Examining Black Phone 2 – Popular Scary Movie Continuation Moves Clumsily Toward The Freddy Krueger Franchise

Arriving as the resurrected master of horror machine was still churning out film versions, quality be damned, the first installment felt like a sloppy admiration piece. With its small town 70s backdrop, young performers, psychic kids and gnarly neighbourhood villain, it was nearly parody and, comparable to the weakest King’s stories, it was also inelegantly overstuffed.

Curiously the source was found within the household, as it was adapted from a brief tale from King’s son Joe Hill, stretched into a film that was a shocking commercial success. It was the narrative about the kidnapper, a brutal murderer of children who would enjoy extending the process of killing. While molestation was not referenced, there was something clearly non-heteronormative about the antagonist and the period references/societal fears he was clearly supposed to refer to, reinforced by Ethan Hawke playing him with a noticeably camp style. But the film was too ambiguous to ever properly acknowledge this and even without that uneasiness, it was excessively convoluted and too high on its tiring griminess to work as anything more than an unthinking horror entertainment.

Second Installment's Release During Studio Struggles

The next chapter comes as former horror hit-makers Blumhouse are in critical demand for a hit. This year they’ve struggled to make any project successful, from their werewolf film to their thriller to their action film to the total box office disaster of the robotic follow-up, and so much depends on whether the continuation can prove whether a brief narrative can become a film that can create a series. But there's a complication …

Ghostly Evolution

The original concluded with our Final Boy Finn (the young actor) killing the Grabber, assisted and trained by the apparitions of earlier casualties. It’s forced writer-director Scott Derrickson and his co-writer C Robert Cargill to take the series and its antagonist toward fresh territory, transforming a human antagonist into a supernatural one, a direction that guides them via Elm Street with a capability to return into reality enabled through nightmares. But different from the striped sweater villain, the Grabber is clearly unimaginative and totally without wit. The facial covering continues to be successfully disturbing but the film struggles to make him as scary as he temporarily seemed in the first, constrained by convoluted and often confusing rules.

Alpine Christian Camp Setting

The main character and his frustratingly crude sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) face him once more while stranded due to weather at a mountain religious retreat for kids, the sequel also nodding toward Freddy’s one-time nemesis the Friday the 13th antagonist. Gwen is guided there by a ghostly image of her dead mother and potentially their dead antagonist's original prey while Finn, still trying to deal with his rage and recently discovered defensive skills, is following so he can protect her. The screenplay is overly clumsy in its contrived scene-setting, inelegantly demanding to get the siblings stranded at a location that will additionally provide to backstories for both hero and villain, supplying particulars we didn’t really need or care to learn about. What also appears to be a more calculated move to edge the film toward the same church-attending crowds that turned the Conjuring franchise into huge successes, the director includes a religious element, with virtue now more directly linked with the creator and the afterlife while evil symbolizes the devil and hell, faith the ultimate weapon against this type of antagonist.

Over-stacked Narrative

The consequence of these choices is further over-stack a story that was formerly almost failing, including superfluous difficulties to what should be a basic scary film. I often found myself excessively engaged in questioning about the methods and reasons of feasible and unfeasible occurrences to feel all that involved. It’s a low-lift effort for Hawke, whose visage remains hidden but he does have genuine presence that’s mostly missing elsewhere in the ensemble. The location is at times impressively atmospheric but the bulk of the persistently unfrightening scenes are marred by a rough cinematic quality to differentiate asleep and awake, an poor directorial selection that seems excessively meta and constructed to mirror the horrifying unpredictability of living through a genuine night terror.

Unconvincing Franchise Argument

Lasting approximately two hours, the follow-up, similar to its predecessor, is a excessively extended and hugely unconvincing argument for the birth of an additional film universe. When it calls again, I advise letting it go to voicemail.

• Black Phone 2 releases in Australian cinemas on 16 October and in the United States and United Kingdom on October 17