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Coming as the re-activated master of horror machine was persistently generating adaptations, quality be damned, The Black Phone felt like a sloppy admiration piece. Set against a 1970s small town setting, young performers, psychic kids and twisted community predator, it was nearly parody and, comparable to the weakest King’s stories, it was also inelegantly overstuffed.

Interestingly the source was found within the household, as it was based on a short story from King’s son Joe Hill, expanded into a film that was a unexpected blockbuster. It was the story of the Grabber, a sadistic killer of children who would revel in elongating the process of killing. While sexual abuse was never mentioned, there was something clearly non-heteronormative about the character and the historical touchpoints/moral panics he was clearly supposed to refer to, emphasized by Ethan Hawke playing him with a distinctly flamboyant manner. But the film was too opaque to ever really admit that and even excluding that discomfort, it was too busily plotted and overly enamored with its exhaustingly grubby nastiness to work as anything more than an mindless scary movie material.

Follow-up Film's Debut Amidst Studio Struggles

The follow-up debuts as former horror hit-makers the production company are in critical demand for a hit. Recently they've faced challenges to make anything work, from the monster movie to the suspense story to Drop to the complete commercial failure of M3gan 2.0, and so significant pressure rests on whether Black Phone 2 can prove whether a short story can become a movie that can spawn a franchise. But there's a complication …

Ghostly Evolution

The initial movie finished with our protagonist Finn (the performer) defeating the antagonist, helped and guided by the apparitions of earlier casualties. It’s forced filmmaker Derrickson and his co-writer C Robert Cargill to advance the story and its antagonist toward fresh territory, transforming a human antagonist into a supernatural one, a route that takes them by way of Freddy's domain with an ability to cross back into reality enabled through nightmares. But different from the striped sweater villain, the Grabber is clearly unimaginative and entirely devoid of humour. The mask remains effectively jarring but the production fails to make him as terrifying as he temporarily seemed in the initial film, trapped by complicated and frequently unclear regulations.

Mountain Retreat Location

The main character and his annoyingly foul-mouthed sister Gwen (the performer) face him once more while trapped by snow at an alpine Christian camp for kids, the sequel also nodding toward Freddy’s one-time nemesis Jason Voorhees. Gwen is guided there by a vision of her late mother and what could be their deceased villain's initial casualties while the brother, still attempting to process his anger and recently discovered defensive skills, is following so he can protect her. The script is excessively awkward in its contrived scene-setting, awkwardly requiring to maroon the main characters at a setting that will further contribute to histories of protagonist and antagonist, filling in details we didn’t really need or care to learn about. In what also feels like a more deliberate action to edge the film toward the same church-attending crowds that turned the Conjuring franchise into massive hits, the director includes a faith-based component, with virtue now more directly linked with the divine and paradise while evil symbolizes the devil and hell, religion the final defense against this type of antagonist.

Overloaded Plot

The consequence of these choices is further over-stack a franchise that was previously nearly collapsing, including superfluous difficulties to what ought to be a straightforward horror movie. Regularly I noticed too busy asking questions about the hows and whys of feasible and unfeasible occurrences to feel all that involved. It’s a low-lift effort for the actor, whose face we never really see but he maintains authentic charisma that’s typically lacking in other aspects in the acting team. The environment is at times impressively atmospheric but the majority of the consistently un-scary set-pieces are flawed by a rough cinematic quality to differentiate asleep and awake, an unsuccessful artistic decision that appears overly conscious and created to imitate the frightening randomness of living through a genuine night terror.

Weak Continuation Rationale

Lasting approximately two hours, the follow-up, similar to its predecessor, is a unnecessarily lengthy and hugely unconvincing justification for the establishment of a new franchise. If another installment comes, I advise letting it go to voicemail.

• Black Phone 2 is out in Australia's movie houses on the sixteenth of October and in the United States and United Kingdom on 17 October