AArriving while the reactivated Stephen King machine was still churning out adaptations, quality be damned, The Black Phone felt like a lazy fanboy homage. With its 1970s small-town setting, high school actors, psychic children, and evil neighborhood villain, the film bordered on pastiche and, like the worst of King’s stories, it was also inelegantly overstuffed.
Oddly enough, the call came from inside the family home, as it was based on a short story by King’s son Joe Hill that was made into a film that earned a surprise $161 million hit. It was the story of the Grabber, a sadistic killer of young boys who delighted in prolonging the ritual of their death. Although sexual abuse was never mentioned, there was something inevitably queer-coded about the character and the historical touchpoints/moral panics he was clearly meant to reference, reinforced by Ethan Hawke playing him with a certain rustling, effeminate touch (even before his appearance, the word queer had also been used liberally). But the movie was too opaque to really admit it and even without that unease, it was too heavy on intrigue and too high on its exhausting, dirty nastiness to work as anything other than indiscriminate sleepover nightmare fuel.
Its sequel comes as former horror movie makers Blumhouse desperately need 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 lot hinges on whether Black Phone 2 can prove that a short story can become a film that can spawn a franchise. There is just one small problem…
The first film ended with our Final Boy Finn (Mason Thames) killing the Grabber, assisted and driven by the ghosts of those he had killed before (And his sister medium helping him find his position – see, busy!). This required writer-director Scott Derrickson and co-writer C Robert Cargill to take the series and its killer to a new location, transforming a flesh-and-blood villain into a supernatural villain, a route that takes them via Elm Street with an ability to return to the real world facilitated by dreams. But unlike Freddy Krueger, the Grabber is distinctly uninventive and completely devoid of humor (this time Hawke also plays him without the same camp, perhaps reading the room a bit…). The mask remains indeed shocking but the film struggles to make it as frightening as it 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 children, with the sequel also nodding to Freddy’s old nemesis Jason Voorhees (the two of whom would make mincemeat of the Grabber). Gwen is guided there by a vision of her late mother and what could be the first victims of their late tormentor while Finn, still trying to manage his anger and his new ability to fight back, follows her so he can protect her. The storyline is too ungainly in its contrived setting, clumsily requiring stranding the siblings in a location that will also add to the stories of the protagonist and antagonist, filling in details we didn’t really need or want to know (as a mystery, it’s not that interesting). In what also appears to be a more calculated move to aim the film at the same church-going 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 evil represents the Devil and Hell, with faith being the ultimate weapon against a monster like this.
All of this has the effect of further stacking a series that was already teetering on the edge, adding unnecessary complications to what should be a simple Friday night powerhouse (I often found myself too busy asking questions about the hows and whys of what might or might not happen to feel any of that involved). It’s a low-key effort for Hawke, whose face we never really see (this could, for all we know as viewers, be purely voice work), but he has a real presence that’s mostly lacking elsewhere in the cast. The setting is atmospherically grandiose at times, but the majority of the still-unscary set pieces are marred by 8mm grainy texture to differentiate between asleep and awake, an ineffective stylistic choice that feels overly self-aware and constructed to reflect the horrible unpredictability of being in a real-life nightmare.
At just under two hours, Black Phone 2, like M3gan 2.0 before it, is an unnecessarily long and extremely unconvincing argument for the birth of a new franchise. The next time it rings, I advise you not to answer.
