the town eerily deserted. When the two sisters check into Jennifers home they find her maid Helda dead. Looking from house to house and store to store in Snowfield they find that everyone in town had either died of some mysterious disease or were hacked to death. It wasn't until the local sheriff Bryce Hammond, Ben Afflect, and his two deputies Stu Wargel & Steve Shanning, Live Schriber & Nicky Katt, came on the scene that they all realized that something out of, or under, this world happened to the people of Snowfield. The only clue that they had was a message scrawled in lipstick on a locked bathroom mirror stating "The Ancient Enemy, Thimothy Flyte".

Even though the story is a bit hard to follow the film "Phantoms" does have it shocks and thrills with the human race battling this ancient enemy that has resurfaced again to claim it's share of victims like it did over and over on earth since time immemorial. Living off life on earth these "phantoms" are not only able to wipe out whole towns cities or even civilizations they can even mimic their victims and absorb their minds and memories as well as their flesh and blood. Which makes them almost invincible even in the face of modern scientific and military technology.

The ending of the movie "Phantoms" was even more far fetched with Prof. Flyte coming up with this chemical component that has to do with cleaning up oil spills that does in the "Ancient Enemy" of all Mankind once and for all, or does it?

The movie has a very young and teenage-looking Ben Afflect playing not only the town's sheriff Bryce Hammond but also being a Harvard graduate as well as a former FBI agent who quit because he killed a little boy by accident and never wanted to touch a gun again. You wonder why Bryce would later get a job as a sheriff where he's obligated to not only carry but very possibly use handguns if he's so spooked by them?