Post by Dracula on Jun 29, 2022 21:33:27 GMT -5
The Black Phone(6/27/2022)
There have been over sixty films made from the writings of Stephen King and while that well has hardly dried it is interesting to note that Hollywood now seems more than happy to open the adjacent well that is the oeuvre of King’s son, who writes under the nom de plume Joe Hill. The most recent and perhaps most acclaimed adaptation of a Joe Hill story to come along is The Black Phone, from Sinister director Scott Derrickson, whose returning to horror after a diversion into the MCU to direct the first Doctor Strange movie. The story and film are not very shy about their King family lineage as this is in many ways a callback to something like The Shining in which a horrific situation is made stranger since a kid in the middle of it has some sort of psychic powers they don’t understand but also with a bit of the “nostalgic child” narrative of something like “It” or “Dreamcatcher.” The film is about a young teenager who is kidnapped by a serial killer called “The Grabber” and imprisoned in a room with scant resources and needs to find a way out, and in doing so is aided by a supposedly disconnected phone that’s in the room through which his latent psychic powers allow him to talk with the ghosts of The Grabber’s previous victims.
I didn’t dislike The Black Phone but I don’t think it ever fully worked for me either and it’s a little hard to put my finger on why. A big part of it is that, while the situation it depicts is theoretically horrific, I don’t think the movie ever really plays like a true horror film. Frankly I didn’t care much for “The Grabber” as a villain, possibly because I think his masks look kind of dumb. The kabuki-like wood masks he wears give him an over-the-top look along the lines of slash movie killer, but this isn’t a slasher movie, almost every evil thing The Grabber does happens off screen. He would have frankly been a lot more scary if he actually looked and acted like a real life serial killer of the kind you see in true crime documentaries than as a masked psycho. Beyond that I think the movie just leaves the confines of the room the kid has been locked in too much. There’s a whole sub-plot with his sister that isn’t uninteresting in and of itself, but it interrupts the tension being built in the basement and ultimately doesn’t affect the story as much as you think it will. The film is titled appropriately, however, as many of the film’s best moments involve conversations on the titular phone. These are probably the scenes where this most resembles a true horror film rather than a sort of particularly dark survival/prison escape story and occasionally invokes some rather creepy imagery. Again, I didn’t dislike the movie: it has an eye for detail I appreciated and is generally well acted and staged, but I feel like it could have been a whole lot more effective with some key adjustments.
*** out of Five
There have been over sixty films made from the writings of Stephen King and while that well has hardly dried it is interesting to note that Hollywood now seems more than happy to open the adjacent well that is the oeuvre of King’s son, who writes under the nom de plume Joe Hill. The most recent and perhaps most acclaimed adaptation of a Joe Hill story to come along is The Black Phone, from Sinister director Scott Derrickson, whose returning to horror after a diversion into the MCU to direct the first Doctor Strange movie. The story and film are not very shy about their King family lineage as this is in many ways a callback to something like The Shining in which a horrific situation is made stranger since a kid in the middle of it has some sort of psychic powers they don’t understand but also with a bit of the “nostalgic child” narrative of something like “It” or “Dreamcatcher.” The film is about a young teenager who is kidnapped by a serial killer called “The Grabber” and imprisoned in a room with scant resources and needs to find a way out, and in doing so is aided by a supposedly disconnected phone that’s in the room through which his latent psychic powers allow him to talk with the ghosts of The Grabber’s previous victims.
I didn’t dislike The Black Phone but I don’t think it ever fully worked for me either and it’s a little hard to put my finger on why. A big part of it is that, while the situation it depicts is theoretically horrific, I don’t think the movie ever really plays like a true horror film. Frankly I didn’t care much for “The Grabber” as a villain, possibly because I think his masks look kind of dumb. The kabuki-like wood masks he wears give him an over-the-top look along the lines of slash movie killer, but this isn’t a slasher movie, almost every evil thing The Grabber does happens off screen. He would have frankly been a lot more scary if he actually looked and acted like a real life serial killer of the kind you see in true crime documentaries than as a masked psycho. Beyond that I think the movie just leaves the confines of the room the kid has been locked in too much. There’s a whole sub-plot with his sister that isn’t uninteresting in and of itself, but it interrupts the tension being built in the basement and ultimately doesn’t affect the story as much as you think it will. The film is titled appropriately, however, as many of the film’s best moments involve conversations on the titular phone. These are probably the scenes where this most resembles a true horror film rather than a sort of particularly dark survival/prison escape story and occasionally invokes some rather creepy imagery. Again, I didn’t dislike the movie: it has an eye for detail I appreciated and is generally well acted and staged, but I feel like it could have been a whole lot more effective with some key adjustments.
*** out of Five
