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Arriving as the resurrected master of horror machine was persistently generating film versions, without concern for excellence, The Black Phone felt like a lazy fanboy tribute. Set against a 1970s small town setting, high school cast, psychic kids and gnarly neighbourhood villain, it was nearly parody and, similar to the poorest the author's tales, it was also inelegantly overstuffed.

Interestingly the inspiration originated from within the household, as it was adapted from a brief tale from King’s son Joe Hill, expanded into a film that was a shocking commercial success. It was the narrative about the kidnapper, a cruel slayer of young boys who would enjoy extending the ritual of their deaths. While sexual abuse was avoided in discussion, there was something inescapably queer-coded about the character and the historical touchpoints/moral panics he was obviously meant to represent, emphasized by Ethan Hawke playing him with a certain swishy, effeminate flare. But the film was too ambiguous to ever fully embrace this aspect and even aside from that tension, it was excessively convoluted and too high on its tiring griminess to work as anything more than an mindless scary movie material.

Follow-up Film's Debut Amidst Production Company Challenges

Its sequel arrives as previous scary movie successes Blumhouse are in desperate need of a win. This year they’ve struggled to make any film profitable, from the monster movie to their thriller to their action film to the total box office disaster of the AI sequel, and so a great deal rides on whether Black Phone 2 can prove whether a compact tale can become a film that can generate multiple installments. There’s just one slight problem …

Supernatural Transformation

The original concluded with our Final Boy Finn (the young actor) defeating the antagonist, assisted and trained by the spirits of previous victims. It’s forced filmmaker Derrickson and his collaborator C Robert Cargill to move the franchise and its antagonist toward fresh territory, turning a flesh and blood villain into a ghostly presence, a path that leads them via Elm Street with a capability to return into the real world made possible by sleep. But different from the striped sweater villain, the Grabber is clearly unimaginative and totally without wit. The disguise stays effectively jarring but the movie has difficulty to make him as scary as he briefly was in the initial film, trapped by complicated and frequently unclear regulations.

Mountain Retreat Location

The protagonist and his irritatingly profane sibling Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) confront him anew while snowed in at a mountain religious retreat for kids, the sequel also nodding regarding the hockey mask killer the Friday the 13th antagonist. Gwen is guided there by a vision of her late mother and what could be their dead antagonist's original prey while the protagonist, continuing to process his anger and newfound ability to fight back, is following so he can protect her. The screenplay is excessively awkward in its artificial setup, awkwardly requiring to leave the brother and sister trapped at a location that will additionally provide to backstories for both hero and villain, filling in details we weren't particularly interested in or care to learn about. What also appears to be a more calculated move to guide the production in the direction of the similar religious audiences that turned the Conjuring franchise into huge successes, the filmmaker incorporates a faith-based component, with virtue now more directly linked with the divine and paradise while bad represents the devil and hell, belief the supreme tool against such a creature.

Overloaded Plot

What all of this does is additional over-complicate a series that was already close to toppling over, adding unnecessary complications to what ought to be a basic scary film. Regularly I noticed too busy asking questions about the methods and reasons of feasible and unfeasible occurrences to experience genuine engagement. It’s a low-lift effort for Hawke, whose visage remains hidden but he does have real screen magnetism that’s mostly missing elsewhere in the cast. The environment is at times impressively atmospheric but the bulk of the consistently un-scary set-pieces are flawed by a gritty film stock appearance to distinguish dreaming from waking, an unsuccessful artistic decision that feels too self-aware and created to imitate the frightening randomness of living through a genuine night terror.

Weak Continuation Rationale

Running nearly 120 minutes, the follow-up, like M3gan 2.0 before it, is a needlessly long and highly implausible argument for the birth of a new franchise. If another installment comes, I advise letting it go to voicemail.

• The sequel is out in Australian cinemas on the sixteenth of October and in the US and UK on October 17