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Coming as the resurrected Stephen King machine was persistently generating film versions, regardless of quality, The Black Phone felt like a uninspired homage. With its retro suburban environment, young performers, telepathic children and twisted community predator, it was close to pastiche and, comparable to the weakest his literary works, it was also awkwardly crowded.

Funnily enough the source was found from the author's own lineage, as it was inspired by a compact narrative from the author's offspring, expanded into a film that was a surprise $161m hit. It was the narrative about the kidnapper, a brutal murderer of children who would enjoy extending the ritual of their deaths. While assault was never mentioned, there was something clearly non-heteronormative about the character and the historical touchpoints/moral panics he was obviously meant to represent, emphasized by the actor portraying him with a noticeably camp style. But the film was too vague to ever really admit that and even aside from that tension, it was overly complicated and overly enamored with its exhaustingly grubby nastiness to work as only an unthinking horror entertainment.

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

The next chapter comes as former horror hit-makers Blumhouse are in urgent requirement for success. This year they’ve struggled to make any film profitable, from the monster movie to The Woman in the Yard to the adventure movie to the complete commercial failure of the robotic follow-up, and so much depends on whether Black Phone 2 can prove whether a short story 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 performer) killing the Grabber, assisted and trained by the spirits of previous victims. This has compelled director Scott Derrickson and his writing partner Cargill to take the series and its antagonist toward fresh territory, converting a physical threat into a supernatural one, a path that leads them via Elm Street with an ability to cross back into the physical realm facilitated by dreams. But in contrast to the dream killer, the Grabber is noticeably uncreative and completely lacking comedy. The facial covering continues to be successfully disturbing but the movie has difficulty to make him as frightening as he temporarily seemed in the initial film, trapped by convoluted and often confusing rules.

Snowy Religious Environment

The main character and his frustratingly crude sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) face him once more while stranded due to weather at a mountain religious retreat for kids, the follow-up also referencing in the direction of Jason Voorhees the Friday the 13th antagonist. The female lead is led there by a vision of her late mother and what might be their dead antagonist's original prey while the protagonist, continuing to process his anger and fresh capacity for resistance, is following so he can protect her. The screenplay is excessively awkward in its forced establishment, awkwardly requiring to maroon the main characters at a location that will additionally provide to histories of main character and enemy, filling in details we didn't actually require or care to learn about. Additionally seeming like a more calculated move to push the movie towards the similar religious audiences that transformed the Conjuring movies into huge successes, the director includes a religious element, with virtue now more directly linked with the divine and paradise while evil symbolizes the devil and hell, faith the ultimate weapon against this type of antagonist.

Over-stacked Narrative

The consequence of these choices is further over-stack a series that was already nearly collapsing, incorporating needless complexities to what could have been a straightforward horror movie. Frequently I discovered overly occupied with inquiries about the methods and reasons of possible and impossible events to become truly immersed. It's minimal work for the performer, whose features stay concealed but he does have authentic charisma that’s typically lacking in other aspects in the acting team. The environment is at times remarkably immersive but the majority of the consistently un-scary set-pieces are damaged by a rough cinematic quality to distinguish dreaming from waking, an unsuccessful artistic decision that appears overly conscious and constructed to mirror the frightening randomness of being in an actual nightmare.

Weak Continuation Rationale

Lasting approximately two hours, the follow-up, comparable to earlier failures, is a excessively extended and hugely unconvincing case for the creation of a new franchise. If another installment comes, I suggest ignoring it.

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