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Arriving as the resurrected Stephen King machine was continuing to produce film versions, regardless of quality, The Black Phone felt like a sloppy admiration piece. Featuring a retro suburban environment, young performers, psychic kids and disturbing local antagonist, it was almost imitation and, comparable to the weakest King’s stories, it was also inelegantly overstuffed.

Interestingly the call came from from the author's own lineage, as it was adapted from a brief tale from his descendant, expanded into a film that was a unexpected blockbuster. It was the tale of the antagonist, a sadistic killer of young boys who would revel in elongating the process of killing. While sexual abuse was not referenced, there was something inescapably queer-coded about the antagonist and the period references/societal fears he was obviously meant to represent, emphasized by Ethan Hawke portraying him with a certain swishy, effeminate flare. But the film was too vague to ever fully embrace this aspect and even aside from that tension, it was too busily plotted and too high on its wearisome vileness to work as only an mindless scary movie material.

Follow-up Film's Debut In the Middle of Production Company Challenges

The next chapter comes as once-dominant genre specialists Blumhouse are in critical demand for a hit. Lately they've encountered difficulties to make any film profitable, from their werewolf film to their thriller to Drop to the total box office disaster of M3gan 2.0, and so a great deal rides on whether Black Phone 2 can prove whether a brief narrative can become a motion picture that can spawn a franchise. But there's a complication …

Ghostly Evolution

The initial movie finished with our Final Boy Finn (the performer) eliminating the villain, assisted and trained by the apparitions of earlier casualties. It’s forced writer-director Scott Derrickson and his writing partner Cargill to take the series and its killer to a new place, turning a flesh and blood villain into a supernatural one, a route that takes them via Elm Street with a power to travel into the real world enabled through nightmares. But unlike Freddy Krueger, the Grabber is noticeably uncreative and completely lacking comedy. The disguise stays appropriately unsettling but the production fails to make him as terrifying as he briefly was in the original, constrained by complicated and frequently unclear regulations.

Snowy Religious Environment

The protagonist and his annoyingly foul-mouthed sister Gwen (the performer) confront him anew while stranded due to weather at an alpine Christian camp for kids, the second film also acknowledging toward Freddy’s one-time nemesis Jason Voorhees. The sister is directed there by a ghostly image of her dead mother and what could be their late tormenter’s first victims while the protagonist, continuing to handle his fury and fresh capacity for resistance, is tracking to defend her. The script is excessively awkward in its forced establishment, inelegantly demanding to get the siblings stranded at a place that will also add to background information for hero and villain, supplying particulars we didn’t really need or desire to understand. In what also feels like a more deliberate action to push the movie towards the comparable faith-based viewers that made the Conjuring series into massive hits, Derrickson adds a faith-based component, with virtue now more directly linked with God and heaven while bad represents the demonic and punishment, religion the final defense against a monster like this.

Overloaded Plot

What all of this does is further over-stack a series that was already almost failing, including superfluous difficulties to what should be a basic scary film. I often found myself overly occupied with inquiries about the processes and motivations of feasible and unfeasible occurrences to become truly immersed. It's minimal work for the actor, whose face we never really see but he maintains genuine presence that’s typically lacking in other aspects in the cast. The setting is at times atmospherically grand but most of the consistently un-scary set-pieces are flawed by a rough cinematic quality to separate sleep states from consciousness, an unsuccessful artistic decision that seems excessively meta and created to imitate the terrifying uncertainty of being in an actual nightmare.

Unconvincing Franchise Argument

Lasting approximately two hours, the follow-up, similar to its predecessor, is a excessively extended and highly implausible argument for the birth of another series. The next time it rings, I suggest ignoring it.

• Black Phone 2 releases in Australian theaters on October 16 and in the US and UK on 17 October