Examining Black Phone 2 – Successful Horror Follow-up Moves Clumsily Toward The Freddy Krueger Franchise

Debuting as the resurrected Stephen King machine was persistently generating film versions, regardless of quality, the first installment felt like a sloppy admiration piece. Set against a 1970s small town setting, teenage actors, psychic kids and disturbing local antagonist, it was almost imitation and, like the very worst of King’s stories, it was also inelegantly overstuffed.

Funnily enough the source was found from the author's own lineage, as it was adapted from a brief tale from King’s son Joe Hill, expanded into a film that was a shocking commercial success. It was the tale of the antagonist, a brutal murderer of young boys who would revel in elongating their fatal ceremony. While molestation was not referenced, there was something clearly non-heteronormative about the character and the historical touchpoints/moral panics he was intended to symbolize, emphasized by Ethan Hawke portraying him with a certain swishy, effeminate flare. But the film was too opaque to ever really admit that and even excluding that discomfort, it was excessively convoluted and overly enamored with its tiring griminess to work as anything more than an mindless scary movie material.

Follow-up Film's Debut Amidst Filmmaking Difficulties

The next chapter comes as previous scary movie successes Blumhouse are in urgent requirement for success. Recently they've faced challenges to make any project successful, from Wolf Man to their thriller to the adventure movie to the total box office disaster of the robotic follow-up, and so significant pressure rests on whether Black Phone 2 can prove whether a brief narrative can become a film that can create a series. There’s just one slight problem …

Ghostly Evolution

The original concluded with our Final Boy Finn (Mason Thames) eliminating the villain, helped and guided by the apparitions of earlier casualties. This situation has required writer-director Scott Derrickson and his co-writer C Robert Cargill to move the franchise and its antagonist toward fresh territory, transforming a human antagonist into a supernatural one, a route that takes them via Elm Street with a capability to return into the real world enabled through nightmares. But different from the striped sweater villain, the antagonist is markedly uninventive and totally without wit. The disguise stays appropriately unsettling but the production fails to make him as frightening as he briefly was in the first, limited by complicated and frequently unclear regulations.

Mountain Retreat Location

The main character and his frustratingly crude sister Gwen (the performer) encounter him again while snowed in at a mountain religious retreat for kids, the second film also acknowledging in the direction of Jason Voorhees Jason Voorhees. The female lead is led there by a ghostly image of her dead mother and what could be their dead antagonist's original prey while the brother, still attempting to process his anger and recently discovered defensive skills, is pursuing to safeguard her. The writing is too ungainly in its forced establishment, clumsily needing to leave the brother and sister trapped at a location that will additionally provide to background information for main character and enemy, filling in details we didn't actually require or want to know about. What also appears to be a more calculated move to push the movie towards the same church-attending crowds that transformed the Conjuring movies into huge successes, Derrickson adds a spiritual aspect, with morality now more strongly connected with the creator and the afterlife while evil symbolizes the demonic and punishment, religion the final defense against a monster like this.

Overcomplicated Story

What all of this does is continued over-burden a series that was already almost failing, adding unnecessary complications to what ought to be a straightforward horror movie. Frequently I discovered overly occupied with inquiries about the hows and whys of possible and impossible events to experience genuine engagement. It's an undemanding role for the actor, whose visage remains hidden but he maintains authentic charisma that’s generally absent in other areas in the ensemble. The location is at times remarkably immersive but the majority of the continuously non-terrifying sequences are damaged by a grainy 8mm texture to differentiate asleep and awake, an ineffective stylistic choice that appears overly conscious and constructed to mirror the horrifying unpredictability of being in an actual nightmare.

Unpersuasive Series Justification

At just under 2 hours, the follow-up, similar to its predecessor, is a needlessly long and highly implausible case for the creation of a new franchise. If another installment comes, I recommend not answering.

• The follow-up film releases in Australian cinemas on the sixteenth of October and in the US and UK on October 17