Black Phone 2 Review – Hit Horror Sequel Lumbers Toward Elm Street

Coming as the revived master of horror machine was continuing to produce film versions, quality be damned, The Black Phone felt like a lazy fanboy tribute. Featuring a retro suburban environment, high school cast, gifted youths and twisted community predator, it was almost imitation and, like the very worst of his literary works, it was also inelegantly overstuffed.

Curiously the call came from from the author's own lineage, as it was based on a short story from his descendant, expanded into a film that was a unexpected blockbuster. It was the tale of the antagonist, a cruel slayer of young boys who would enjoy extending the process of killing. While assault was not referenced, there was something clearly non-heteronormative about the character and the period references/societal fears he was intended to symbolize, strengthened by Ethan Hawke portraying him with a certain swishy, effeminate flare. But the film was too ambiguous to ever properly acknowledge this and even without that uneasiness, it was excessively convoluted and too high on its exhaustingly grubby nastiness to work as anything beyond an mindless scary movie material.

Second Installment's Release During Studio Struggles

The next chapter comes as previous scary movie successes the production company are in desperate need of a win. Recently they've faced challenges to make anything work, from Wolf Man to The Woman in the Yard to Drop to the utter financial disappointment of M3gan 2.0, and so significant pressure rests on whether the continuation can prove whether a compact tale can become a film that can spawn a franchise. But there's a complication …

Paranormal Shift

The initial movie finished with our Final Boy Finn (the performer) defeating the antagonist, assisted and trained by the ghosts of those he had killed before. This has compelled director Scott Derrickson and his writing partner Cargill to move the franchise and its killer to a new place, transforming a human antagonist into a ghostly presence, a route that takes them via Elm Street with a capability to return into reality enabled through nightmares. But different from the striped sweater villain, the antagonist is clearly unimaginative and completely lacking comedy. The disguise stays successfully disturbing but the film struggles to make him as terrifying as he temporarily seemed in the original, constrained by complicated and frequently unclear regulations.

Snowy Religious Environment

Finn and his frustratingly crude sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) confront him anew while trapped by snow at a high-altitude faith-based facility for kids, the second film also acknowledging regarding the hockey mask killer the camp slasher. The sister is directed there by an apparition of her deceased parent and potentially their late tormenter’s first victims while the brother, still attempting to handle his fury and recently discovered defensive skills, is pursuing to safeguard her. The script is too ungainly in its contrived scene-setting, inelegantly demanding to maroon the main characters at a location that will additionally provide to backstories for both hero and villain, providing information we didn’t really need or desire to understand. What also appears to be a more calculated move to guide the production in the direction of the same church-attending crowds that turned the Conjuring franchise into huge successes, the filmmaker incorporates a faith-based component, with good now more closely associated with the divine and paradise while villainy signifies the devil and hell, belief the supreme tool against such a creature.

Overloaded Plot

The result of these decisions is continued over-burden a franchise that was previously almost failing, adding unnecessary complications to what should be a simple Friday night engine. I often found myself too busy asking questions about the hows and whys of what could or couldn’t happen to become truly immersed. It's minimal work for Hawke, whose features stay concealed but he does have genuine presence that’s mostly missing elsewhere in the cast. The location is at times impressively atmospheric but most of the continuously non-terrifying sequences are marred by a rough cinematic quality to distinguish dreaming from waking, an unsuccessful artistic decision that seems excessively meta and constructed to mirror the horrifying unpredictability of experiencing a real bad dream.

Unconvincing Franchise Argument

Lasting approximately two hours, Black Phone 2, similar to its predecessor, is a excessively extended and hugely unconvincing justification for the establishment of another series. When it calls again, I suggest ignoring it.

• The sequel debuts in Australia's movie houses on 16 October and in the US and UK on 17 October