Examining Black Phone 2 – Hit Horror Sequel Heads Towards Elm Street
Coming as the resurrected Stephen King machine was still churning out screen translations, without concern for excellence, the first installment felt like a sloppy admiration piece. With its 1970s small town setting, young performers, telepathic children and gnarly neighbourhood villain, it was close to pastiche and, like the very worst of his literary works, it was also inelegantly overstuffed.
Funnily enough the call came from inside the family home, as it was adapted from a brief tale from the author's offspring, stretched into a film that was a surprise $161m hit. It was the tale of the antagonist, a sadistic killer of children who would enjoy extending the process of killing. While sexual abuse was avoided in discussion, there was something unmistakably LGBTQ-suggestive about the villain and the period references/societal fears he was intended to symbolize, strengthened by Ethan Hawke playing him with a certain swishy, effeminate flare. But the film was too opaque to ever properly acknowledge this and even without that uneasiness, it was excessively convoluted and too focused on its exhaustingly grubby nastiness to work as anything beyond an unthinking horror entertainment.
Second Installment's Release In the Middle of Studio Struggles
Its sequel arrives as once-dominant genre specialists the studio are in critical demand for a hit. Lately they've encountered difficulties to make any film profitable, from the monster movie to the suspense story to the adventure movie to the total box office disaster of M3gan 2.0, and so much depends on whether Black Phone 2 can prove whether a compact tale can become a movie that can spawn a franchise. But there's a complication …
Supernatural Transformation
The original concluded with our protagonist Finn (Mason Thames) defeating the antagonist, supported and coached by the apparitions of earlier casualties. This has compelled director Scott Derrickson and his writing partner 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 via Elm Street with a power to travel into reality enabled through nightmares. But unlike Freddy Krueger, the villain is noticeably uncreative and entirely devoid of humour. The disguise stays appropriately unsettling but the production fails to make him as terrifying as he momentarily appeared in the first, constrained by complex and typically puzzling guidelines.
Alpine Christian Camp Setting
Finn and his frustratingly crude sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) face him once more while trapped by snow at a high-altitude faith-based facility for kids, the sequel also nodding regarding the hockey mask killer the Friday the 13th antagonist. The female lead is led there by an apparition of her deceased parent and what might be their deceased villain's initial casualties while the brother, still attempting to handle his fury and fresh capacity for resistance, is pursuing to safeguard her. The writing is excessively awkward in its artificial setup, clumsily needing to maroon the main characters at a place that will also add to background information for hero and villain, filling in details we weren't particularly interested in or want to know about. In what also feels like a more calculated move to guide the production in the direction of the comparable faith-based viewers that transformed the Conjuring movies into major blockbusters, the filmmaker incorporates a faith-based component, with morality now more strongly connected with God and heaven while villainy signifies Satan and damnation, religion the final defense against such a creature.
Overcomplicated Story
The consequence of these choices is additional over-complicate a series that was already almost failing, incorporating needless complexities to what could have been a simple Friday night engine. Frequently I discovered overly occupied with inquiries about the hows and whys of feasible and unfeasible occurrences to become truly immersed. It's an undemanding role for the actor, whose face we never really see but he maintains authentic charisma that’s generally absent in other areas in the ensemble. The environment is at times remarkably immersive but the majority of the consistently un-scary set-pieces are flawed by a rough cinematic quality to separate sleep states from consciousness, an ineffective stylistic choice that feels too self-aware and created to imitate the terrifying uncertainty of living through a genuine night terror.
Unconvincing Franchise Argument
Running nearly 120 minutes, the sequel, like M3gan 2.0 before it, is a needlessly long and hugely unconvincing case for the creation of another series. When it calls again, I recommend not answering.
- The sequel is out in Australian theaters on October 16 and in the United States and United Kingdom on October 17
