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Debuting as the resurrected master of horror machine was continuing to produce screen translations, without concern for excellence, The Black Phone felt like a lazy fanboy tribute. Set against a retro suburban environment, high school cast, psychic kids and disturbing local antagonist, it was close to pastiche and, similar to the poorest King’s stories, it was also inelegantly overstuffed.

Curiously the call came from within the household, as it was inspired by a compact narrative from King’s son Joe Hill, stretched into a film that was a shocking commercial success. It was the story of the Grabber, a brutal murderer of children who would enjoy extending the process of killing. While sexual abuse was never mentioned, there was something inescapably queer-coded about the antagonist and the period references/societal fears he was intended to symbolize, reinforced by the performer acting with a distinctly flamboyant manner. But the film was too vague to ever properly acknowledge this and even without that uneasiness, it was excessively convoluted and too focused on its exhaustingly grubby nastiness to work as anything beyond an mindless scary movie material.

Follow-up Film's Debut In the Middle of Studio Struggles

The next chapter comes as previous scary movie successes the production company are in desperate need of a win. Recently they've faced challenges to make any film profitable, from Wolf Man to their thriller to Drop to the total box office disaster of the AI sequel, and so a great deal rides on whether the sequel can prove whether a compact tale can become a motion picture that can generate multiple installments. There’s just one slight problem …

Ghostly Evolution

The first film ended with our surviving character Finn (the young actor) defeating the antagonist, assisted and trained by the ghosts of those he had killed before. It’s forced filmmaker Derrickson and his writing partner Cargill to take the series and its antagonist toward fresh territory, turning a flesh and blood villain into a supernatural one, a route that takes them through Nightmare on Elm Street with an ability to cross back into reality enabled through nightmares. But in contrast to the dream killer, the villain is markedly uninventive and completely lacking comedy. The disguise stays successfully disturbing but the film struggles to make him as frightening as he temporarily seemed in the first, constrained by complicated and frequently unclear regulations.

Alpine Christian Camp Setting

The main character and his annoyingly foul-mouthed sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) face him once more while snowed in at a high-altitude faith-based facility for kids, the sequel also nodding regarding the hockey mask killer Jason Voorhees. The sister is directed there by a ghostly image of her dead mother and what might be their deceased villain's initial casualties while the protagonist, continuing to deal with his rage and recently discovered defensive skills, is following so he can protect her. The writing is overly clumsy in its contrived scene-setting, inelegantly demanding to maroon the main characters at a location that will additionally provide to backstories for both protagonist and antagonist, supplying particulars we weren't particularly interested in or want to know about. What also appears to be a more strategic decision to push the movie towards the same church-attending crowds that transformed the Conjuring movies into huge successes, the filmmaker incorporates a faith-based component, with morality now more strongly connected with the divine and paradise while bad represents the demonic and punishment, religion the final defense against a monster like this.

Overcomplicated Story

The consequence of these choices is continued over-burden a series that was already almost failing, incorporating needless complexities to what ought to be a straightforward horror movie. Frequently I discovered excessively engaged in questioning about the methods and reasons of feasible and unfeasible occurrences to experience genuine engagement. It’s a low-lift effort for the performer, whose visage remains hidden but he maintains real screen magnetism that’s typically lacking in other aspects in the acting team. The environment is at times atmospherically grand but the majority of the consistently un-scary set-pieces are marred by a gritty film stock appearance to separate sleep states from consciousness, an poor directorial selection that feels too self-aware and created to imitate the horrifying unpredictability of living through a genuine night terror.

Unconvincing Franchise Argument

Running nearly 120 minutes, Black Phone 2, comparable to earlier failures, is a excessively extended and hugely unconvincing justification for the establishment of another series. The next time it rings, I suggest ignoring it.

• The sequel debuts in Australian cinemas on 16 October and in the United States and United Kingdom on October 17