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Coming as the re-activated Stephen King machine was continuing to produce adaptations, regardless of quality, The Black Phone felt like a lazy fanboy tribute. Featuring a small town 70s backdrop, young performers, psychic kids and disturbing local antagonist, it was close to pastiche and, comparable to the weakest King’s stories, it was also inelegantly overstuffed.

Interestingly the source was found inside the family home, as it was adapted from a brief tale from his descendant, expanded into a film that was a shocking commercial success. It was the tale of the antagonist, a cruel slayer of children who would enjoy extending the ritual of their deaths. While sexual abuse was never mentioned, there was something clearly non-heteronormative about the villain and the historical touchpoints/moral panics he was intended to symbolize, strengthened by the actor playing him with a certain swishy, effeminate flare. But the film was too ambiguous to ever really admit that and even excluding that discomfort, it was overly complicated and too high on its tiring griminess to work as only an mindless scary movie material.

The Sequel's Arrival During Studio Struggles

The follow-up debuts as former horror hit-makers Blumhouse are in critical demand for a hit. Recently they've faced challenges to make any film profitable, from their werewolf film to The Woman in the Yard to their action film to the total box office disaster of M3gan 2.0, and so significant pressure rests on whether the sequel can prove whether a brief narrative can become a movie that can create a series. There’s just one slight problem …

Supernatural Transformation

The original concluded with our protagonist Finn (the performer) eliminating the villain, supported and coached by the ghosts of those he had killed before. This situation has required director Scott Derrickson and his writing partner Cargill to take the series and its villain in a different direction, converting a physical threat into a ghostly presence, a direction that guides them by way of Freddy's domain with an ability to cross back into the physical realm made possible by sleep. But in contrast to the dream killer, the Grabber is markedly uninventive and entirely devoid of humour. The disguise stays appropriately unsettling but the movie has difficulty to make him as scary as he temporarily seemed in the first, constrained by complex and typically puzzling guidelines.

Mountain Retreat Location

Finn and his frustratingly crude sister Gwen (the performer) encounter him again while trapped by snow at a mountain religious retreat for kids, the second film also acknowledging in the direction of Jason Voorhees the Friday the 13th antagonist. The female lead is led there by a ghostly image of her dead mother and what could be their deceased villain's initial casualties while the brother, still attempting to process his anger and newfound ability to fight back, is tracking to defend her. The screenplay is excessively awkward in its forced establishment, clumsily needing to maroon the main characters at a place that will also add to backstories for both hero and villain, filling in details we didn’t really need or desire to understand. Additionally seeming like a more calculated move to guide the production in the direction of the similar religious audiences that made the Conjuring series into huge successes, Derrickson adds a spiritual aspect, with good now more closely associated with the divine and paradise while villainy signifies the demonic and punishment, religion the final defense against a monster like this.

Over-stacked Narrative

The consequence of these choices is additional over-complicate a series that was already close to toppling over, incorporating needless complexities to what could have been a straightforward horror movie. I often found myself too busy asking questions about the processes and motivations of what could or couldn’t happen to experience genuine engagement. It’s a low-lift effort for the actor, whose face we never really see but he possesses real screen magnetism that’s typically lacking in other aspects in the ensemble. The environment is at times impressively atmospheric but the majority of the continuously non-terrifying sequences are flawed by a rough cinematic quality to distinguish dreaming from waking, an poor directorial selection that appears overly conscious and created to imitate the frightening randomness of being in an actual nightmare.

Weak Continuation Rationale

Running nearly 120 minutes, the sequel, like M3gan 2.0 before it, is a excessively extended and hugely unconvincing case for the creation of a new franchise. The next time it rings, I recommend not answering.

• The follow-up film is out in Australian theaters on October 16 and in America and Britain on October 17