Examining Black Phone 2 – Successful Horror Follow-up Lumbers Toward Elm Street
Debuting as the revived master of horror machine was still churning out adaptations, without concern for excellence, the first installment felt like a lazy fanboy tribute. Featuring a retro suburban environment, teenage actors, gifted youths and disturbing local antagonist, it was close to pastiche and, like the very worst of King’s stories, it was also inelegantly overstuffed.
Curiously the source was found from the author's own lineage, 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 brutal murderer of adolescents who would enjoy extending the process of killing. While sexual abuse was not referenced, there was something inescapably queer-coded about the character and the era-specific anxieties he was obviously meant to represent, reinforced by the performer portraying him with a distinctly flamboyant manner. But the film was too opaque to ever fully embrace this aspect and even excluding that discomfort, it was overly complicated and too focused on its tiring griminess to work as only an unthinking horror entertainment.
The Sequel's Arrival Amidst Studio Struggles
The follow-up debuts as former horror hit-makers the studio are in urgent requirement for success. Recently they've faced challenges to make any film profitable, from Wolf Man to The Woman in the Yard to the adventure movie to the total box office disaster of the AI sequel, and so a great deal rides on whether the continuation can prove whether a brief narrative can become a film that can generate multiple installments. There’s just one slight problem …
Ghostly Evolution
The original concluded with our Final Boy Finn (Mason Thames) killing the Grabber, assisted and trained by the spirits of previous victims. It’s forced director Scott Derrickson and his co-writer C Robert Cargill to advance the story and its villain in a different direction, transforming a human antagonist into a supernatural one, a direction that guides them by way of Freddy's domain with a capability to return into the physical realm enabled through nightmares. But in contrast to the dream killer, the villain is clearly unimaginative and completely lacking comedy. The mask remains successfully disturbing but the film struggles to make him as scary as he briefly was in the first, trapped by convoluted and often confusing rules.
Mountain Retreat Location
The main character and his annoyingly foul-mouthed sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) encounter him again while stranded due to weather at a high-altitude faith-based facility for kids, the follow-up also referencing in the direction of Jason Voorhees the camp slasher. Gwen is guided there by an apparition of her deceased parent and what could be their deceased villain's initial casualties while the protagonist, continuing to deal with his rage and fresh capacity for resistance, is pursuing to safeguard her. The script is overly clumsy in its forced establishment, awkwardly requiring to leave the brother and sister trapped at a location that will additionally provide to histories of protagonist and antagonist, providing information we didn't actually require or desire to understand. What also appears to be a more strategic decision to edge the film toward the same church-attending crowds that made the Conjuring series into huge successes, the director includes a spiritual aspect, with morality now more strongly connected with the divine and paradise while villainy signifies the devil and hell, religion the final defense against this type of antagonist.
Overloaded Plot
The consequence of these choices is additional over-complicate a story that was formerly close to toppling over, adding unnecessary complications to what should be a straightforward horror movie. Frequently I discovered excessively engaged in questioning about the methods and reasons of what could or couldn’t happen to feel all that involved. It's an undemanding role for the performer, whose features stay concealed but he does have authentic charisma that’s typically lacking in other aspects in the acting team. The location is at times remarkably immersive but most of the consistently un-scary set-pieces are marred by a rough cinematic quality to separate sleep states from consciousness, an poor directorial selection that seems excessively meta and designed to reflect the frightening randomness of living through a genuine night terror.
Unpersuasive Series Justification
Running nearly 120 minutes, the sequel, like M3gan 2.0 before it, is a excessively extended and extremely unpersuasive case for the creation of an additional film universe. If another installment comes, I advise letting it go to voicemail.
- Black Phone 2 releases in Australian cinemas on the sixteenth of October and in the US and UK on October 17