Am I the only one? (Spoilers)
The way I took this final chapter was simply that Reggie had dementia the entire time, and this whole thing from 1979 until now was in his head.
This would explain the whole series. The gaps in between the movies explain Reggie's lucidity. The fact that Reggie gets, and possesses the quadruple barrel shotgun in Lord of the Dead through Ravager, despite discarding it in Phantasm 2. The fact that Reggie constantly, for no reason, possesses a Barracuda throught all the movies.
When they introduced Reggie with dementia in this movie, that's all I thought it was. And I felt it tied the series up perfectly. The worse the situation got, I felt it represented the state of Reggie's deteriorating mind.
My take was that Jody really died in a car accident in 1978, and Reggie felt the obligation to take care of Mike afterwards.
Then Reggie's mind starts to succumb to dementia. It starts out slowly in Phantasm, he still denies it at the start of Phantasm 2, and then it's in full bore for the remaining years, until he dies at the end of Ravager.
The only real moments in the entire series are the moments before the Tall Man appears, and the shots of Mike talking to Reggie on the grounds of the nursing home.
Even when Reggie "dies" in the hospital bed, I was under the impression that he saw Mike's physical being, and Jody's ghost standing next to him.
So in summary, The Red World, the Tall Man, the sentinels, none of it ever happened. Reggie was simply battling dementia and his own mortality.
Under that premise, I thought this movie was brilliant, and a perfect ending to the series.
Yea