Black Phone 2 Review – Successful Horror Follow-up Heads Towards Elm Street

Arriving as the re-activated Stephen King machine was continuing to produce film versions, regardless of quality, the original film felt like a uninspired homage. With its 1970s small town setting, high school cast, telepathic children and disturbing local antagonist, it was nearly parody and, like the very worst of his literary works, it was also awkwardly crowded.

Curiously the source was found from the author's own lineage, as it was adapted from a brief tale from his descendant, over-extended into a film that was a surprise $161m hit. It was the tale of the antagonist, a sadistic killer of young boys who would enjoy extending the ritual of their deaths. While sexual abuse was avoided in discussion, there was something inescapably queer-coded about the villain and the historical touchpoints/moral panics he was obviously meant to represent, reinforced by Ethan Hawke portraying him with a noticeably camp style. But the film was too ambiguous to ever properly acknowledge this and even excluding that discomfort, it was excessively convoluted and too focused on its wearisome vileness to work as only an mindless scary movie material.

The Sequel's Arrival Amidst Production Company Challenges

Its sequel arrives as former horror hit-makers the studio are in desperate need of a win. This year they’ve struggled to make any film profitable, from their werewolf film to the suspense story to Drop to the complete commercial failure of the AI sequel, and so a great deal rides on whether Black Phone 2 can prove whether a short story can become a movie that can create a series. However, there's an issue …

Paranormal Shift

The first film ended with our Final Boy Finn (Mason Thames) killing the Grabber, helped and guided by the ghosts of those he had killed before. It’s forced filmmaker Derrickson and his co-writer C Robert Cargill to move the franchise and its killer to a new place, converting a physical threat into a supernatural one, a direction that guides them via Elm Street with an ability to cross back into the physical realm enabled through nightmares. But in contrast to the dream killer, the villain is markedly uninventive and totally without wit. The disguise stays effectively jarring but the movie has difficulty to make him as frightening as he temporarily seemed in the first, limited by complex and typically puzzling guidelines.

Snowy Religious Environment

The protagonist and his annoyingly foul-mouthed sister Gwen (the performer) confront him anew while snowed in at a mountain religious retreat for kids, the sequel also nodding regarding the hockey mask killer Jason Voorhees. The sister is directed there by an apparition of her deceased parent and what might be their dead antagonist's original prey while the protagonist, continuing to process his anger and recently discovered defensive skills, is pursuing to safeguard her. The writing is excessively awkward in its contrived scene-setting, inelegantly demanding to get the siblings stranded at a location that will additionally provide to background information for hero and villain, providing information we weren't particularly interested in or want to know about. Additionally seeming like a more deliberate action to edge the film toward the comparable faith-based viewers that turned the Conjuring franchise into massive hits, Derrickson adds a religious element, with virtue now more directly linked with God and heaven while villainy signifies Satan and damnation, religion the final defense against such a creature.

Over-stacked Narrative

The consequence of these choices is additional over-complicate a series that was already almost failing, incorporating needless complexities to what ought to be a basic scary film. Frequently I discovered overly occupied with inquiries about the hows and whys of what could or couldn’t happen to feel all that involved. It's minimal work for the performer, whose visage remains hidden but he maintains authentic charisma that’s mostly missing elsewhere in the ensemble. The location is at times atmospherically grand but most of the continuously non-terrifying sequences are flawed by a grainy 8mm texture to differentiate asleep and awake, an unsuccessful artistic decision that seems excessively meta and designed to reflect the frightening randomness of living through a genuine night terror.

Unconvincing Franchise Argument

Lasting approximately two hours, the sequel, similar to its predecessor, is a excessively extended and extremely unpersuasive justification for the establishment of a new franchise. If another installment comes, I advise letting it go to voicemail.

• The follow-up film releases in Australia's movie houses on 16 October and in America and Britain on October 17