Examining Black Phone 2 – Successful Horror Follow-up Moves Clumsily Toward Elm Street

Debuting as the re-activated bestselling author machine was still churning out film versions, quality be damned, the original film felt like a sloppy admiration piece. With its retro suburban environment, teenage actors, psychic kids and gnarly neighbourhood villain, it was close to pastiche and, like the very worst of King’s stories, it was also clumsily packed.

Interestingly the call came from within the household, as it was inspired by a compact narrative from King’s son Joe Hill, expanded into a film that was a unexpected blockbuster. It was the story of the Grabber, a sadistic killer of young boys who would enjoy extending their fatal ceremony. While assault was not referenced, there was something inescapably queer-coded about the character and the era-specific anxieties he was clearly supposed to refer to, emphasized by the performer acting with a distinctly flamboyant manner. But the film was too opaque to ever really admit that and even without that uneasiness, it was excessively convoluted and overly enamored with its exhaustingly grubby nastiness to work as anything more than an unthinking horror entertainment.

Follow-up Film's Debut During Production Company Challenges

Its sequel arrives as former horror hit-makers Blumhouse are in desperate need of a win. Recently they've faced challenges to make any project successful, from their werewolf film to the suspense story to their action film to the complete commercial failure of the AI sequel, and so a great deal rides on whether the sequel can prove whether a compact tale can become a movie that can create a series. However, there's an issue …

Paranormal Shift

The first film ended with our surviving character Finn (the young actor) killing the Grabber, supported and coached by the spirits of previous victims. This has compelled filmmaker Derrickson and his co-writer C Robert Cargill to take the series and its antagonist toward fresh territory, transforming a human antagonist into a supernatural one, a path that leads them by way of Freddy's domain with a power to travel into reality enabled through nightmares. But different from the striped sweater villain, the Grabber is clearly unimaginative and entirely devoid of humour. The facial covering continues to be appropriately unsettling but the film struggles to make him as frightening as he momentarily appeared in the original, constrained by convoluted and often confusing rules.

Snowy Religious Environment

The protagonist and his irritatingly profane sibling Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) face him once more while snowed in at a high-altitude faith-based facility for kids, the follow-up also referencing toward Freddy’s one-time nemesis Jason Voorhees. Gwen is guided there by a ghostly image of her dead mother and potentially their dead antagonist's original prey while the protagonist, continuing to process his anger and fresh capacity for resistance, is tracking to defend her. The screenplay is overly clumsy in its contrived scene-setting, clumsily needing to get the siblings stranded at a place that will also add to histories of protagonist and antagonist, supplying particulars we didn't actually require or care to learn about. What also appears to be a more calculated move to guide the production in the direction of the comparable faith-based viewers that made the Conjuring series into major blockbusters, the filmmaker incorporates a religious element, with virtue now more directly linked with the divine and paradise while villainy signifies the demonic and punishment, faith the ultimate weapon against a monster like this.

Overcomplicated Story

What all of this does is further over-stack a series that was already close to toppling over, adding unnecessary complications to what could have been a straightforward horror movie. I often found myself too busy asking questions about the processes and motivations of possible and impossible events to feel all that involved. It's an undemanding role for the actor, whose features stay concealed but he maintains real screen magnetism that’s mostly missing elsewhere in the ensemble. The setting is at times remarkably immersive but the bulk of the continuously non-terrifying sequences are marred by a gritty film stock appearance to differentiate asleep and awake, an poor directorial selection that feels too self-aware and constructed to mirror the horrifying unpredictability of living through a genuine night terror.

Unpersuasive Series Justification

At just under 2 hours, the sequel, similar to its predecessor, is a excessively extended and extremely unpersuasive justification for the establishment of an additional film universe. When it calls again, I suggest ignoring it.

• The follow-up film releases in Australian cinemas on October 16 and in the United States and United Kingdom on October 17