Producers: Ed Guiney, Andrew Lowe, Yorgos Lanthimos, Emma Stone, Ari Aster, Lars Knudsen, Miky Lee and Jerry Kyoungboum Ko   Director: Yorgos Lanthimos   Screenwriter: Will Tracy   Cast: Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Aidan Delbis, Stavros Halkias and Alicia Silverstone   Distributor: Focus Features

Grade: C+

Yorgos Lanthimos’ previous films have been of variable quality, but all of them have been abundantly imaginative.  While “Bugonia” has plenty of Lanthimos style—including a score by Jerskin Fendrix (combined with a sound design by Johnnie Burn) that abruptly shatters the silence with deafening impact at arbitrary points—it ultimately proves a curiously uneven sci-fi horror comedy that leads up to a rather banal observation about human nature.  In the end it proves, quite literally, to be just a shaggy-alien story.

Perhaps that’s simply because it’s not an original work, but an adaptation of Jang Joon-hwan’s 2003 South Korean movie “Save the Green Planet!”  It’s been updated and moved to the United States by scripter Will Tracy, but still comes across like a dragged-out episode of “The Twilight Zone,” complete with heavy-handed twist ending, albeit an episode with lots of explicit blood and gore—and a measure of black comedy—added to the mix.

The small cast of characters is introduced without much ado, though details of their backgrounds are ladled out gradually.  One is Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone), the no-nonsense head of Big Pharma firm Auxolith, which manufactures drugs and chemicals like pesticides.  She keeps extra fit with training, exercise and running, while ruling her company with an iron hand.

Then there’s Teddy Gatz (Jesse Plemons), whose job is a menial one in the shipping department, taping up boxes for transport.  He bicycles to work each day from his rural house and has a hobby raising honeybees in the backyard.  But his hives, like others, are in trouble.  He’s also grieving the illness of his mother Sandy (Alicia Silverstone), who fell into a coma while part of an Auxolith drug-testing protocol and is now in a care facility.  And almost as an afterthought, it’s revealed that he was abused as a child by a babysitter named Casey (Stavros Halkias) who’s now a creepy local cop.  Casey pops up occasionally to apologize for what he did and see how Teddy’s faring.     

So one might not be surprised that a man as troubled as Teddy enlists his docile cousin Don (Aidan Delbis) to join him in a plot to kidnap Fuller.  The abduction as she arrives home one evening does not go smoothly; she resists quite effectively for a while in a deadpan slapstick sequence.  But eventually she’s subdued, awakening trussed up in Teddy’s gloomy basement with Don holding a rifle on her.

You might expect the fumbling duo to issue demands about pesticide testing, dangerous drug trials and such, but Teddy’s concerns are bigger and crazier.  He’s a conspiracy theorist convinced that Fuller is an alien from the Andromeda galaxy whose race has been engaged in the long-term eradication of humanity; that’s why he’s shaved her head—hair being a source of Andromedan strength—and slathered her body with antihistamine lotion. He demands that she confess her true nature and arrange a meeting for him with her emperor, whose ship will be near earth in three days’ time during an eclipse; he intends to negotiate for mankind’s survival.

That leads to an extended battle of wits as Fuller, who’s adept at corporate doublespeak, tries to convince Teddy, a jumble of personal grievance and apparent looniness who can give in to violence in a flash, to let her go.  At first she attempts to persuade him that he’s mistaken about her being an alien, but that merely infuriates him, so she changes tactics, admitting that she is what he believes to gain his trust and offering to accede to his demands.  She also confesses that Auxolith has developed a drug that can cure his mother, and reveals where he can get a sample to give to her.

What transpires from that point won’t be revealed here.  Suffice it to say that it involves many twists designed to subvert expectations—as well as multiple deaths and an ending a few might even see as a happy one.  That ending also proves the enormous impact that Stanley Kubrick has had on modern cinema.

The performances are all outstanding.  Stone, with her piercing eyes and sneer, makes Fuller an odious victim, and Plemons, with his rumpled desperation and air of dark certitude, is the perfect foil for her.  Newcomer Delbis is a genuine find as a schlub who’s committed to his cause but nonetheless has issues with it, while Halkias makes your skin crawl, which is the point.

Lanthimos is also fortunate in his behind-the-camera crew.  Cinematographer Robbie Ryan eschews any hint of glamor in his raw imagery, shifting gears with a few surrealistic black-and-white hallucinations, while production designer James Price and costumer Jennifer Johnson similarly go for a basically realistic look.  Editor Yorgos Mavropsaridis helps to build tension throughout, though in line with Lanthimos’ point of view, he stretches out the coda almost beyond endurance.  Of course, he has to prolong it to match the final song, Marlene Dietrich’s eerie rendition of Pete Seeger’s “Where Have All the Flowers Gone.”

You may find the mixture of observations on such topics as climate change, corporate corruption, conspiracy theorizing, pedophilia, and the human propensity to violence (just to scratch the surface) in “Bugonia” compelling, or not.  You may find the bleak humor with which Lanthimos infuses them funny, or misplaced.  What’s certain is that the film intends to both provoke and amuse.  What’s doubtful is whether it does either very successfully.  It’s more certain to be a very divisive film, much as “Eddington” was earlier this year.                   

The title, incidentally, isn’t made-up; in fact, it dovetails nicely with Lanthimos’ Greek background.  In classical Greek “bugonia” (a composite of the roots for “cow” and “birth”) refers to a belief among ancient Mediterranean people that bees somehow generated spontaneously from the carcasses of cattle—a conviction that apparently led to some quasi-religious rituals.  But the final montage in the film suggests that their rebirth after the hive decline Teddy frets over will arise from the corpses of quite a different animal.

Producers: Jason Blum, Scott Derrickson and C. Robert Cargill   Director: Scott Derrickson Screenplay: Scott Derrickson and C. Robert Cargill   Cast: Mason Thames, Madeleine McGraw, Jeremy Davies, Demián Bichir, Ethan Hawke, Arianna Rivas, Anna Lore, Graham Abbey and Maev Beaty   Distributor: Universal Pictures

Grade: C+

When the first “Black Phone” ended, The Grabber (Ethan Hawke), the serial killer who had preyed on young Denver boys until his latest victim, thirteen-year-old Finney Shaw (Mason Thames), managed, with some help from ghosts as well as his sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw), to outwit and kill him, was definitely dead.  How to bring him back for a sequel—an inevitability given the success of the 2022 original?

The solution settled on by direct Scott Derrickson and his co-writer C. Robert Cargill (with, it’s been reported, a little help from Joe Hill, who wrote the short story on which the original movie was based), is to turn The Grabber into something like Freddy Krueger, a spectral figure wo haunts dreams and terrorizes from the afterlife.  That’s not the only element of “Black Phone 2” that’s derivative; at times the movie feels a little like Frankenstein’s monster, made up of bits and pieces from previous horror movies—“Nightmare on Elm Street” here, a bit of “Friday the 13^th” there, and how about dabs of “The Exorcist” and “The Shining,” and even “Carrie”? 

That’s not to say that the result doesn’t work reasonably well.  It does, especially in visual terms; there’s lots of chilling imagery, and even a touch of ghoulish poetry.  But while agreeably spooky, it ultimately comes across as a bit of a hodgepodge of genre clichés, and an attempt to give the tale an overarching familial explanation feels forced.

The movie begins, in fact, with a sequence of Hope Shaw (Anna Lore), in a remote phone booth having a weird conversation.  (We know from the first film that she died since time earlier in 1978, when its action was set, an apparent suicide.)  Later we’ll find that the phone booth is located at Alpine Lake, a Colorado Christian youth camp where she was once a counselor.

The focus then shifts to “now,” presumably around 1982, when Finney has grown into a school bully who beats up kids who call him a freak and self-medicates his trauma with marijuana.  Sis Gwen is worried about him, but their father Terrence (Jeremy Davies), now a recovering alcoholic, doesn’t want to be too intrusive.

Gwen, who’s inherited Hope’s power to have revealing visions (which were key to her helping Finney in the first outing), is having horrible nightmares involving three mutilated boys.  She’s also sleepwalking, something that worries Finney, as does her growing friendship with Ernesto Arellano (Miguel Mora), the younger brother of one of The Grabber’s victims who was not as lucky as her brother.

After learning that Hope had worked at Alpine Lake, Gwen and Ernesto contrive to apply for counselor traineeships there, and Finney decides to accompany them as a would-be protector.  (That it seems to be winter and school still in session is conveniently overlooked.)  They drive to the place in the midst of what’s later described as the worst blizzard in decades but are led through the gates by Mustang (Arianna Rivas), the horse-savvy cowgirl who’s the niece of avuncular Armando (Demián Bichir), the owner-operator of the place.  The only other people on site are the office-manager couple Kenneth (Graham Abbey) and Barbara (Maev Beaty); he’s a wimp and she’s a Bible-thumping harridan reminiscent of Carrie White’s mother.

It doesn’t take long for weird things to start happening in this isolated place, which is like a snowbound Camp Crystal Lake.  Gwen, segregated in the girls’ barracks, starts having nightmares, which leads the boys to break camp rules to watch over her.  That supposedly derelict phone book outside starts ringing, with calls for both Gwen (from those three boys—who, from a place beneath an icy cover scrape letters whose meaning it’s for her to decipher—shades of “REDRUM”) and Finney (from The Grabber, who shows up as a menacing ghost with the power to assault living victims, being seen only by his victims while remaining invisible to those looking on at the resultant mayhem).

It turns out that The Grabber had ties to Alpine Lake too, and Armando is certain that the key to ending his evil power is to locate the remains of the three spectral boys, his first victims, and bring closure to them and their families.  That leads to a concerted effort by all concerned to clear the snow from the ice-covered lake and systematically search the waters below for tell-tale evidence.  Naturally, The Grabber seeks to prevent their discovering evidence of his past misdeeds.  Who would ever have expected hm to be such an expert skater?  For that matter, who would have thought Gwen to be capable of spouting Bible verses by heart (the result of her pious mother’s influence, no doubt) while cursing like a dockworker (her daddy’s, presumably).

Adding to the plot twists is the revelation that The Grabber’s initial seizure of Finney might not have been as random as it seemed, and that his threat to Gwen might have more behind it than merely punishing her brother by proxy for having killed him.  Be that as it may, the truth about Hope’s courage helps the Shaws finally to heal and, incidentally, to the blossoming of romance between Gwen and ever-dependable Ernesto.  (One wonders whether he, played amiably by Mora, might be prominent in the next installment of what the makers seem determined to convert into a franchise.)

For the moment one can point to committed performances here by both Thames, who gets to go darker than ever before as Finney, and the ever-spunky McGraw; an engaging one from Bichir, who adds a tongue-in-cheek touch that acts as a wink to the audience; and a lean, no-nonsense turn from Davies.  Hawke’s contribution is mostly in terms of voice work, but he obviously relishes delivering the villain’s growling threats, and whoever is behind the demon mask at any given moment proves perfectly fine.  Rivas does a nice tomboy bit as Mustang and Abbey is suitably skittish as Kenneth, who cowers in the shadow of Beaty’s holier-than-thou Barbara, a woman who designs in condemning Gwen as a demon child.  (One wonders about Armando, Mustang, Kenneth and Barbara after the snow settles; the movie is so anxious to drag out a happy ending for the townies that it simply forgets about them.)

Derrickson once again proves adept at working with his cinematographer, here Pär M. Ekberg, to create creepy visuals, and works expertly with Ekberg and editor Louise Ford to fashion not only the usual jump scares but a succession of hallucinatory dream montages, using scratchy 16mm film and frantic cutting, that are italicized by the sound team and an eerie score from composer Atticus Derrrickson.  Returnee Patti Podesta’s production design once again avoids exaggerating the period detail; the Canadian locations look genuinely frigid, which must have made for a challenging shoot. 

Like most sequels, “Black Phone 2” can’t recapture the surprise of its predecessor, and the avalanche of reminiscences to other horror films suggests more lack of imagination than homage.  But genre fans will probably enjoy this brooding reunion with Finney, Gwen and The Grabber, even if it doesn’t grab you as effectively as the first movie did.