Examining Black Phone 2 – Hit Horror Sequel Heads Towards Elm Street
Coming as the resurrected master of horror machine was still churning out film versions, quality be damned, The Black Phone felt like a lazy fanboy tribute. Featuring a small town 70s backdrop, teenage actors, gifted youths and gnarly neighbourhood villain, it was close to pastiche and, similar to the poorest his literary works, it was also awkwardly crowded.
Interestingly the inspiration originated from inside the family home, as it was based on a short story from the author's offspring, expanded into a film that was a surprise $161m hit. It was the story of the Grabber, a cruel slayer of adolescents who would take pleasure in prolonging their fatal ceremony. While sexual abuse was not referenced, there was something clearly non-heteronormative about the antagonist and the historical touchpoints/moral panics he was intended to symbolize, emphasized by the performer acting with a certain swishy, effeminate flare. But the film was too ambiguous to ever properly acknowledge this and even excluding that discomfort, it was overly complicated and overly enamored with its exhaustingly grubby nastiness to work as only an mindless scary movie material.
Second Installment's Release Amidst Filmmaking Difficulties
The follow-up debuts as previous scary movie successes Blumhouse are in urgent requirement for success. Recently they've faced challenges to make any project successful, from Wolf Man to The Woman in the Yard to the adventure movie to the utter financial disappointment of the AI sequel, and so significant pressure rests on whether the sequel can prove whether a compact tale can become a motion picture that can generate multiple installments. 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 apparitions of earlier casualties. This situation has required writer-director Scott Derrickson and his writing partner Cargill to take the series and its villain in a different direction, converting a physical threat into a supernatural one, a path that leads them via Elm Street with a capability to return into the real world made possible by sleep. But unlike Freddy Krueger, the Grabber is noticeably uncreative and completely lacking comedy. The disguise stays successfully disturbing but the production fails to make him as terrifying as he temporarily seemed in the first, trapped by convoluted and often confusing rules.
Mountain Retreat Location
The protagonist and his frustratingly crude sister Gwen (the actress) face him once more while trapped by snow at an alpine Christian camp for kids, the second film also acknowledging in the direction of Jason Voorhees the Friday the 13th antagonist. The female lead is led there by an apparition of her deceased parent and what might be their late tormenter’s first victims while the protagonist, continuing to deal with his rage and fresh capacity for resistance, is following so he can protect her. The screenplay is too ungainly in its contrived scene-setting, awkwardly requiring to get the siblings stranded at a setting that will further contribute to backstories for both protagonist and antagonist, providing information we didn’t really need or want to know about. Additionally seeming like a more calculated move to push the movie towards the similar religious audiences that made the Conjuring series into major blockbusters, Derrickson adds a faith-based component, with virtue now more directly linked with God and heaven while evil symbolizes the devil and hell, belief the supreme tool against this type of antagonist.
Over-stacked Narrative
The result of these decisions is additional over-complicate a franchise that was previously almost failing, including superfluous difficulties to what ought to be a simple Friday night engine. I often found myself excessively engaged in questioning about the hows and whys of possible and impossible events to become truly immersed. It's minimal work for Hawke, whose features stay concealed but he maintains real screen magnetism that’s typically lacking in other aspects in the acting team. The environment is at times remarkably immersive but most of the consistently un-scary set-pieces are marred by a grainy 8mm texture to separate sleep states from consciousness, an unsuccessful artistic decision that seems excessively meta and created to imitate the horrifying unpredictability of being in an actual nightmare.
Unpersuasive Series Justification
Running nearly 120 minutes, the sequel, comparable to earlier failures, is a excessively extended and hugely unconvincing argument for the birth of a new franchise. The next time it rings, I suggest ignoring it.
- The follow-up film debuts in Australia's movie houses on the sixteenth of October and in the US and UK on October 17
