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Coming as the resurrected Stephen King machine was continuing to produce screen translations, without concern for excellence, The Black Phone felt like a uninspired homage. With its 1970s small town setting, teenage actors, psychic kids and twisted community predator, it was close to pastiche and, comparable to the weakest King’s stories, it was also inelegantly overstuffed.

Funnily enough the source was found within the household, as it was based on a short story from his descendant, stretched into a film that was a surprise $161m hit. It was the story of the Grabber, a brutal murderer of children who would enjoy extending their fatal ceremony. While sexual abuse was not referenced, there was something clearly non-heteronormative about the character and the era-specific anxieties he was clearly supposed to refer to, emphasized by Ethan Hawke acting with a certain swishy, effeminate flare. But the film was too opaque to ever really admit that and even excluding that discomfort, it was excessively convoluted and too high on its tiring griminess to work as anything beyond an unthinking horror entertainment.

Second Installment's Release In the Middle of Filmmaking Difficulties

Its sequel arrives as former horror hit-makers Blumhouse are in critical demand for a hit. This year they’ve struggled to make any project successful, from the monster movie to their thriller to their action film to the total box office disaster of M3gan 2.0, and so a great deal rides on whether the continuation 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 Final Boy Finn (the performer) killing the Grabber, helped and guided by the ghosts of those he had killed before. This situation has required 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 ghostly presence, a path that leads them by way of Freddy's domain with an ability to cross back into reality made possible by sleep. But unlike Freddy Krueger, the villain is noticeably uncreative and totally without wit. The disguise stays effectively jarring but the movie has difficulty to make him as scary as he momentarily appeared in the original, limited by complex and typically puzzling guidelines.

Mountain Retreat Location

The main character and his annoyingly foul-mouthed sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) confront him anew while trapped by snow at a mountain religious retreat for kids, the second film also acknowledging toward Freddy’s one-time nemesis Jason Voorhees. The sister is directed there by a vision of her late mother and what might be their deceased villain's initial casualties while Finn, still trying to deal with his rage and fresh capacity for resistance, is following so he can protect her. The screenplay is too ungainly in its artificial setup, inelegantly demanding to get the siblings stranded at a setting that will further contribute to background information for main character and enemy, filling in details we weren't particularly interested in or care to learn about. In what also feels like a more deliberate action to edge the film toward the similar religious audiences that turned the Conjuring franchise into massive hits, the director includes a religious element, with good now more closely associated with the creator and the afterlife while villainy signifies the demonic and punishment, religion the final defense against a monster like this.

Over-stacked Narrative

The result of these decisions is additional over-complicate a franchise that was previously close to toppling over, adding unnecessary complications to what could have been a basic scary film. Frequently I discovered overly occupied with inquiries about the hows and whys of feasible and unfeasible occurrences to become truly immersed. It's minimal work for Hawke, whose visage remains hidden but he does have real screen magnetism that’s mostly missing elsewhere in the cast. The setting is at times atmospherically grand but most of the continuously non-terrifying sequences are damaged by a grainy 8mm texture to differentiate asleep and awake, an ineffective stylistic choice that appears overly conscious and created to imitate the terrifying uncertainty of being in an actual nightmare.

Unconvincing Franchise Argument

At just under 2 hours, Black Phone 2, similar to its predecessor, is a excessively extended and hugely unconvincing justification for the establishment of an additional film universe. The next time it rings, I recommend not answering.

• The follow-up film releases in Australian theaters on October 16 and in the United States and United Kingdom on the seventeenth of October