Film Review – The Black Phone

Careers can be a strange thing. Director Scott Derrickson was last seen on screen with 2016’s “Doctor Strange,” offered a chance to do something different with the MCU, tasked with introducing one of their most challenging characters. And he did an excellent job doing so, bringing the Master of the Mystic Arts to life with a wonderfully cinematic and mercifully approachable origin tale that also represented his biggest box office success to date. Derrickson didn’t capitalize on the moment and now, six years later, there’s “The Black Phone,” which doesn’t find the helmer building on his “Doctor Strange” triumph, but returning to horror itches last scratched in 2012’s “Sinister” and 2014’s “Deliver Us from Evil.” It’s a small-scale creeper, an adaptation of a Joe Hill short story, which puts pressure on the production to develop enough material to fill a feature-length run time. “The Black Phone” has a few sharper points of potential, but Derrickson and co-writer C. Robert Cargill don’t have enough here to bring this supernatural story to a full boil. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com