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

Debuting as the resurrected Stephen King machine was continuing to produce screen translations, without concern for excellence, the first installment felt like a sloppy admiration piece. Set against a small town 70s backdrop, young performers, telepathic children and gnarly neighbourhood villain, it was nearly parody and, similar to the poorest the author's tales, it was also awkwardly crowded.

Funnily enough the inspiration originated from inside the family home, as it was adapted from a brief tale from his descendant, stretched into a film that was a shocking commercial success. It was the narrative about the kidnapper, a sadistic killer of adolescents who would enjoy extending their fatal ceremony. While sexual abuse was never mentioned, there was something unmistakably LGBTQ-suggestive about the villain and the period references/societal fears he was intended to symbolize, emphasized by the actor playing him with a distinctly flamboyant manner. But the film was too ambiguous to ever fully embrace this aspect and even without that uneasiness, it was overly complicated and overly enamored with its exhaustingly grubby nastiness to work as anything beyond an unthinking horror entertainment.

Follow-up Film's Debut During Filmmaking Difficulties

Its sequel arrives as once-dominant genre specialists the studio are in desperate need of a win. Lately they've encountered difficulties to make anything work, from the monster movie to The Woman in the Yard to Drop to the complete commercial failure of the robotic follow-up, and so a great deal rides on whether the sequel can prove whether a short story can become a movie that can spawn a franchise. There’s just one slight problem …

Ghostly Evolution

The first film ended with our protagonist Finn (Mason Thames) eliminating the villain, helped and guided by the ghosts of those he had killed before. It’s forced filmmaker Derrickson and his co-writer C Robert Cargill to advance the story and its villain in a different direction, converting a physical threat into a paranormal entity, a route that takes them by way of Freddy's domain with a power to travel into reality made possible by sleep. But unlike Freddy Krueger, the villain is noticeably uncreative and entirely devoid of humour. The mask remains successfully disturbing but the production fails to make him as scary as he temporarily seemed in the first, trapped by complicated and frequently unclear regulations.

Mountain Retreat Location

The main character and his irritatingly profane sibling Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) face him once more while trapped by snow at an alpine Christian camp for kids, the sequel also nodding toward Freddy’s one-time nemesis Jason Voorhees. Gwen is guided there by an apparition of her deceased parent and potentially their late tormenter’s first victims while the protagonist, continuing to handle his fury and newfound ability to fight back, is tracking to defend her. The script is too ungainly in its forced establishment, clumsily needing to leave the brother and sister trapped at a setting that will further contribute to backstories for both hero and villain, supplying particulars we didn't actually require or desire to understand. In what also feels like a more calculated move to guide the production in the direction of the comparable faith-based viewers that made the Conjuring series into huge successes, the director includes a religious element, with virtue now more directly linked with God and heaven while evil symbolizes the devil and hell, religion the final defense against a monster like this.

Overcomplicated Story

The consequence of these choices is further over-stack a series that was already almost failing, incorporating needless complexities to what should be a basic scary film. I often found myself overly occupied with inquiries about the hows and whys of feasible and unfeasible occurrences to experience genuine engagement. It's minimal work for the performer, whose features stay concealed but he possesses genuine presence that’s generally absent in other areas in the ensemble. The environment is at times impressively atmospheric but the majority of the persistently unfrightening scenes are damaged by a grainy 8mm texture to distinguish dreaming from waking, an unsuccessful artistic decision that appears overly conscious and created to imitate the horrifying unpredictability of living through a genuine night terror.

Unconvincing Franchise Argument

At just under 2 hours, the sequel, like M3gan 2.0 before it, is a unnecessarily lengthy and hugely unconvincing argument for the birth of a new franchise. If another installment comes, I advise letting it go to voicemail.

• The follow-up film debuts in Australia's movie houses on the sixteenth of October and in the United States and United Kingdom on the seventeenth of October