Examining Black Phone 2 – Successful Horror Follow-up Moves Clumsily Toward Nightmare on Elm Street
Arriving as the re-activated Stephen King machine was still churning out screen translations, quality be damned, the original film felt like a sloppy admiration piece. With its small town 70s backdrop, teenage actors, gifted youths and disturbing local antagonist, it was close to pastiche and, similar to the poorest his literary works, it was also clumsily packed.
Funnily enough the call came from inside the family home, as it was inspired by a compact narrative from his descendant, stretched into a film that was a surprise $161m hit. It was the tale of the antagonist, a cruel slayer of adolescents who would revel in elongating their fatal ceremony. While sexual abuse was avoided in discussion, there was something unmistakably LGBTQ-suggestive about the villain and the era-specific anxieties he was intended to symbolize, emphasized by the actor acting with a distinctly flamboyant manner. But the film was too opaque to ever fully embrace this aspect and even excluding that discomfort, it was excessively convoluted and too focused on its exhaustingly grubby nastiness to work as anything more than an undiscerning sleepover nightmare fuel.
The Sequel's Arrival In the Middle of Production Company Challenges
The follow-up debuts as once-dominant genre specialists the studio are in desperate need of a win. This year they’ve struggled to make any film profitable, from the monster movie to the suspense story to the adventure movie to the utter financial disappointment of M3gan 2.0, and so a great deal rides on whether the continuation can prove whether a brief narrative can become a movie that can spawn a franchise. But there's a complication …
Paranormal Shift
The original concluded with our protagonist Finn (Mason Thames) defeating the antagonist, helped and guided by the apparitions of earlier casualties. It’s forced writer-director Scott Derrickson and his writing partner Cargill to move the franchise and its villain in a different direction, transforming a human antagonist into a supernatural one, a route that takes them by way of Freddy's domain with a power to travel into the real world facilitated by dreams. But in contrast to the dream killer, 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 temporarily seemed in the initial film, trapped by convoluted and often confusing rules.
Mountain Retreat Location
Finn and his annoyingly foul-mouthed sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) confront him anew while snowed in at a mountain religious retreat for kids, the second film also acknowledging toward Freddy’s one-time nemesis the Friday the 13th antagonist. Gwen is guided there by a ghostly image of her dead mother and what might be their dead antagonist's original prey while Finn, still trying to deal with his rage and newfound ability to fight back, is following so he can protect her. The screenplay is overly clumsy in its artificial setup, awkwardly requiring to maroon the main characters at a setting that will further contribute to backstories for both protagonist and antagonist, filling in details we weren't particularly interested in or care to learn about. Additionally seeming like a more calculated move to guide the production in the direction of the comparable faith-based viewers that turned the Conjuring franchise into major blockbusters, the director includes a religious element, with virtue now more directly linked with the divine and paradise while villainy signifies Satan and damnation, religion the final defense against such a creature.
Overcomplicated Story
The consequence of these choices is further over-stack a story that was formerly close to toppling over, adding unnecessary complications to what ought to be a simple Friday night engine. Regularly I noticed overly occupied with inquiries about the hows and whys of feasible and unfeasible occurrences to feel all that involved. It's minimal work for Hawke, whose visage remains hidden but he does have genuine presence that’s generally absent in other areas in the cast. The location is at times remarkably immersive but the majority of the persistently unfrightening scenes are flawed by a rough cinematic quality to distinguish dreaming from waking, an unsuccessful artistic decision that seems excessively meta and constructed to mirror the frightening randomness of living through a genuine night terror.
Unconvincing Franchise Argument
At just under 2 hours, the sequel, similar to its predecessor, is a needlessly long and highly implausible case for the creation of a new franchise. The next time it rings, I recommend not answering.
- Black Phone 2 is out in Australia's movie houses on October 16 and in the United States and United Kingdom on October 17
