The La Bamba star is up and about after a frightening fall from a horse during filming of Young Guns 2. He has two other movies ready for release including the supernatural action flick The First Power, which opens Friday.

The outlook for the 28-year-old actor is good: He's just not going to be in any more action pictures for a while."Horse movies are not my cup of tea," says Phillips, his hair shoulder-length for the film he exited more jarringly than he would have liked.

On March 16, Phillips, in his role as Chavez in the Young Guns sequel, was on horseback near Santa Fe, N.M., for a scene calling for him to be strung up for a lynching. Emilio Estevez as Billy the Kid fires a gun to snap his shackles and the two escape. That's how it was supposed to be, anyway.

A noose around his neck, Phillips let go of the reins and put his manacled hands against a wall, all his weight in the stirrups. When Estevez fired a blank shot, the horse bolted.

"I never had a chance to get the reins and recover," Phillips says. The noose was rigged to break away and "that probably saved me from getting my neck snapped."But a foot caught in the stirrup as he slid off the horse, andPhillips remembers little of the next horrific seconds as he was dragged 50 to 100 yards. "I hit a wagon wheel turned on its side. They tell me I went through a woodpile. Emilio said it looked like bowling pins scattering allover the place."

The film's property master, Peter Bankins, reached him first. Estevez held Phillips' hand until a helicopter arrived to take him to the hospital. The damage included a right forearm shattered in four places, requiring the insertion of a plate with nine ping during 21/2 hours of surgery. He'll need 18 months of therapy to regain full mobility. And one knee took 100 stitches."I was lucky," says Phillips, whose father, George, a retired Navy aircraft mechanic, was visiting his son for the first time on a movie set and witnessed the accident.

Phillips takes an on-sreen pounding as a cop in The First Power. Then he's a bad guy in Show of Force, co-starring Amy Irving, due May 5, 1990.

Though he wants to tone down his on-sreen daring for a while, he'll play a writer next in Death Sentence, which he co-wrote - Phillips says he's not going to let himself be spooked.In fact, he's looking forward to seeing how the accident is in-corporated into Young Guns 2. Cameras were rolling throughout his mishap."It's going to be an amazing scene."

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