Arriving as the re-activated Stephen King machine was still churning out adaptations, quality be damned, The Black Phone felt like a lazy fanboy tribute. With its 1970s small town setting, high school cast, psychic kids and gnarly neighbourhood villain, it was close to pastiche and, like the very worst of King’s stories, it was also inelegantly overstuffed.
Funnily enough the call came from inside the family home, as it was based on a short story from King’s son Joe Hill, over-extended into a film that was a surprise $161m hit. It was the story of the Grabber, a sadistic killer of young boys who would revel in elongating the ritual of their deaths. While sexual abuse was never mentioned, there was something inescapably queer-coded about the character and the historical touchpoints/moral panics he was clearly supposed to refer to, reinforced by Ethan Hawke playing him with a certain swishy, effeminate flare (even before his appearance, the word fag had also been liberally used). But the film was too opaque to ever really admit that and even without that uneasiness, it was too busily plotted and too high on its exhaustingly grubby nastiness to work as anything more than an undiscerning sleepover nightmare fuel.
Its sequel arrives as former horror hit-makers Blumhouse are in desperate need of a win. This year they’ve struggled to make anything work, from Wolf Man to The Woman in the Yard to Drop to the total box office disaster of M3gan 2.0, and so a great deal rides on whether Black Phone 2 can prove whether a short story can become a movie that can spawn a franchise. There’s just one slight problem …
The first film ended with our Final Boy Finn (Mason Thames) killing the Grabber, assisted and trained by the ghosts of those he had killed before (and his psychic sister helping to track down his location – see, busy!). It’s forced writer-director Scott Derrickson and his co-writer C Robert Cargill to take the series and its killer to a new place, turning a flesh and blood villain into a supernatural one, a route that takes them via Elm Street with an ability to cross back into the real world facilitated by dreams. But unlike Freddy Krueger, the Grabber is markedly uninventive and entirely devoid of humour (this time Hawke also plays him without any of the same camp-ness, perhaps reading the room a little …). The mask remains effectively jarring but the film struggles to make him as frightening as he briefly was in the first, trapped by convoluted and often confusing rules.
Finn and his annoyingly foul-mouthed sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) encounter him again while snowed in at an alpine Christian camp for kids, the sequel also nodding toward Freddy’s one-time nemesis Jason Voorhees (both would make mincemeat of the Grabber). Gwen is guided there by a vision of her late mother and what might be their late tormenter’s first victims while Finn, still trying to process his anger and newfound ability to fight back, is following so he can protect her. The script is too ungainly in its contrived scene-setting, clumsily needing to get the siblings stranded at a place that will also add to backstories for both protagonist and antagonist, filling in details we didn’t really need or want to know about (as a mystery, it’s not all that interesting). In what also feels like a more calculated move to edge the film toward the same church-attending crowds that turned the Conjuring franchise into massive hits, Derrickson adds a religious element, with good now more closely associated with God and heaven while bad represents the devil and hell, faith the ultimate weapon against a monster like this.
What all of this does is further over-stack a series that was already close to toppling over, adding unnecessary complications to what should be a simple Friday night engine (I often found myself too busy asking questions about the the hows and whys of what could or couldn’t happen to feel all that involved). It’s a low-lift effort for Hawke, whose face we never really see (it could, for all we know as viewers, be purely voice work) but he does have genuine presence that’s mostly missing elsewhere in the cast. The setting is at times atmospherically grand but the majority of the consistently un-scary set-pieces are marred by a grainy 8mm texture to differentiate asleep and awake, an ineffective stylistic choice that feels too self-aware and constructed to mirror the horrifying unpredictability of being in an actual nightmare.
At just under 2 hours, Black Phone 2, like M3gan 2.0 before it, is a needlessly long and hugely unconvincing argument for the birth of a new franchise. The next time it rings, I recommend not answering.
