I Just Saw

About five years after siblings Gwen and Finn defeated the Grabber, a serial killer targeting boys in their neighbourhood, they’re both still troubled by the events. Finn self-medicates with marijuana, while Gwen has dreams of a phone call being made by a Christian camp counsellor in the late 1950s, talking about numbers written on ice by a dead child…

When I was a wee bairn, I read a lot of R. L. Stine. He was the children’s horror author behind Goosebumps and, for slightly older readers, Fear Street. By Stine’s own admission, the books were pulp trash designed to be entertaining and not much else. He’d sequelise the popular titles, hence Say Cheese and Die – Again! and Monster Blood II.

Black Phone 2 reminds me of those. Like them, its plot is mostly passagework, repeated fakeouts leading up to the bad guy’s reappearance in the third act. The prologue is great and sets up an intriguing mystery that just about held my interest in the film during its length. Its narrative diffusion is a major problem, though.

One thing that made the original Black Phone effective despite its formulaic elements was that the Grabber seemed to have an authentic psychopathology, haunted by the shadows of such real-world ’70s/’80s serial killers as John Wayne Gacy and Jeffrey Dahmer. The film was wise enough to let this linger in the subtext. It doesn’t tell you that the Grabber is a paedophile, but you can infer that from the details, like his use of a van and balloons, his victims all having the same gender, and a shot of him sitting in a chair with a belt, shirtless, waiting for the victims to try to escape.

Black Phone 2 denudes him of almost all this implied characterisation and makes him into more of a movie killer, without any motive beyond “I’m evil”. This makes the Grabber less frightening and the film less real. Where it shines is in its filmmaking choices, including the use of grainy stock for dream sequences. Its setting is pretty good and reminiscent of classic slasher films, which it seems to be trying to emulate. There’s even a surprisingly deep cut in a reference to the movie Curtains, from 1983 (the same year Black Phone 2 is set), with a killer on a frozen lake.

The period elements are worn a lot more lightly this time. The most obvious thing to anchor it in the early 1980s is when the characters mention Duran Duran, as well as some teenage slang like “choice”. I was amused by some of the characters, like a married couple of caretakers, the wife of whom gets short shrift from our heroes for being a religious bigot, although she seemed fairly sympathetic to me. I’d be annoyed too if some strange kids turned up to my camp asking about a horrible triple homicide that I’d been hoping to forget. Ethan Hawke is still good value, even if he’s not given much to do. All in all, this is worth your time if you liked The Black Phone, but only just.

Rating: 2/4