Black Phone 2 Review – Hit Horror Sequel Heads Towards The Freddy Krueger Franchise

Coming as the re-activated Stephen King machine was continuing to produce screen translations, without concern for excellence, the first installment felt like a uninspired homage. Featuring a retro suburban environment, young performers, telepathic children and gnarly neighbourhood villain, it was almost imitation and, like the very worst of King’s stories, it was also awkwardly crowded.

Curiously the inspiration originated from from the author's own lineage, as it was inspired by a compact narrative from the author's offspring, stretched into a film that was a unexpected blockbuster. It was the story of the Grabber, a sadistic killer of young boys who would revel in elongating their fatal ceremony. While assault was never mentioned, there was something unmistakably LGBTQ-suggestive about the character and the era-specific anxieties he was clearly supposed to refer to, reinforced by Ethan Hawke playing him with a noticeably camp style. But the film was too opaque to ever properly acknowledge this and even excluding that discomfort, it was excessively convoluted and too focused on its exhaustingly grubby nastiness to work as only an undiscerning sleepover nightmare fuel.

Follow-up Film's Debut During Production Company Challenges

Its sequel arrives as former horror hit-makers the studio are in urgent requirement for success. Lately they've encountered difficulties to make anything work, from the monster movie to the suspense story to Drop to the total box office disaster of the AI sequel, and so much depends on whether the continuation can prove whether a short story can become a movie that can spawn a franchise. But there's a complication …

Supernatural Transformation

The original concluded with our Final Boy Finn (the performer) eliminating the villain, assisted and trained by the spirits of previous victims. This has compelled writer-director Scott Derrickson and his collaborator C Robert Cargill to take the series and its killer to a new place, transforming a human antagonist into a supernatural one, a route that takes them through Nightmare on Elm Street with an ability to cross back into reality made possible by sleep. But different from the striped sweater villain, the Grabber is clearly unimaginative and completely lacking comedy. The facial covering continues to be successfully disturbing but the movie has difficulty to make him as frightening as he temporarily seemed in the initial film, constrained by convoluted and often confusing rules.

Alpine Christian Camp Setting

The main character and his irritatingly profane sibling Gwen (the performer) encounter him again while snowed in at a mountain religious retreat for kids, the second film also acknowledging in the direction of Jason Voorhees the camp slasher. The female lead is led there by a ghostly image of her dead mother and what might be their deceased villain's initial casualties while the protagonist, continuing to handle his fury and newfound ability to fight back, is following so he can protect her. The writing is excessively awkward in its forced establishment, clumsily needing to get the siblings stranded at a location that will additionally provide to backstories for both main character and enemy, supplying particulars we weren't particularly interested in or desire to understand. What also appears to be a more calculated move to guide the production in the direction of the comparable faith-based viewers that transformed the Conjuring movies into major blockbusters, the filmmaker incorporates a religious element, with good now more closely associated with the creator and the afterlife while villainy signifies the demonic and punishment, religion the final defense against such a creature.

Overloaded Plot

The result of these decisions is further over-stack a story that was formerly close to toppling over, adding unnecessary complications to what should be a straightforward horror movie. Regularly I noticed too busy asking questions 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 authentic charisma that’s generally absent in other areas in the cast. The environment is at times remarkably immersive but the bulk of the consistently un-scary set-pieces are flawed by a grainy 8mm texture to separate sleep states from consciousness, an ineffective stylistic choice that appears overly conscious and created to imitate the terrifying uncertainty of being in an actual nightmare.

Weak Continuation Rationale

At just under 2 hours, the follow-up, like M3gan 2.0 before it, is a unnecessarily lengthy and hugely unconvincing justification for the establishment of another series. When it calls again, I recommend not answering.

• The follow-up film releases in Australia's movie houses on the sixteenth of October and in the US and UK on October 17