Dir: Scott Derrickson. Starring: Mason Thames, Madeleine McGraw, Jeremy Davies, James Ransone, Ethan Hawke. 15, 103 minutes
I wouldn’t blame you if you were a little sick of seeing kids on bicycles. You know the ones – packs of them, furiously pedalling down the street in order to halt whatever paranormal entity threatens their precious American suburbia. The Stranger Things via It via Ghostbusters: Afterlife pipeline of wistful nostalgia has been serving up countless Steven Spielbergian throwbacks for the past few years. And, from a distance, the new Blumhouse horror The Black Phone seems like more of the same. It is, after all, a feature-length adaptation of Joe Hill’s short story from 2004. Hill happens to be the son of Stephen King, the other Stev(ph)en at the helm of this single-minded pop culture takeover.
