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

Debuting as the resurrected master of horror machine was persistently generating film versions, quality be damned, the first installment felt like a lazy fanboy tribute. Featuring a 1970s small town setting, young performers, gifted youths and disturbing local antagonist, it was nearly parody and, comparable to the weakest his literary works, it was also clumsily packed.

Interestingly the source was found within the household, as it was based on a short story from the author's offspring, expanded into a film that was a unexpected blockbuster. It was the tale of the antagonist, a cruel slayer of adolescents who would take pleasure in prolonging the process of killing. While sexual abuse was never mentioned, there was something clearly non-heteronormative about the character and the period references/societal fears he was intended to symbolize, emphasized by Ethan Hawke acting with a certain swishy, effeminate flare. But the film was too opaque to ever properly acknowledge this and even excluding that discomfort, it was overly complicated and too focused on its exhaustingly grubby nastiness to work as anything more than an unthinking horror entertainment.

Follow-up Film's Debut In the Middle of Studio Struggles

Its sequel arrives as previous scary movie successes the studio are in critical demand for a hit. Lately they've encountered difficulties to make any film profitable, from their werewolf film to The Woman in the Yard to Drop to the total box office disaster of the AI sequel, and so much depends on whether the continuation can prove whether a brief narrative can become a film that can generate multiple installments. However, there's an issue …

Ghostly Evolution

The original concluded with our protagonist Finn (the young actor) killing the Grabber, assisted and trained by the ghosts of those he had killed before. This situation has required director Scott Derrickson and his collaborator C Robert Cargill to move the franchise and its antagonist toward fresh territory, transforming a human antagonist into a ghostly presence, a path that leads them via Elm Street with a power to travel into the physical realm made possible by sleep. But in contrast to the dream killer, the villain is noticeably uncreative and entirely devoid of humour. The mask remains effectively jarring but the production fails to make him as frightening as he momentarily appeared in the original, limited by complicated and frequently unclear regulations.

Snowy Religious Environment

The main character and his irritatingly profane sibling Gwen (the actress) encounter him again while stranded due to weather at a mountain religious retreat for kids, the follow-up also referencing in the direction of Jason Voorhees the camp slasher. The female lead is led there by a vision of her late mother and what might be their deceased villain's initial casualties while the protagonist, continuing to deal with his rage and fresh capacity for resistance, is pursuing to safeguard her. The writing is overly clumsy in its artificial setup, awkwardly requiring to get the siblings stranded at a setting that will further contribute to histories of main character and enemy, providing information we weren't particularly interested in or care to learn about. Additionally seeming like a more strategic decision to edge the film toward the same church-attending crowds that turned the Conjuring franchise into massive hits, the director includes a faith-based component, with morality now more strongly connected with the creator and the afterlife while evil symbolizes the devil and hell, faith the ultimate weapon against this type of antagonist.

Over-stacked Narrative

The consequence of these choices is additional over-complicate a franchise that was previously nearly collapsing, incorporating needless complexities to what should be a straightforward horror movie. Regularly I noticed too busy asking questions about the hows and whys of possible and impossible events to feel all that involved. It’s a low-lift effort for the performer, whose visage remains hidden but he maintains real screen magnetism that’s typically lacking in other aspects in the ensemble. The setting is at times atmospherically grand but the majority of the persistently unfrightening scenes are marred by a grainy 8mm texture to distinguish dreaming from waking, an unsuccessful artistic decision that appears overly conscious and designed to reflect the horrifying unpredictability of living through a genuine night terror.

Weak Continuation Rationale

Lasting approximately two hours, the sequel, similar to its predecessor, is a needlessly long and extremely unpersuasive argument for the birth of a new franchise. If another installment comes, I suggest ignoring it.

• The sequel is out in Australian theaters on 16 October and in the US and UK on the seventeenth of October