As a rule, it is not a big problem to continue continuously inspired slasher. The killer was only beheaded at the end of the predecessor and then burned? No problem, there is always any reason why a Jason Voorhees, Michael Myers or Victor Crowley returns again. But in the case of “The Black Phone” the situation is a bit more complicated: after all, the child's murderous, in the final with a telephone cord, is not the fantastic element, but instead the way he is brought to the way: while the kidnapped Finney (Mason Thames) speaks on the title of the gripper, sees his sister searching for him Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) ahead of future events in their dreams.
But “The Black Phone” in his cinema release in 2021, despite the continued Corona restrictions, recorded ten times (!) Of his budget-and so “Doctor Strange” director Scott Derrickson and his regular co-author C. Robert Cargill have been particularly strained to find a way that the story of the gripper (and his iconic Praising devil mask) beyond Joe Hill's original short story. The result is a mashup of the eighties horror nose: “Black Phone 2” not only takes the holiday camp setting from “Friday, the 13th” (Children sinked in the lake), but also feels almost more like a “Black Phone” sequel like a “Nightmare” spin-off.
In keeping with the snow-covered holiday camp setting, the gripper (Ethan Hawke) wears a particularly icy mask in the sequel …
1982: Finney is still not over the events four years after he has taken the young victims of the gripper and brought the masked serial killer underground. Anyone who provokes it on the schoolyard is brutally beaten up – and at home the teenager tries to silence his traumas seeking him again and again with joints. But then Gwen is once again shaken by terrifyingly real -looking nightmares, in which children played with an ax and sunk under an ice layer.
It weighs much more heavily that her mother, who hanged herself in the garage seven years ago, also occurs in the visions: she reports on the phone from 1957 – from the Christian holiday camp, in which she once worked as a warehouse supervisor. Finney and Gwen register for a holiday job to get to the bottom. Due to the worst snowstorm since 1946, however, they are almost alone in the camp – and also the gripper, now with icy mask, obviously somehow in the mystery …
First explain, then scary
There are a number of new supporting characters, with Demián Bichir (“The Hateful Eight”) as a camplate or Arianna Rivas (“Working Man”) as his daughter, sometimes even prominently occupied, which hardly get anything to do within the actual story. Rather, it seems as if the distribution of many different shoulders should above all be veiled how much exposure work has to be done here in order to overturn the “Black Phone” franchise of serial killer thrillers to Freddy-Krueger-Memorial horror. Especially since events are also re -rolled up from the predecessor, which contributes to one or the other twist, but, for example, in the case of the mother's suicide is also at the expense of the emotional punch of the original.
But even if that sounds negative now, you like to accept the generously interspersed explanatory moments, because the new direction rocks quite well overall: Even without scalpel-sharp scissor hands and sadistic sayings Inalls. Anyway, “Black Phone 2”, which, with its limited setting, is more reminiscent of the atmosphere of the Playstation slasher games “Until Dawn” than the associated movie, simply incredibly good: Especially the nightly scenes on a icy mountain lake are eliminated, especially for a horror film …
Location Feriencamp: Jason Voorhees would probably have had his bright joy here!
… and thus form the perfect contrast for the dream sequences modeled on the look of old home video recordings: In his pleasantly nasty horror breakthrough “Sinister”, Scott Derrickson has experimented with the Super-8 look of supposed or actual snuff videos-and also fail in “Black Phone 2” and the crunchy recordings do not lack their disturbing effect. Sometimes this is reminiscent of the VHS of “Dance of Teufel”, which was then circulating on the schoolyard, in which the particularly disturbing areas were particularly worn out.
In addition, this noisy dream sequences look, in which one already believes you can see the vast majority, but also the advantage that “Black Phone 2” dares a lot of what you would otherwise not expect in a mainstream horror film with super-sharp digital look-especially when it comes to violence against children: In a particularly “memorable” scene, a ghost boy stretches his head covered with scars into the head Camphütte in before the half face is separated from the falling window. Now it is there on the ground, a cheek, an eye, half the mouth, desperately snapped like a fish on the dry.
Conclusion: It takes a lot of talkative scenes to explain why and how things will continue after the end of “The Black Phone”. But as an unofficial “Nightmare-Murderous Dreams” offshoot, the sometimes quite disturbing “Black Phone 2” makes a lot of visually incredible amount-and especially the sensational ice skating showdown is simply breathtaking!