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Debuting as the resurrected Stephen King machine was continuing to produce film versions, quality be damned, The Black Phone felt like a lazy fanboy tribute. With its 1970s small town setting, young performers, telepathic children and twisted community predator, it was almost imitation and, like the very worst of the author's tales, it was also inelegantly overstuffed.

Curiously the inspiration originated from within the household, as it was inspired by a compact narrative from King’s son Joe Hill, expanded into a film that was a unexpected blockbuster. It was the tale of the antagonist, a cruel slayer of adolescents who would enjoy extending their fatal ceremony. While sexual abuse was not referenced, there was something inescapably queer-coded about the antagonist and the era-specific anxieties he was clearly supposed to refer to, reinforced by the performer acting with a certain swishy, effeminate flare. But the film was too opaque to ever really admit that and even aside from that tension, it was overly complicated and too focused on its wearisome vileness to work as anything beyond an unthinking horror entertainment.

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

Its sequel arrives as once-dominant genre specialists Blumhouse are in desperate need of a win. This year they’ve struggled to make any film profitable, from their werewolf film to their thriller to the adventure movie to the complete commercial failure of the AI sequel, and so significant pressure rests on whether the continuation can prove whether a brief narrative can become a motion picture that can create a series. There’s just one slight problem …

Ghostly Evolution

The original concluded with our surviving character Finn (the young actor) defeating the antagonist, assisted and trained by the apparitions of earlier casualties. This situation has required writer-director Scott Derrickson and his writing partner Cargill to take the series and its villain in a different direction, turning a flesh and blood villain into a supernatural one, a direction that guides them via Elm Street with a power to travel into the real world made possible by sleep. But different from the striped sweater villain, the Grabber is noticeably uncreative and totally without wit. The facial covering continues to be effectively jarring but the movie has difficulty to make him as frightening as he momentarily appeared in the first, constrained by complicated and frequently unclear regulations.

Snowy Religious Environment

The protagonist and his frustratingly crude sister Gwen (the actress) encounter him again while trapped by snow at a high-altitude faith-based facility for kids, the second film also acknowledging toward Freddy’s one-time nemesis the camp slasher. The female lead is led there by a ghostly image of her dead mother and what might be their late tormenter’s first victims while Finn, still trying to handle his fury and fresh capacity for resistance, is pursuing to safeguard her. The screenplay is too ungainly in its forced establishment, awkwardly requiring to get the siblings stranded at a setting that will further contribute to backstories for both main character and enemy, filling in details we weren't particularly interested in or want to know about. What also appears to be a more deliberate action to push the movie towards the comparable faith-based viewers that transformed the Conjuring movies into major blockbusters, Derrickson adds a faith-based component, with virtue now more directly linked with the divine and paradise while villainy signifies the demonic and punishment, faith the ultimate weapon against such a creature.

Over-stacked Narrative

The consequence of these choices is additional over-complicate a story that was formerly close to toppling over, adding unnecessary complications to what should be a straightforward horror movie. Regularly I noticed excessively engaged in questioning about the methods and reasons of what could or couldn’t happen to experience genuine engagement. It's minimal work for the actor, whose features stay concealed but he maintains real screen magnetism that’s typically lacking in other aspects in the ensemble. The environment is at times remarkably immersive but the majority of the persistently unfrightening scenes are damaged by a rough cinematic quality to separate sleep states from consciousness, an unsuccessful artistic decision that appears overly conscious and designed to reflect the terrifying uncertainty of experiencing a real bad dream.

Unpersuasive Series Justification

At just under 2 hours, Black Phone 2, similar to its predecessor, is a needlessly long and extremely unpersuasive case for the creation of a new franchise. The next time it rings, I suggest ignoring it.

• The sequel is out in Australian theaters on the sixteenth of October and in the United States and United Kingdom on October 17