The Black Phone is a child-killer horror flick to avoid like the plague

Hyped but godawful, The Black Phone makes an ungainly lunge for cult-horror acclaim using every trick in the book – the book being a brisk short story about a child killer by Stephen King’s son, Joe Hill. 

In its pages, which thankfully run to 1,100 fewer than King’s IT, this character is an obese, sweating gay paedophile called Albert – not a perfect part, on the surface or indeed anywhere below it, for the gaunt, usually chilled-out Ethan Hawke. His Sinister director, Scott Derrickson, presumably lured him in with heaven knows what blandishments.

Thanks to a blend of tastelessness and ineptitude, the film sets about making Hawke’s agreement to guest-star look like the worst call of his life. It dishes out heaps of icky paranoia but remarkably few actual scares, while also managing to be pointlessly brutal in all the wrong places – which is to say, when Hawke’s limp-wristed caricature of a sub-Pennywise sex offender isn’t even on screen.

We’re in 1978, in suburban Colorado, where five pubescent boys have been thus far plucked off the streets, and piled into the black van of “The Grabber” (Hawke) when he pretends to show them a magic trick. The latest is 13-year-old Finney (Mason Thames), who finds himself locked in a basement with just a filthy mattress, a loo, and a black phone inexplicably hanging on one wall, which his captor tells him hasn’t worked for years.

Through this unlikely medium, as Hawke’s Albert doesn’t realise, his previous victims are able to contact Finney and give him survival tips, just at the point when he’s giving up all hope. While these dead unfortunates materialise to give us the odd jump, Finney’s expletive-fond younger sister Gwen (Madeline McGraw) is picking up distress signals in some vaguely-indebted-to-The-Shining manner, and cycling around like crazy to find him before it’s too late.

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7tbHLnp6rmaCde6S7ja6iaJ6Zobq0e49omaWZk6B6sbTOp5xmqpWrtqbDjJyfoqSUYriquMueqWagn6e%2FsL6Mn6Oim5tirre7yJ1kpaGbmnqxuMCgrJ5n