🔗 Share this article

Debuting as the revived master of horror machine was still churning out screen translations, regardless of quality, The Black Phone felt like a sloppy admiration piece. Set against a small town 70s backdrop, high school cast, psychic kids and disturbing local antagonist, it was close to pastiche and, like the very worst of King’s stories, it was also inelegantly overstuffed.

Interestingly the call came from within the household, as it was adapted from a brief tale from his descendant, over-extended into a film that was a shocking commercial success. It was the story of the Grabber, a sadistic killer of children who would enjoy extending their fatal ceremony. While molestation was avoided in discussion, there was something unmistakably LGBTQ-suggestive about the villain and the period references/societal fears he was intended to symbolize, reinforced by the performer portraying him with a certain swishy, effeminate flare. But the film was too ambiguous to ever fully embrace this aspect and even aside from that tension, it was too busily plotted and too focused on its tiring griminess to work as only an mindless scary movie material.

The Sequel's Arrival During Production Company Challenges

Its sequel arrives as previous scary movie successes the studio are in desperate need of a win. Lately they've encountered difficulties to make anything work, from their werewolf film to their thriller to Drop to the total box office disaster 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 initial movie finished with our protagonist Finn (Mason Thames) eliminating the villain, supported and coached by the ghosts of those he had killed before. It’s forced writer-director Scott Derrickson and his writing partner Cargill to take the series and its killer to a new place, turning a flesh and blood villain into a supernatural one, a path that leads them through Nightmare on Elm Street with an ability to cross back into reality enabled through nightmares. But different from the striped sweater villain, the Grabber is markedly uninventive and totally without wit. The mask remains successfully disturbing but the production fails to make him as frightening as he briefly was in the original, constrained by convoluted and often confusing rules.

Mountain Retreat Location

The main character and his irritatingly profane sibling Gwen (the performer) confront him anew while trapped by snow at a mountain religious retreat for kids, the sequel also nodding in the direction of Jason Voorhees the Friday the 13th antagonist. Gwen is guided there by a ghostly image of her dead mother and what might be their deceased villain's initial casualties while the brother, still attempting to process his anger and fresh capacity for resistance, is pursuing to safeguard her. The script is excessively awkward in its contrived scene-setting, inelegantly demanding to get the siblings stranded at a setting that will further contribute to histories of main character and enemy, providing information we didn’t really need or desire to understand. In what also feels like a more calculated move to guide the production in the direction of the similar religious audiences that made the Conjuring series into huge successes, Derrickson adds a religious element, with good now more closely associated with the divine and paradise while bad represents the demonic and punishment, faith the ultimate weapon against a monster like this.

Overcomplicated Story

The consequence of these choices is additional over-complicate a franchise that was previously almost failing, adding unnecessary complications to what ought to be a straightforward horror movie. Regularly I noticed overly occupied with inquiries about the hows and whys of possible and impossible events to experience genuine engagement. It’s a low-lift effort for the performer, whose features stay concealed but he maintains authentic charisma that’s typically lacking in other aspects in the ensemble. The environment is at times atmospherically grand but the bulk of the persistently unfrightening scenes are marred by a gritty film stock appearance to separate sleep states from consciousness, an ineffective stylistic choice that appears overly conscious and created to imitate the horrifying unpredictability of experiencing a real bad dream.

Weak Continuation Rationale

Lasting approximately two hours, the follow-up, comparable to earlier failures, is a excessively extended and extremely unpersuasive justification for the establishment of an additional film universe. If another installment comes, I recommend not answering.

• The follow-up film debuts in Australia's movie houses on 16 October and in the US and UK on October 17