Black Phone 2 Review – Horror Sequel Heads Down Elm Street | Horror movies

ASince the revitalized Stephen King machine was still churning out adaptations, quality be damned, The Black Phone seemed like a lazy tribute to fans. With its 1970s small-town setting, high school cast, psycho kids and a sinister neighborhood villain, it was close to pastiche and, like the worst of King’s stories, also inelegantly stuffed.

It’s funny that the call came from inside the family home, because it was based on a short story by King’s son, Joe Hill, which was spun into a surprise $161 million movie. It was the story of the Grabber, a sadistic killer of young boys who enjoyed prolonging their death rituals. Although sexual assault was never mentioned, there was something inescapably weird about the character and the historical/moral panic touchpoints he was clearly meant to refer to, which was reinforced by Ethan Hawke playing him with a certain androgynous flare (even before he came out, the word gay was also used liberally). But the film was too vague to really acknowledge that, and even without that sense of unease, the film was so busy and over-the-top in its exhausting sloppiness that it was little more than nightmare fuel for undistinguished sleep.

Its sequel comes at a time when former Blumhouse horror filmmakers desperately need a win. They’ve struggled this year to make anything work, from Wolf Man to The Woman in the Yard to Drop to the complete box office disaster of M3gan 2.0, so a lot depends on whether Black Phone 2 can prove whether a short story can become a film that could spawn a franchise. There is only one simple problem…

The first film ended with Final Boy Finn (Mason Thames) killing Grabber, aided and trained by the ghosts of those he had killed before (and His psychic sister helps track his location – look, busy!). Writer-director Scott Derrickson and co-creator C. Robert Cargill are forced to take the series and its killer to a new place, transforming a flesh-and-blood villain into a supernatural villain, a path that takes them across Elm Street with the ability to return to the real world thanks to dreams. But unlike Freddy Krueger, The Grabber is remarkably uninventive and completely devoid of humor (this time Hawkeye also plays himself without any of the same camp, perhaps reading the room a bit…). The mask remains effectively jarring, but the film struggles to make it as scary as it briefly was in the first film, besieged by convoluted and often confusing rules.

Finn and his annoyingly foul-mouthed sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) encounter him once again during a snowfall at a Christian children’s camp in the Alps, and the sequel also nods toward Freddy’s former enemy Jason Voorhees (both of whom make mincemeat of the Grabber). There, Gwen is guided by a vision of her late mother and what may be the first victims of their late tormentor while she is followed by Finn, still trying to process his anger and his newfound ability to fight, so that he can protect her. The script is very uncomfortable with its contrived scene-setting, clumsily needing to have the siblings stuck in a place that would also add to the backstories of both the protagonist and antagonist, filling in details we didn’t really need or want to know about (as a mystery, it’s not that interesting). In what also seems like a deliberate move to push the film toward the same church-attending crowds that turned the Conjuring series into massive successes, Derrickson adds a religious element, as good is now more closely associated with God and Heaven while evil is represented by Satan and Hell, and faith is the ultimate weapon against a monster like this.

What all of this does is further pile up a series that was already on the verge of collapse, adding unnecessary complexity to what should be a simple Friday night drive (I often found myself too busy asking questions about the hows and whys of what could or could not happen to feel all of that). It’s a minor effort for Hawke, whose face we never really see (it could be purely a voice job for all we know as viewers) but he has a real presence that’s often missing elsewhere in the cast. The setting is sometimes atmospherically atmospheric, but the majority of non-scary set pieces are marred by grainy 8mm textures to differentiate between sleeping and waking, an ineffective stylistic choice that feels overly self-conscious and designed to reflect the terrifying unpredictability of being in a real nightmare.

At just under two hours, Black Phone 2, like M3gan 2.0 before it, is an unnecessarily long and largely unconvincing argument for the birth of a new franchise. Next time it rings, I recommend not answering.