🔗 Share this article

Coming as the resurrected Stephen King machine was persistently generating adaptations, regardless of quality, The Black Phone felt like a lazy fanboy tribute. Featuring a small town 70s backdrop, young performers, gifted youths and disturbing local antagonist, it was almost imitation and, comparable to the weakest the author's tales, it was also inelegantly overstuffed.

Interestingly the inspiration originated from within the household, as it was based on a short story from the author's offspring, over-extended into a film that was a unexpected blockbuster. It was the narrative about the kidnapper, a brutal murderer of young boys who would enjoy extending the process of killing. While sexual abuse was never mentioned, there was something inescapably queer-coded about the villain and the period references/societal fears he was intended to symbolize, emphasized by Ethan Hawke acting with a noticeably camp style. But the film was too opaque to ever fully embrace this aspect and even aside from that tension, it was overly complicated and overly enamored with its exhaustingly grubby nastiness to work as anything beyond an undiscerning sleepover nightmare fuel.

Follow-up Film's Debut Amidst Production Company Challenges

The next chapter comes as former horror hit-makers the production company are in critical demand for a hit. Recently they've faced challenges to make any film profitable, from their werewolf film to their thriller to their action film to the utter financial disappointment of the robotic follow-up, and so significant pressure rests on whether the sequel can prove whether a brief narrative can become a motion picture that can generate multiple installments. But there's a complication …

Ghostly Evolution

The first film ended with our surviving character Finn (Mason Thames) killing the Grabber, helped and guided by the ghosts of those he had killed before. This situation has required writer-director Scott Derrickson and his collaborator C Robert Cargill to move the franchise and its villain in a different direction, transforming a human antagonist into a supernatural one, a route that takes them through Nightmare on Elm Street with a capability to return into reality facilitated by dreams. But in contrast to the dream killer, the antagonist is clearly unimaginative and totally without wit. The mask remains successfully disturbing but the film struggles to make him as terrifying as he temporarily seemed in the first, trapped by convoluted and often confusing rules.

Snowy Religious Environment

Finn and his frustratingly crude sister Gwen (the performer) encounter him again while trapped by snow at an alpine Christian camp for kids, the second film also acknowledging in the direction of Jason Voorhees the camp slasher. Gwen is guided there by a vision of her late mother and potentially their late tormenter’s first victims while the protagonist, continuing to process his anger and fresh capacity for resistance, is following so he can protect her. The script is excessively awkward in its artificial setup, awkwardly requiring to maroon the main characters at a place that will also add to backstories for both protagonist and antagonist, supplying particulars we didn't actually require or care to learn about. Additionally seeming like a more calculated move to guide the production in the direction of the same church-attending crowds that transformed the Conjuring movies into major blockbusters, Derrickson adds a faith-based component, with good now more closely associated with the divine and paradise while villainy signifies the demonic and punishment, belief the supreme tool against this type of antagonist.

Overcomplicated Story

The result of these decisions is additional over-complicate a story that was formerly nearly collapsing, adding unnecessary complications to what should be a straightforward horror movie. Regularly I noticed excessively engaged in questioning about the processes and motivations of what could or couldn’t happen to become truly immersed. It’s a low-lift effort for the actor, whose face we never really see but he does have genuine presence that’s typically lacking in other aspects in the acting team. The location is at times remarkably immersive but the majority of the continuously non-terrifying sequences are flawed by a rough cinematic quality to distinguish dreaming from waking, an poor directorial selection that feels too self-aware and created to imitate the horrifying unpredictability of living through a genuine night terror.

Unpersuasive Series Justification

Lasting approximately two hours, Black Phone 2, comparable to earlier failures, is a unnecessarily lengthy and highly implausible justification for the establishment of another series. If another installment comes, I recommend not answering.

• Black Phone 2 is out in Australian cinemas on 16 October and in America and Britain on the seventeenth of October