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Arriving as the resurrected master of horror machine was continuing to produce film versions, regardless of quality, The Black Phone felt like a uninspired homage. With its small town 70s backdrop, high school cast, gifted youths and gnarly neighbourhood villain, it was close to pastiche and, comparable to the weakest King’s stories, it was also clumsily packed.

Funnily enough the source was found within the household, as it was adapted from a brief tale from the author's offspring, over-extended into a film that was a surprise $161m hit. It was the narrative about the kidnapper, a sadistic killer of children who would take pleasure in prolonging their fatal ceremony. While molestation was never mentioned, there was something unmistakably LGBTQ-suggestive about the villain and the historical touchpoints/moral panics he was intended to symbolize, emphasized by the performer portraying him with a noticeably camp style. But the film was too opaque to ever properly acknowledge this and even aside from that tension, it was excessively convoluted and too high on its wearisome vileness to work as anything beyond an unthinking horror entertainment.

Second Installment's Release Amidst Studio Struggles

Its sequel arrives as once-dominant genre specialists the production company are in critical demand for a hit. Recently they've faced challenges to make any project successful, from Wolf Man to The Woman in the Yard to their action film to the utter financial disappointment of the robotic follow-up, and so a great deal rides on whether the continuation can prove whether a brief narrative can become a film that can create a series. There’s just one slight problem …

Supernatural Transformation

The initial movie finished with our surviving character Finn (the young actor) killing the Grabber, supported and coached by the ghosts of those he had killed before. This has compelled director Scott Derrickson and his collaborator C Robert Cargill to advance the story and its killer to a new place, converting a physical threat into a supernatural one, a route that takes them via Elm Street with a capability to return into the real world enabled through nightmares. But in contrast to the dream killer, the villain is markedly uninventive and entirely devoid of humour. The disguise stays effectively jarring but the movie has difficulty to make him as terrifying as he temporarily seemed in the first, trapped by complex and typically puzzling guidelines.

Mountain Retreat Location

Finn and his frustratingly crude sister Gwen (the performer) face him once more while trapped by snow at a mountain religious retreat for kids, the sequel also nodding in the direction of Jason Voorhees Jason Voorhees. The female lead is led there by an apparition of her deceased parent and potentially their dead antagonist's original prey while Finn, still trying to handle his fury and recently discovered defensive skills, is following so he can protect her. The screenplay is excessively awkward in its artificial setup, inelegantly demanding to get the siblings stranded at a location that will additionally provide to backstories for both hero and villain, filling in details we didn’t really need or want to know about. Additionally seeming like a more calculated move to edge the film toward the similar religious audiences that turned the Conjuring franchise into major blockbusters, the director includes a religious element, with good now more closely associated with the creator and the afterlife while bad represents the devil and hell, belief the supreme tool against such a creature.

Over-stacked Narrative

What all of this does is continued over-burden a franchise that was previously nearly collapsing, adding unnecessary complications to what could have been a basic scary film. Regularly I noticed overly occupied with inquiries about the hows and whys of feasible and unfeasible occurrences to experience genuine engagement. It’s a low-lift effort for Hawke, whose features stay concealed but he maintains genuine presence that’s mostly missing elsewhere in the ensemble. The environment is at times impressively atmospheric but most of the continuously non-terrifying sequences are flawed by a grainy 8mm texture to distinguish dreaming from waking, an poor directorial selection that feels too self-aware and designed to reflect the horrifying unpredictability of living through a genuine night terror.

Unpersuasive Series Justification

At just under 2 hours, the follow-up, like M3gan 2.0 before it, is a excessively extended and highly implausible case for the creation of a new franchise. When it calls again, I advise letting it go to voicemail.

• Black Phone 2 releases in Australian cinemas on 16 October and in the United States and United Kingdom on October 17