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Arriving as the resurrected Stephen King machine was continuing to produce screen translations, regardless of quality, The Black Phone felt like a lazy fanboy tribute. Featuring a 1970s small town setting, teenage actors, psychic kids and gnarly neighbourhood villain, it was nearly parody and, similar to the poorest his literary works, it was also awkwardly crowded.

Funnily enough the call came from from the author's own lineage, as it was adapted from a brief tale from his descendant, expanded into a film that was a surprise $161m hit. It was the tale of the antagonist, a sadistic killer of adolescents who would take pleasure in prolonging the ritual of their deaths. While molestation was not referenced, there was something clearly non-heteronormative about the character and the period references/societal fears he was clearly supposed to refer to, reinforced by the actor playing him with a noticeably camp style. But the film was too ambiguous to ever fully embrace this aspect and even aside from that tension, it was overly complicated and overly enamored with its tiring griminess to work as anything beyond an unthinking horror entertainment.

Second Installment's Release Amidst Production Company Challenges

Its sequel arrives as previous scary movie successes the production company are in critical demand for a hit. This year they’ve struggled to make any film profitable, from their werewolf film to the suspense story to the adventure movie to the utter financial disappointment of the AI sequel, and so significant pressure rests on whether the sequel can prove whether a compact tale can become a film that can create a series. But there's a complication …

Paranormal Shift

The initial movie finished with our surviving character Finn (Mason Thames) defeating the antagonist, supported and coached by the ghosts of those he had killed before. It’s forced filmmaker Derrickson and his collaborator C Robert Cargill to take the series and its antagonist toward fresh territory, transforming a human antagonist into a supernatural one, a path that leads them by way of Freddy's domain with a capability to return into reality enabled through nightmares. But different from the striped sweater villain, the Grabber is clearly unimaginative and entirely devoid of humour. The mask remains successfully disturbing but the production fails to make him as frightening as he momentarily appeared in the initial film, trapped by complex and typically puzzling guidelines.

Mountain Retreat Location

Finn and his annoyingly foul-mouthed sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) encounter him again while snowed in at an alpine Christian camp 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 potentially their deceased villain's initial casualties while the protagonist, continuing to handle his fury and newfound ability to fight back, is pursuing to safeguard her. The screenplay is excessively awkward in its contrived scene-setting, clumsily needing to leave the brother and sister trapped at a place that will also add to background information for hero and villain, filling in details we didn't actually require or want to know about. In what also feels like a more calculated move to push the movie towards the similar religious audiences that transformed the Conjuring movies into major blockbusters, the filmmaker incorporates a spiritual aspect, with virtue now more directly linked with the divine and paradise while bad represents the demonic and punishment, belief the supreme tool against this type of antagonist.

Overloaded Plot

The consequence of these choices is additional over-complicate a franchise that was previously nearly collapsing, adding unnecessary complications to what ought to be a simple Friday night engine. Frequently I discovered excessively engaged in questioning about the processes and motivations of what could or couldn’t happen to feel all that involved. It’s a low-lift effort for the performer, whose features stay concealed but he maintains genuine presence that’s typically lacking in other aspects in the acting team. The setting is at times remarkably immersive but the majority of the persistently unfrightening scenes are flawed by a rough cinematic quality to differentiate asleep and awake, an ineffective stylistic choice that appears overly conscious and constructed to mirror the frightening randomness of experiencing a real bad dream.

Unpersuasive Series Justification

Running nearly 120 minutes, Black Phone 2, like M3gan 2.0 before it, is a excessively extended and hugely unconvincing case for the creation of an additional film universe. The next time it rings, I suggest ignoring it.

• The follow-up film is out in Australian cinemas on 16 October and in the US and UK on October 17