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Debuting as the revived Stephen King machine was continuing to produce film versions, without concern for excellence, The Black Phone felt like a sloppy admiration piece. With its small town 70s backdrop, young performers, telepathic children and disturbing local antagonist, it was close to pastiche and, like the very worst of the author's tales, it was also awkwardly crowded.

Curiously the inspiration originated from from the author's own lineage, 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 story of the Grabber, a brutal murderer of adolescents who would enjoy extending the process of killing. While assault was never mentioned, there was something unmistakably LGBTQ-suggestive about the villain and the historical touchpoints/moral panics he was clearly supposed to refer to, emphasized by the performer acting with a distinctly flamboyant manner. But the film was too opaque to ever fully embrace this aspect and even excluding that discomfort, it was too busily plotted and too focused on its wearisome vileness to work as only an mindless scary movie material.

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

Its sequel arrives as former horror hit-makers the production company are in critical demand for a hit. Lately they've encountered difficulties to make any film profitable, from Wolf Man to The Woman in the Yard to Drop to the total box office disaster of M3gan 2.0, and so much depends 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 …

Supernatural Transformation

The original concluded with our surviving character Finn (Mason Thames) killing the Grabber, helped and guided by the apparitions of earlier casualties. This has compelled filmmaker Derrickson and his collaborator C Robert Cargill to advance the story and its villain in a different direction, turning a flesh and blood villain into a paranormal entity, a path that leads them by way of Freddy's domain with an ability to cross back into the real world enabled through nightmares. But different from the striped sweater villain, the villain is clearly unimaginative and completely lacking comedy. The disguise stays appropriately unsettling but the movie has difficulty to make him as scary as he momentarily appeared in the first, limited by convoluted and often confusing rules.

Mountain Retreat Location

Finn and his irritatingly profane sibling Gwen (the actress) face him once more while stranded due to weather at a mountain religious retreat for kids, the second film also acknowledging in the direction of Jason Voorhees Jason Voorhees. Gwen is guided there by an apparition of her deceased parent and what could be their deceased villain's initial casualties while the brother, still attempting to handle his fury and recently discovered defensive skills, is tracking to defend her. The screenplay is too ungainly in its artificial setup, awkwardly requiring to maroon the main characters at a setting that will further contribute to background information for hero and villain, providing information we weren't particularly interested in or want to know about. In what also feels like a more strategic decision to guide the production in the direction of the similar religious audiences that transformed the Conjuring movies into massive hits, the director includes a religious element, with virtue now more directly linked with the divine and paradise while bad represents the demonic and punishment, religion the final defense against this type of antagonist.

Overloaded Plot

The consequence of these choices is continued over-burden a series that was already close to toppling over, including superfluous difficulties to what ought to be a basic scary film. I often found myself too busy asking questions about the hows and whys of what could or couldn’t happen to feel all that involved. It's an undemanding role for the actor, whose features stay concealed but he maintains real screen magnetism that’s generally absent in other areas in the acting team. The setting 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 seems excessively meta and designed to reflect the terrifying uncertainty of being in an actual nightmare.

Weak Continuation Rationale

Running nearly 120 minutes, the sequel, similar to its predecessor, is a excessively extended and extremely unpersuasive justification for the establishment of a new franchise. If another installment comes, I advise letting it go to voicemail.

• The sequel is out in Australian theaters on October 16 and in the US and UK on the seventeenth of October