Black Phone 2 Review – Hit Horror Sequel Moves Clumsily Toward Elm Street

Debuting as the re-activated master of horror machine was still churning out film versions, regardless of quality, the original film felt like a uninspired homage. Set against a retro suburban environment, high school cast, 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.

Funnily enough the call came from from the author's own lineage, as it was inspired by a compact narrative from the author's offspring, over-extended into a film that was a shocking commercial success. It was the narrative about the kidnapper, a brutal murderer of adolescents who would enjoy extending the ritual of their deaths. While assault was never mentioned, there was something inescapably queer-coded about the villain and the period references/societal fears he was intended to symbolize, reinforced by the actor acting with a noticeably camp style. But the film was too vague to ever really admit that and even without that uneasiness, it was overly complicated and overly enamored with its tiring griminess to work as only an mindless scary movie material.

Follow-up Film's Debut Amidst Studio Struggles

The next chapter comes as former horror hit-makers the studio are in desperate need of a win. This year they’ve struggled to make any project successful, from their werewolf film to The Woman in the Yard to their action film to the utter financial disappointment of the AI sequel, and so significant pressure rests on whether the continuation can prove whether a compact tale can become a motion picture that can generate multiple installments. However, there's an issue …

Paranormal Shift

The initial movie finished with our surviving character Finn (the young actor) defeating the antagonist, helped and guided by the apparitions of earlier casualties. It’s forced director Scott Derrickson and his collaborator C Robert Cargill to take the series and its killer to a new place, converting a physical threat 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 unlike Freddy Krueger, the antagonist is noticeably uncreative and entirely devoid of humour. The disguise stays effectively jarring but the film struggles to make him as terrifying as he briefly was in the original, limited by complex and typically puzzling guidelines.

Snowy Religious Environment

Finn and his frustratingly crude sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) face him once more while stranded due to weather at an alpine Christian camp for kids, the second film also acknowledging regarding the hockey mask killer the Friday the 13th antagonist. The female lead is led there by a vision of her late mother and what could be their deceased villain's initial casualties while the protagonist, continuing to process his anger and newfound ability to fight back, is tracking to defend her. The writing is too ungainly in its contrived scene-setting, awkwardly requiring to leave the brother and sister trapped at a place that will also add to background information for main character and enemy, providing information we didn't actually require or desire to understand. Additionally seeming like a more calculated move to guide the production in the direction of the comparable faith-based viewers that transformed the Conjuring movies into massive hits, Derrickson adds a religious element, with good now more closely associated with the divine and paradise while bad represents the devil and hell, religion the final defense against such a creature.

Over-stacked Narrative

What all of this does is continued over-burden a series that was already close to toppling over, incorporating needless complexities to what ought to be a straightforward horror movie. Regularly I noticed excessively engaged in questioning about the processes and motivations of what could or couldn’t happen to experience genuine engagement. It’s a low-lift effort for Hawke, whose face we never really see but he possesses authentic charisma that’s typically lacking in other aspects in the ensemble. The setting is at times atmospherically grand but most of the consistently un-scary set-pieces are damaged by a rough cinematic quality to differentiate asleep and awake, an unsuccessful artistic decision that appears overly conscious and designed to reflect the frightening randomness of living through a genuine night terror.

Unpersuasive Series Justification

Lasting approximately two hours, the sequel, like M3gan 2.0 before it, is a excessively extended and extremely unpersuasive case for the creation of an additional film universe. The next time it rings, I suggest ignoring it.

• Black Phone 2 debuts in Australia's movie houses on the sixteenth of October and in America and Britain on the seventeenth of October