Stream It Or Skip It?

As the credits rolled on Black Phone 2 (now streaming on VOD platforms like Amazon Prime Video), I recalled how entertaining 2022’s The Black Phone was, how it managed to hold us in its pincerlike grip, how it made us laugh and shiver with visual and thematic details neatly orchestrated within its late-1970s setting, how it functioned in a recognizable reality with just a hint of the supernatural, how chilling Ethan Hawke was as the serial killer villain, the Grabber. This sequel, though – despite bringing back key creatives in director Scott Derrickson, his co-writer C. Robert Cargill and concept/story guy Joe Hill (notably the son of one Stephen King) – tries to hold us in a loose and flabby grip, forget what made us laugh and shiver, settle on aping some of the better slasher movies from its early-1980s setting, go full-blown with the woo-woo, and probably never even had Ethan Hawke physically on set, since we hear his voice but don’t see anything resembling his real face. What a disappointment. But hey, at least Madeleine McGraw returns to steal some scenes again, even the ones where she isn’t calling anyone “slapdick.”

The Gist: It’s 1982, four years after the Grabber (Hawke) didn’t live to regret grabbing Finney (Mason Thames), because Finney killed the creep. Notably, Finney is now just Finn, and it fits – if a kid taunts him about What Happened in the first movie, Finn makes him live to regret it by kicking his ass. Then Finn goes home and smokes a ton of weed and watches Night Flight while his little sis Gwen (McGraw) ponders a courtship with nice-guy schoolmate Ernesto (Miguel Mora) and has nightmares so vivid, she sleepwalks right out the front door. Finn and Gwen watch out for each other when things get hairy. Their dad Terrence (Jeremy Davies) has enough to do, what with his job and ongoing struggle to not drink booze, although it’s pretty easy being the parent of Gen X kids, since he isn’t obligated to even try to talk to them about important things like their emotions or the several metric tons of trauma they’re haplessly muddling through.

On top of the more-amplified-than-usual teen angst, the siblings are haunted by not-of-this-earth shit: Finn walks by busted phone booths that inevitably ring, and he does his best to try not to let it remind him of What Happened (“He wasted a serial killer!” blurts a kid at school). And Gwen’s dreams, depicted with grainy old VHS-style footage, seem to be telling her something about her mother Hope (Anna Lore), dead by suicide, and three boys who were murdered at a Christian winter sleepaway camp where Hope worked as a counselor in the 1950s. The dreams get increasingly troubling, especially the one in which she wanders into the basement from Black Phone 1 and answers the call and it’s – well, no spoilers. The dreams seem to be physically affecting her as they blur with reality. The only solution is to pile into a car with Ernesto and get jobs at the camp so they can Scooby-snoop around the grounds in an attempt to figure out what the hell is going on; meanwhile, Terrence shrugs his shoulders, says a half-goodbye as his kids zoom off into unknown dangers and grits his teeth through every Busch beer commercial.

A brutal snowstorm whips up on the way to the camp, so when they arrive it’s mostly abandoned save for its caretakers, Armando (Demian Bichir) and his niece Mustang (Arianna Rivas), and two comic-relief judgy bible-thumpers, Kenneth (Graham Abbey) and Barbara (Maev Beaty). There’s a phone booth at the camp that’s totally busted and has been for millennia, but of course as soon as Finn walks by it, it rings and the Grabber’s on the other end hissing shit like “You of all people know that ‘dead’ is just a word” and “You know as well as I do that fear is just a warmup.” Gwen’s dreams don’t stop here – they intensify with every passing night, and jeez, there are so many of them. Why does the plot need her to have like 17 grainy-VHS dreams when three or four would do just fine? I guess they incrementally reveal how an why and in what capacity the Grabber haunts her from beyonnnnnddd the grrrravvvvee. On one particularly eventful evening, Finn and Ernesto and everyone else finds sleepwalking Gwen in a kitchen where she fights for her life against an invisible force, so it’s immediately clear that something has to be done. So as soon as she somehow survives the ordeal an wakes up, the kids and the camp folks powwow to make this connection and that revelation and therefore explain everything for roughly 15 minutes of screen time before we can get on with the Grabber’s metaphysical grabbery. That part might be boring, but hey, at least everything “makes sense” now.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Well, the Grabber coasts in Freddy Krueger’s wake, but at a sleepaway camp the likes of which Jason Voorhees used to hack ‘n’ slash his way through. Beyond that, the previous episode of Diminishing Returns Theatre was M3GAN 2.0, a creative and commercial dud of a hopeful franchise launch, and way too convoluted than it needs to be – a lot like Black Phone 2, except for the “commercial dud” part.

Performance Worth Watching: As Thames sourpusses his way through the movie, McGraw holds down the fort with snappy line-readings and a sense of dramatic consequence that cuts through some of the nonsense.

Memorable Dialogue: “You think it’s hot that I talk to Jesus?” – Gwen calls out earnest Ernesto for his weirdly horny compliment

Sex and Skin: Nah.

Our Take: Note, by “makes sense” I mean it doesn’t really. And if your movie requires you to pause and tediously explicate at length, perhaps your movie is too convoluted for its own good. The first Black Phone stepped right up to the Overcomplication Line without crossing it, but the sequel blows past it, tries to make a U-turn and stalls out. That’s a long way of saying it lost me. This is what happens when you get too far from a grounded reality of serial-killer dread and instead rejigger the formula into a Nightmare on Elm Street scenario where the slasher bad guy straddles reality and the dreaming world. Gwen essentially becomes a Dream Warrior; cue the rockin’ Dokken track and complete the cycle, please and thank you.

Derrickson deserves some praise for not repeating the formula of the successful first film and coasting to an easy payday. He directs the hell out of Black Phone 2, like he did with the first, but in this case, he isn’t elevating a familiar premise to something novel, instead mistaking convolution for complexity. The final product boasts some inspired creepy moments – images of surreal, ghostly gore may stick to you like dried corn syrup – and smartly rendered visual textures cleanly differentiate between the waking and sleeping realities. But it’s generally humorless, is too grim for its own good and quickly gets repetitive as the film lurches tediously near the two-hour mark and a silly, overcooked climax. The Black Phone was ostensibly about generational trauma in a specific era, keyed in on the shit that scared us back then, but the follow-up dilutes those atmospheric qualities with plot plot plot that is not not not as affecting as it should be. 

Our Call: CLICK nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn. SKIP IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.