The Media Tourist

Scattershot sequel to the 2021 horror hit feels like a movie misfire

Black Phone 2
Starring Ethan Hawke, Mason Thames, Madeline McGraw & Jeremy Davies
Directed by Scott Derrickson
Rated R

In theaters Friday, Oct. 17

Ever since Lazurus, we’ve been fascinated with people who come back from the dead. Ethan Hawke pulls off his own resurrection trick in this gritty sequel to the 2021 horror hit in which his character was killed off in a climactic confrontation by the young teen he’d kidnapped and tormented.

In Black Phone 2, set four years later, Hawke’s creepy “Grabber”—so named because he snatched victims off the street and sweeps them away in his black van—haunts the dreams of the younger sister of the boy who ended his reign of neighborhood terror. Then those dreams become living nightmares.

The gang’s all here from the first film. Mason Thames (from the recent How to Train Your Dragon remake) is Finny, the only known survivor of the Grabber’s basement of horrors. Madeline McGraw (from Disney’s Secrets of Sulphur Springs) returns as his sis, Gwen, now haunted by nighttime visions of the Grabber, his deeds and his victims. Jeremy Davies is back as their father, battling alcoholism and his own traumatic past.

But this time around, it’s all about the ghostly Grabber being set on revenge by sinking his sinister hooks—or his hatchet—into Gwen.

There’s blood and visceral goop and terrible stuff going down, but not a whole lot of bone-chilling scares or shocks. And right off the bat, we know the Grabber is dead, right? The sequel is set in 1978, back when there were still wall-mounted telephones and payphone booths. Gwen’s dreams are shot in a way that looks, appropriately enough, like grainy, 8mm home movies. And a ringing phone likely means someone from the “other side,” or the Grabber himself, wants to talk. There’s a remote Colorado winter youth camp, a blinding snowstorm, and a group of mutilated kids killed by the Grabber, entombed under the ice of a frozen lake, their lost young souls crying out for eternal rest.

And Hawke gets star billing, but he spends almost the entirety of the movie hidden behind the grinning devil mask that became the Grabber’s must-have accoutrement. Oh, the masked Grabber also ice skates, in a finale that suggests ax hockey might be hell’s most popular pastime.

The original Black Phone was a big box-office success. But maybe it was best just to let it rest in peace, rather than bring it back with a story that feels like a strained hodgepodge of horror-show cliches and stereotypes—the snowstorm, zombie-ghost children, a lakeside camp, a young woman accused of being “possessed,” bad dreams that bleed into reality. It’s like The Shining, Friday the 13^th, The Walking Dead and Carrie all showed up in A Nightmare on Elm Street and took a Wrong Turn into The Exorcist before heading to an Ice Capades show.

And it also gets sidetracked by what seems to be an unfocused obsession with religion, with lots of scenes showing crosses and Bibles, recited lines of Scripture, and a foul-mouthed spew of venom at overly pious Christians. Most of the story is set in a Christian youth camp. But it never connects faith to the rest of the narrative.

“O death, where is thy sting?” Gwen asks the Grabber at one point, quoting the New Testament’s book of 1 Corinthians.

Fans of the first Black Phone might be asking the same question about this scattershot sequel with little of its predecessor’s sting. Where is the monstrous mojo of a phone call from beyond the grave? As creepshows about phone booths go, this one feels like a misdial.

—Neil Pond

Latest Stephen King movie adaptation is a bleak, unpleasant slog

The Long Walk
Starring Cooper Hoffman, David Johnson, Charlie Plummer & Roman Griffin Davis
Directed by Francis Lawrence
Rated R

In theaters Friday, Sept. 12

A bleak dystopian parable set in a too-close-for-comfort future, The Long Walk depicts America as a militaristic totalitarian police state and an entire generation so traumatized by war and economic collapse that a death march seems like a good idea.

Based on an early novel by Stephen King (the first he ever wrote, back in the 1960s when he was a freshman at the University of Maine), it’s about a grueling annual walking contest in which young men are “chosen” from every state to compete on a course of more than 300 miles. There’s no stopping for any reason, and everyone receives penalty “warnings” for rule-breaking infractions—like pausing to pee or poop, walking too slow, falling behind, collapsing, or stepping off the pavement. Get three warnings, and you’re eliminated. That’s permanently eliminated—blam, you’re shot. The walk is over when there’s only one walker left alive—the ostensible winner.

The thought of winning—surviving—is the carrot on the stick, the thing that keeps the men trudging ahead: The lone survivor will receive whatever their heart desires, “more riches than you could possibly imagine,” says the Major (Mark Hamill) who runs the show. The walkers fantasize about what they’d do with such limitless wealth.

And it’s all televised.

King is widely recognized as a maestro of the macabre for the many adaptations of his work that became horror touchstones, like Carrie, It, The Shining, Children of the Corn, Salem’s Lot, Creepshow and Cujo. But others of his writings—like the ones that became The Shawshank Redemption and Stand By Me—were slim on the supernatural and rooted instead in human drama.

It isn’t a horror movie, per se, even though it depicts some truly horrific human drama, like young men getting brain-spattering kill shots to the head. And the walk itself is a monstrous event, ghoulish entertainment for looky-loos desperate for any kind of diversion. But it won’t ever bask in the same glow as The Shawshank Redemption or Stand By Me.  

You might recognize some of the walkers. Cooper Hoffman, the son of the late actor Philip Seymour Hoffman, made an impressive debut in Licorice Pizza back in 2021. David Johnson had a recurring role in HBO’s Industry. Roman Griffin Davis was the kid, Jojo, in Jojo Rabbit.

There are messages swirling around, about brotherhood and friendship, family, forced allegiance, how a society can easily slide into madness, our appetite for “extreme” entertainment. Director Francis Lawrence certainly knows dystopia; he helmed four flicks of the Hunger Games franchise, with a fifth in the works for next year.

But lofty messages can’t rise above the mire of this relentlessly dreary downer. It’s basically a movie about guys walking…and walking…and walking. And talking… talking… talking. Dying, dying, dying. There are exploding heads, pools of blood and other awfulness; a bloated, maggot-filled animal carcass on the roadside, a crucified crow strung up on a fence, a walker crushed to gristle underneath the treads of an armored car. It’s an ugly world; we get it. But the messaging is mired in the downer murk of one of the most visually unpleasant movie experiences of the year.

The Long Walk wants to lead viewers into a socially relevant cautionary tale. Too bad it takes such a nasty, depressing road-trip slog to get there.

—Neil Pond