🔗 Share this article

Coming as the revived bestselling author machine was continuing to produce adaptations, regardless of quality, The Black Phone felt like a sloppy admiration piece. With its 1970s small town setting, high school cast, psychic kids and disturbing local antagonist, it was nearly parody and, comparable to the weakest his literary works, it was also clumsily packed.

Funnily enough the inspiration originated 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 surprise $161m hit. It was the story of the Grabber, a brutal murderer of children who would take pleasure in prolonging the ritual of their deaths. While sexual abuse was not referenced, there was something inescapably queer-coded about the antagonist and the era-specific anxieties he was intended to symbolize, emphasized by Ethan Hawke playing him with a distinctly flamboyant manner. But the film was too vague to ever fully embrace this aspect and even without that uneasiness, it was overly complicated and too high on its exhaustingly grubby nastiness to work as only an mindless scary movie material.

The Sequel's Arrival Amidst Production Company Challenges

Its sequel arrives as previous scary movie successes the production company are in desperate need of a win. Recently they've faced challenges to make any project successful, from their werewolf film to their thriller to the adventure movie to the total box office disaster of the robotic follow-up, and so a great deal rides on whether the sequel can prove whether a short story can become a motion picture that can generate multiple installments. There’s just one slight problem …

Ghostly Evolution

The first film ended with our protagonist Finn (the performer) killing the Grabber, supported and coached by the ghosts of those he had killed before. It’s forced filmmaker Derrickson and his collaborator C Robert Cargill to advance the story and its antagonist toward fresh territory, turning a flesh and blood villain into a ghostly presence, a path that leads them through Nightmare on Elm Street with an ability to cross back into reality made possible by sleep. But unlike Freddy Krueger, the Grabber is markedly uninventive and entirely devoid of humour. The disguise stays appropriately unsettling but the movie has difficulty to make him as scary as he briefly was in the initial film, trapped by complex and typically puzzling guidelines.

Mountain Retreat Location

The protagonist and his annoyingly foul-mouthed sister Gwen (the actress) encounter him again while trapped by snow at a high-altitude faith-based facility for kids, the follow-up also referencing regarding the hockey mask killer Jason Voorhees. The female lead is led there by a ghostly image of her dead mother and what could be their dead antagonist's original prey while Finn, still trying to deal with his rage and fresh capacity for resistance, is tracking to defend her. The script is excessively awkward in its contrived scene-setting, clumsily needing to get the siblings stranded at a location that will additionally provide to background information for protagonist and antagonist, providing information we weren't particularly interested in or desire to understand. What also appears to be a more strategic decision to guide the production in the direction of the similar religious audiences that made the Conjuring series into major blockbusters, Derrickson adds a spiritual aspect, with virtue now more directly linked with the divine and paradise while evil symbolizes the demonic and punishment, belief the supreme tool against such a creature.

Overloaded Plot

What all of this does is further over-stack a series that was already almost failing, incorporating needless complexities to what ought to be a basic scary film. 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 face we never really see but he does have real screen magnetism that’s generally absent in other areas in the cast. The setting is at times impressively atmospheric but most of the consistently un-scary set-pieces are damaged by a grainy 8mm texture to distinguish dreaming from waking, an unsuccessful artistic decision that feels too self-aware and constructed to mirror the frightening randomness of being in an actual nightmare.

Unpersuasive Series Justification

Running nearly 120 minutes, Black Phone 2, similar to its predecessor, is a unnecessarily lengthy and highly implausible justification for the establishment of a new franchise. When it calls again, I recommend not answering.

• Black Phone 2 releases in Australia's movie houses on 16 October and in the United States and United Kingdom on 17 October