Skip to main content

The Black Phone 2 -- a review

The Black Phone was a horror movie that was based on author Joe Hill’s short story about a boy held captive by a killer in his basement who receives messages from the killer’s deceased victims over an old, broken phone. I thought The Black Phone was very well done, having been smartly directed by Scott Derrickson (Sinister, the first Doctor Strange), but, seeing how TBP ended, I never figured a sequel would be on the horizon--at least until last year. I follow Derrickson’s writing collaborator, C. Robert Cargill, on social media, and it was from Cargill that I first learned about The Black Phone 2 being brought to life.

The Black Phone 2 originally started as an idea from Joe Hill (who’s the son of Stephen King), and Derrickson and Cargill quickly turned it into a movie, with filming running from late 2024 into early 2025. Taking place in 1982, four years after the events of the first film, Mason Thames returns as Finney, who escaped the Grabber (Ethan Hawke) in the first film by killing him. His younger sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) is suffering from traumatic nightmares that appear to be created by the Grabber, who is now stalking the kids from beyond the grave. Both Thames and McGraw are superb here.

One might be tempted to disregard TBP2 as being a rip-off of A Nightmare On Elm Street. And while the storylines may seem the same on the surface, the execution in The Black Phone 2 is completely different, and much better. The siblings and their friend Ernesto (Miguel Mora), whose older brother was a victim of the Grabber, attend a winter kids camp in the hopes of scoring counselor jobs, only to wind up getting trapped there by a massive winter storm. There are no kids with them, just the bare bones staff, led by the engaging Armando (Demian Bichir) and his niece Mustang (Arianna Rivas).

Using this desolate wintry setting to great effect, Derrickson and Cargill manage to make The Black Phone 2 intensely scary and moody. The script is also razor smart, producing some truly frightening scares without having their characters do stupid things just to advance the plot. The driving force here is vengeance, as the Grabber himself states, and Ethan Hawke’s performance, done entirely behind a mask, is marvelously menacing. Finney and Gwen’s whole motivation is just staying alive--until they realize they have to fight back. The Black Phone 2 is an intelligent supernatural horror film that catches the delicate balancing act of taking the story seriously, while still having some humor. It winds up being a very satisfying sequel that’s even better than the original. --SF

The Black Phone 2 is on streaming, and is also available on physical media. It's not for young children, as it contains gore and cursing.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Explorer From Another World

It’s Friday night during the summer in Beutter county, an idyllic farming community in Indiana, and the good folks are settling in for what should be another humdinger of an evening. Until their plans are shattered by the arrival of an Explorer From Another World! This turns out to be an alien (Gemma Sterling) who starts savagely killing people from the moment it disembarks from its flying saucer. Local kids Eddie (Colin McCorquodale), Marybeth (Sage Marchand) and Culpepper (Nolan Gay) are planning on seeing a movie, but it looks like they’ll be battling for the very survival of the human race instead! Explorer From Another World is a wonderfully done throwback to the B-movies of the 1950s and 1960s. Ably directed by Woody Edwards (who gives himself a small cameo as Hank in the sheriff’s jail cell), the film is forty five minutes long, but manages to tell its torrid but funny story very effectively in the time allotted. And the short running time tracks when you...
Post a Comment
Read more

Batman: The Return of the Caped Crusaders -- a review

Holy animation,, Batman! Batman: The Return of the Caped Crusaders is a loving tribute to the 1960s TV series that manages to feel like the second 1960s-era Batman movie, thanks to the voice-casting of original Batman and Robin stars Adam West and Burt Ward, along with Julie Newmar, who reprises her role as Catwoman. Taking place in the same time period as the series, the film is filled with the social mores of the time, such as having Catwoman demurely step to the side whenever Batman and Robin battle the villainous henchmen (complete with the customary BIFF! BAM! and POW! word balloons the original series always flashed during the fight scenes). Catwoman is a part of a fearsome foursome of rogues that includes the Joker, Penguin and the Riddler as they set out to work together to wreak havoc on Gotham City. The fact that these villains team up, along with their use of a penguin-themed zeppelin later in the film, is a nice nod to the original 1966 Batman movie that was relea...
Post a Comment
Read more

My Top Five of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is returning (finally!) on the 17th of July with an all-new third season. To celebrate the return what has become my favorite of the new Star Trek shows on Paramount+, I decided to create a list of my top five episodes from the first two seasons. Memento Mori After several episodes of hinting at their presence, Memento Mori is the first big confrontation between the Federation and the Gorn. First introduced in the TOS episode Arena , with a memorable fight between Captain Kirk and a slow moving, green-skinned humanoid lizard, the Gorn have popped up in the episode The Time Trap of ST: The Animated Series , and in the In A Mirror, Darkly Part Two episode of ST: Enterprise (using really bad CGI that wasn’t much of an improvement over the Gorn suit used in Arena ). We never actually see the Gorn in Memento Mori , except for their ships, which look like angry claws ripping their way through space. This is a wise move, because not showing the...
Post a Comment
Read more