Examining Black Phone 2 – Successful Horror Follow-up Lumbers Toward Nightmare on Elm Street
Coming as the resurrected bestselling author machine was still churning out film versions, quality be damned, the first installment felt like a lazy fanboy tribute. Featuring a retro suburban environment, young performers, gifted youths and twisted community predator, it was nearly parody and, comparable to the weakest the author's tales, it was also clumsily packed.
Curiously the inspiration originated from within the household, as it was adapted from a brief tale from his descendant, expanded into a film that was a shocking commercial success. It was the narrative about the kidnapper, a sadistic killer of adolescents who would revel in elongating the process of killing. While sexual abuse was never mentioned, there was something unmistakably LGBTQ-suggestive about the character and the historical touchpoints/moral panics he was obviously meant to represent, strengthened by the performer portraying him with a noticeably camp style. But the film was too opaque to ever fully embrace this aspect and even without that uneasiness, it was too busily plotted and too high on its exhaustingly grubby nastiness to work as only an undiscerning sleepover nightmare fuel.
Second Installment's Release Amidst Production Company Challenges
Its sequel arrives as once-dominant genre specialists the production company are in critical demand for a hit. Recently they've faced challenges to make any film profitable, from Wolf Man to their thriller 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 compact tale can become a movie that can generate multiple installments. There’s just one slight problem …
Ghostly Evolution
The original concluded with our surviving character Finn (the young actor) eliminating the villain, helped and guided by the spirits of previous victims. This has compelled director Scott Derrickson and his co-writer C Robert Cargill to advance the story and its antagonist toward fresh territory, turning a flesh and blood villain into a supernatural one, a path that leads them through Nightmare on Elm Street with a capability to return into reality made possible by sleep. But unlike Freddy Krueger, the villain is noticeably uncreative and completely lacking comedy. The mask remains successfully disturbing but the movie has difficulty to make him as scary as he briefly was in the initial film, trapped by complex and typically puzzling guidelines.
Alpine Christian Camp Setting
Finn and his frustratingly crude sister Gwen (the actress) encounter him again while snowed in at an alpine Christian camp for kids, the second film also acknowledging in the direction of Jason Voorhees the camp slasher. The sister is directed there by a ghostly image of her dead mother and what might be their deceased villain's initial casualties while the protagonist, continuing to handle his fury and recently discovered defensive skills, is following so he can protect her. The screenplay is excessively awkward in its artificial setup, clumsily needing to maroon the main characters at a setting that will further contribute to histories of main character and enemy, filling in details we weren't particularly interested in or care to learn about. What also appears to be a more calculated move to push the movie towards the same church-attending crowds that made the Conjuring series into huge successes, the director includes a spiritual aspect, with good now more closely associated with God and heaven while evil symbolizes Satan and damnation, religion the final defense against a monster like this.
Overcomplicated Story
What all of this does is additional over-complicate a franchise that was previously almost failing, including superfluous difficulties to what ought to be a basic scary film. Regularly I noticed too busy asking questions about the methods and reasons of feasible and unfeasible occurrences to experience genuine engagement. It's an undemanding role for the performer, whose visage remains hidden but he maintains real screen magnetism that’s typically lacking in other aspects in the ensemble. The location is at times impressively atmospheric but the bulk of the continuously non-terrifying sequences are damaged by a grainy 8mm texture to separate sleep states from consciousness, an ineffective stylistic choice that feels too self-aware and constructed to mirror the horrifying unpredictability of living through a genuine night terror.
Unpersuasive Series Justification
Running nearly 120 minutes, the follow-up, like M3gan 2.0 before it, is a needlessly long and hugely unconvincing justification for the establishment of an additional film universe. When it calls again, I recommend not answering.
- Black Phone 2 is out in Australian cinemas on October 16 and in the US and UK on 17 October
