"Cheap Phantasm was; unimaginative is emphatically was not. It looks on paper an awful lot like plenty of other films, past and future, on the model of "inquisitive kid gets in over his head"; horror films and thrillers with one foot planted firmly in bedtime story. What sets Coscarelli's picture apart from its genre cousins is the batshit crazy tone, a certain feeling of his not giving any kind of a shit whatsoever about telling a story that makes sense; it's suggested at the end that some indeterminate amount of the movie might have been a nightmare, even a recurring nightmare, complete with a shocker ending that seems to immediately invalidate that same possibility." - Tim Brayton, Antagony & Ecstasy