The Black Phone 2 (2025)

Warning: I’ll not spoil the second act, but certainly parts of the ending here

Years after surviving his kidnapping by the Grabber (Ethan Hawke) in the first movie, Finn (Mason Thames), now a late teenager, struggles with his clearly untreated trauma, with pot and violence his main methods of control. Recently, his sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) has been having terrible nightmares featuring the ghosts of dead children at a snowy summer (winter?) camp and other curious details. These nightmares are now beginning to turn into feats of rather impressive sleepwalking, one of which leads Gwen to the Grabber’s old house and the black phone with the direct line to the dead in its cellar. There, she has a phone conversation with her and Finn’s dead mother. Some research and a bit of luck suggest to Gwen where the camp from her dreams is situated and because she’s convinced this is not a thing she can just ignore and hope it’ll go away, she, an unwilling Finn, and her prospective boyfriend Ernesto (Miguel Mora) make their way to snowy Montana (I believe), as camp counsellors in training. There, Finn, too, will have phone conversations with the dead again, and all will be haunted by the shadow of the Grabber.

On paper, The Black Phone 2, like the first one directed by Scott Derrickson and scripted by Derrickson and his eternal writing partner (lieutenant of Megaforce) C. Robert Cargill, is yet another exercise in 80s horror nostalgia, remixing elements of the original movie with A Nightmare on Elm Street. Particularly the establishing scenes hit that kind of nostalgia pretty hard, not just with pointedly cheesy bits of dialogue but also aesthetically. However, while the 80s never go away, they turn out only to be one of the movie’s touch stones, and are really an easy way to establish an aesthetic reality things then begin to deviate more and more from.

Once the dreams start in earnest, and even more so once the characters end up in the snow and ice, the film begins to let other eras, film stocks (well, probably digital filters to emulate other filmstocks, but it’s so well done, this really doesn’t matter), and ideas take over. The film then proceeds to create a mood of liminality, of drifting between dream and reality, of borders crossed and uncrossed without the characters realizing in so brilliant a manner, I found myself perfectly okay with its at its core very straightforward narrative and characterisation. But then, straightforward doesn’t mean bad – particularly the characters are likeable and clearly drawn, and some of the differences in how Gwen and Finn relate to their respective traumata feel as if they’ll become rather less straightforward on second or third watch. It’s also nice to watch a really well-made contemporary horror film that allows its characters to triumph about the monster (and work at their trauma) for once. I’m all for 70s horror downer endings, but have grown somewhat annoyed by serious contemporary horror’s insistence that fights are always hopeless, grief insurmountable, and so on and so forth. This is a movie that is convinced sometimes, you can ram evil’s face repeatedly against a frozen surface. A message I approve of.

But really, it’s the mood and the film’s consistently thought-through aesthetics that particularly excite me: Black Phone 2 is a mood held for the length of a whole movie.

In short: Predestination (2014)

Warning: I’m going to keep it very vague, but if you’re up on your classic Science Fiction, even the mention of the Heinlein story this is based on will probably be enough to count as a heavy spoiler in. A plot synopsis is right out anyway, for the best way to learn what this is about is to watch it. Whoa.

I’ve never warmed to any of the other films made by Australian brother director/writer duo The Spierig Brothers. To my eyes, most of them seem glossy yet terribly empty, not having the kind of style as substance gloss that’ll let me be okay with that sort of thing. However, turning their hands at adapating Robert A. Heinlein’s tale of temporal (and other) shenanigans “All You Zombies” seems to have brought out quite different directors in these two. The film’s still very slick – usually, directors don’t unlearn the gloss or the style unless they go the Dario Argento route of working really hard at that – but in this case, the slickness seems completely in service to presenting a complicated and pretty bizarre plot that keeps surprisingly close to the equally bizarre (and great) Heinlein story in a clear and focussed manner.


The directors seem to have realized quite exactly that this particular tale doesn’t need style as distraction, but style as a way to lead an audience through it without things becoming as preposterous as they could otherwise feel, a device to help ask the material’s questions about free will (and the ones about solipsism I don’t believe Heinlein actually noticed, given what I’ve read about his ego) and predestination more clearly. In fact, even if you know where all of this is going – and the film’s close enough to the story you’ll know that pretty early on if you’ve read it – the film is still engrossing because it is so well constructed, playing its game with such verve, one can’t help but get sucked in. Plus, the philosophical questions do of course become quite a bit clearer when you know what they actually are, and how the film is going to frame them in the end.

In short: The Magnificent Seven (2016)

While Antoine Fuqua’s remake of John Sturges’s brilliant remake of Kurosawa’s awesome – in the old sense of the word – film is a perfectly entertaining big budget mainstream western kind of thing (a sentence I’m getting used to having opportunity to write again), it is also a bit of a mess.

Fuqua never seems to be able to decide what kind of film he is actually making: is it a fun action adventure? A film all about the exciting but unpleasant violence? A revisionist western that gives people who aren’t white (and if you squint, even those that aren’t male) their due? A film about what violence does to the men habitually committing it? A would-be Tarantino western? The script has perfectly fine scenes belonging to each of these concepts but it doesn’t even make much of an effort to tie them together into a satisfying whole, so the film is always lesser than the sum of its parts.

Apart from this main flaw, the filmmaking is another example of Antoine Fuqua’s position as a director without any visible personality whose movies look and feel as if they might have been directed by anyone technically competent, which is increasingly sad when a guy has directed movies since the early 90s and should have developed something of a style of his own by now. I’m also rather unhappy with the yellowish colour lying over everything here, a colour obsession I thought movies had finally gotten over again; for the Western genre, this is a particularly bad fit, particularly in a film full of shots of grass that’s supposed to be green (or so I've heard).

I’m also confused why the production went with a mostly utterly indifferent score by James Horner and Simon Franglen that only comes alive when it’s directly quoting Elmer Bernstein’s score for the Sturges film? Also about who thought Vincent D’Onofrio’s (who usually can’t do wrong with me) accent was a good idea, and last but not least why, when you go with a Tarantino style talkative neurotic main villain you then don’t take the extra step and give him decent dialogue (well, monologues, really) nor cast someone who is actually good at playing this sort of role?

All this does make The Magnificent Seven sound like a worse film than it actually is. It really is a watchable film, if in a very frustrating manner.

Three Films Make A Post: The First Motion Picture to be Called GORE-NOGRAPHY!!!

Pieces (1982): Despite being directed by Spain’s not worst but close enough director Juan Piquer Simón, this misbegotten product of a very bad night between the slasher and the giallo genres is unfortunately only seldom amusing with the crazy you’d hope for from its director - though it does include a handful of rather wonderful moments like a random kung fu attack, and Lynda Day George screaming “MONSTER! MONSTER!”). When it’s not sleazy and bloody in a pretty damn uninspired way, the film is often actually downright boring, spending way too much time on the decidedly unexciting police investigation of its murders and on the sexy adventures of a guy named Kendall who likes to wear cardigans, very much like a porn movie that doesn’t know what to do with itself when nobody’s fucking.

Diablo (2015): Lawrence Schoeck’s fine western would probably deserve a longer piece than this handful of sentences, but that kind of thing wouldn’t be doable without spoilers so egregious, they just might suck large parts out of the fun of a first viewing. Which doesn’t mean this is the sort of twist film you’ll only enjoy on first watching (the film does after all use his major turn quite a bit before the finale and does play fair enough you might realize what’s going on much earlier), but sometimes, a first impression is just too good to waste.

So let’s just say this is a clever and dark neo western that has a lot going for it: a clever script, some truly grim moments, beautiful photography, a very good very traditional for the genre soundtrack and Scott Eastwood in what isn’t as much of a stuntcasting decision as you’d expect.

Regression (2015): I rather like what Alejandro Amenábar is trying to do concerning the Satanic Panic of the 80’s and 90’s in the USA here, but in practice, his film never really worked for me. My problem is that I never actually found myself sharing in the increasing hysteria of Ethan Hawke’s character which turned that part of the film mostly irritating, and of course also undermined the film’s final act when the audience needs to share into Hawke’s feelings regarding the truth of the matter or will only very distantly appreciate the plot’s construction. As it stands, and despite some fine acting (Emma Watson’s ever-changing “American” accent notwithstanding) and Amenabár’s generally moody direction, I found myself watching the film with too much distance, kept away from its emotional core.

In short: Getaway (2013)

Warning: this is not to be confused with various other movies called The Getaway, but believe me, you wouldn't.

Second warning: Getaway might have annoyed me so much I'm going to suggest there would be little difference between director Courtney Solomon's efforts and that of a stuffed monkey.

The wife (Rebecca Budig) of former race car and later escape car driver Brent Magna (Ethan Hawke, who needed the money, one hopes) is kidnapped by an evil nameless mastermind (a role so difficult, the film has to use unpleasant close-ups of Jon Voight's face and the voice of Paul Freeman to embody him, because a single actor could not be clichéd yet boring enough for this particular masterpiece of filmmaking). Mastermind then has Brent race all around Sofia in a stolen car as part of a loud, car-crashing fiendish evil plan. Because our villain is especially cruel, he also has Brent pick up the actual owner of the car, a girl without a name (played by Selena Gomez who probably has youth as her excuse) who just happens to be the most annoying person who ever lived; also, she's of course a car freak and computer wiz and the daughter of the boss of a very large investment bank.

Lots of car crashes ensue; stupidity never stops.

Generally, I'd love to be the one to say that Getaway, despite what everyone else on the Internet says, is actually a misunderstood hidden gem. Unfortunately, I couldn't keep a straight face for a lie this huge for very long.

As you probably understand, Getaway is stupid on a level that makes even the worst of Luc Besson's Europa Corp productions look well thought out and intelligent. The big difference is that Besson's movies generally show some (sometimes even more) imagination sandwiched between the idiocies - though it's often a very stupid kind of imagination - whereas Getaway's imagination stops at "car crash fun, hurr hurr".

Which, you know, still could result in an entertaining movie if the director responsible (and I mean responsible), Courtney Solomon, who just happens to also carry the blame for the first Dungeons & Dragons film, would even demonstrate the faintest idea of how to film car chases in an exciting, possibly even varied manner, seeing that about ninety percent of his movie consist of…wait for it…car chases. Clearly, he doesn't, so we get a lot of fast cuts between unexciting shots, and the sort of action choreography which not just doesn't bother to clearly show what's going on but is so misguided I'm pretty convinced nobody involved in the staging of these scenes knows what's supposed to be going on in them themselves. What's even worse: nothing on screen suggests any ideas about any other aspect of filmmaking either.

I'm not usually somebody to say you could probably have replaced a director with a stuffed monkey, but really, how could the resulting film be worse than what Solomon's Getaway delivers?

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Sinister (2012)

True crime writer Ellison Oswalt (Ethan Hawke), with a career ever on the downward path after his first book hit big, has a modus operandi that isn't bound to make him any friends: he and his family - wife Tracy (Juliet Rylance), daughter Ashley (Clare Foley) and son Trevor (Michael Hall D'Addario) - move to the community where the crimes Ellison is going to write about took place in what one can't help but assume is some sort of writer method acting; writing highly critical of the local police generally follows. Needless to say, it's not a very good way to make friends, or have a peaceful family life.

This time around, in his quest to solve the murders of a family of four and the disappearance of their daughter, Ellison even goes a step further. Without anyone's knowledge but Ellison's, the Oswalts move into the house the victims lived in and in whose backyard they died by hanging. Tracy is sure going to be happy if she finds out.

On the very first day in the house, the writer finds a box full of super-8 movies. Instead of the expected home movies, these films show a series of murders that began some time in the 1960s. The find seems to set something in motion around Ellison. Increasingly bizarre things happen to him in the house at night, things that soon enough can't be explained away as natural anymore. The writer's further research turns up disquieting facts that suggest the murders could be part of an occult ritual connected to a Babylonian godhood known as The Eater of Children. The more Ellison learns and suspects, the more horrifying his nights become.

It's as if Ellison's attempts to find a hidden truth had started a process leading - perhaps - to knowledge but also to an inexorable doom.

I'm repeating myself, I think, yet it's still true: sometimes, writing about the films that impress me the most - or in this particular case actually leave this hardened horror movie watcher anxious and not too happy to be rather close to his bed time at the time of writing - is the most difficult because whatever I could write about a movie like Sinister makes an inspired achievement in the "horror movie as nightmare" part of the genre sound like just another well-made movie. Of course, Scott Derrickson's Sinister is a well-made movie, one where sound and vision (hi, David!) very consciously come together to near hypnotic effect, where no scene hasn't a clear - and in hindsight often rather horrifying - reason to be on screen. Sinister is a tight film, seemingly slow-paced but actually relentlessly economic, with more than one sequence I find difficult to get out of my mind now.

Of course, I'm pretty much the ideal viewer for this sort of thing; supernatural horror about weird, ritualistic occurrences, films with a tendency to let the real slowly bleed into the realm of nightmare (or maybe the other way around), horror that is beholden to the Weird, all belong to a fictional area where I feel at home. I'm bound to like a film like this nearly automatically, particularly when it is so damn good at what it does as Sinister is. There are a lot of ideas and concepts in here I love in horror: the unstoppable doom once a protagonist has quite innocently stepped over an invisible line dividing the quotidian world from something dark and not really explicable, the strange and psychologically horrific mechanisms of said doom, the base in a vague mythology that isn't meant to explain things but rather to make them feel more pervasive, the way the film uses the sinister undertones and physicality of analogue film technology, the intensity with which the personal drama and failings of the protagonist and the basis of the horror are feeding off each other without the whole affair turning into a morality play where the abnatural's function is to punish the protagonist for these failings (the film's universe seems much crueller, or just less moral than that).

I could go on and on and never truly get to the point of what makes Sinister so special, so I'm just going to shut up and recommend anyone interested in horror to watch it in a cop-out write-up ending I stole from mainstream film critics.

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