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Arriving as the resurrected bestselling author machine was continuing to produce adaptations, regardless of quality, The Black Phone felt like a sloppy admiration piece. Set against a retro suburban environment, teenage actors, psychic kids and gnarly neighbourhood villain, it was close to pastiche and, similar to the poorest the author's tales, it was also inelegantly overstuffed.

Interestingly the source was found from the author's own lineage, as it was adapted from a brief tale from King’s son Joe Hill, expanded into a film that was a shocking commercial success. It was the story of the Grabber, a cruel slayer of adolescents who would revel in elongating their fatal ceremony. While assault was never mentioned, there was something inescapably queer-coded about the villain and the period references/societal fears he was intended to symbolize, reinforced by the performer acting with a noticeably camp style. But the film was too vague to ever properly acknowledge this and even aside from that tension, it was too busily plotted and overly enamored with its wearisome vileness to work as only an undiscerning sleepover nightmare fuel.

The Sequel's Arrival Amidst Filmmaking Difficulties

The follow-up debuts as previous scary movie successes Blumhouse are in urgent requirement for success. Recently they've faced challenges to make anything work, from the monster movie to the suspense story to the adventure movie to the complete commercial failure of M3gan 2.0, and so a great deal rides on whether the sequel can prove whether a brief narrative can become a movie that can create a series. However, there's an issue …

Ghostly Evolution

The original concluded with our surviving character Finn (the young actor) defeating the antagonist, helped and guided by the apparitions of earlier casualties. This situation has required filmmaker Derrickson and his co-writer C Robert Cargill to move the franchise and its villain in a different direction, transforming a human antagonist into a supernatural one, a path that leads them via Elm Street with an ability to cross back into the physical realm made possible by sleep. But unlike Freddy Krueger, the antagonist is markedly uninventive and completely lacking comedy. The disguise stays effectively jarring but the movie has difficulty to make him as terrifying as he temporarily seemed in the initial film, limited by complicated and frequently unclear regulations.

Alpine Christian Camp Setting

The protagonist and his irritatingly profane sibling Gwen (the actress) encounter him again while stranded due to weather at an alpine Christian camp for kids, the second film also acknowledging regarding the hockey mask killer the camp slasher. Gwen is guided there by a ghostly image of her dead mother and what might be their deceased villain's initial casualties while the protagonist, continuing to process his anger and recently discovered defensive skills, is tracking to defend her. The writing is excessively awkward in its contrived scene-setting, inelegantly demanding to maroon the main characters at a location that will additionally provide to histories of hero and villain, filling in details we weren't particularly interested in or want to know about. What also appears to be a more deliberate action to edge the film toward the same church-attending crowds that made the Conjuring series into massive hits, Derrickson adds a spiritual aspect, with morality now more strongly connected with the creator and the afterlife while bad represents the devil and hell, belief the supreme tool against this type of antagonist.

Overcomplicated Story

What all of this does is continued over-burden a franchise that was previously almost failing, adding unnecessary complications to what should be a basic scary film. Frequently I discovered excessively engaged in questioning about the hows and whys of possible and impossible events to become truly immersed. It's an undemanding role for the actor, whose features stay concealed but he does have authentic charisma that’s typically lacking in other aspects in the acting team. The setting is at times remarkably immersive but most of the consistently un-scary set-pieces are marred by a rough cinematic quality to distinguish dreaming from waking, an ineffective stylistic choice that seems excessively meta and designed to reflect the frightening randomness of being in an actual nightmare.

Weak Continuation Rationale

Running nearly 120 minutes, the sequel, comparable to earlier failures, is a needlessly long and hugely unconvincing case for the creation of an additional film universe. If another installment comes, I suggest ignoring it.

• Black Phone 2 releases in Australia's movie houses on 16 October and in the United States and United Kingdom on 17 October