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Coming as the re-activated master of horror machine was continuing to produce screen translations, regardless of quality, The Black Phone felt like a lazy fanboy tribute. Set against a 1970s small town setting, young performers, psychic kids and gnarly neighbourhood villain, it was close to pastiche and, like the very worst of King’s stories, it was also clumsily packed.

Interestingly the call came from from the author's own lineage, as it was inspired by a compact narrative from his descendant, expanded into a film that was a unexpected blockbuster. It was the story of the Grabber, a cruel slayer of young boys who would revel in elongating 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, reinforced by the performer portraying him with a distinctly flamboyant manner. But the film was too vague to ever properly acknowledge this and even without that uneasiness, it was excessively convoluted and too focused on its exhaustingly grubby nastiness to work as anything beyond an mindless scary movie material.

The Sequel's Arrival Amidst Production Company Challenges

Its sequel arrives as former horror hit-makers Blumhouse are in urgent requirement for success. Lately they've encountered difficulties to make any project successful, from the monster movie to the suspense story to their action film to the utter financial disappointment of the robotic follow-up, and so much depends on whether Black Phone 2 can prove whether a short story can become a motion picture that can generate multiple installments. However, there's an issue …

Ghostly Evolution

The initial movie finished with our protagonist Finn (the young actor) killing the Grabber, assisted and trained by the spirits of previous victims. This has compelled writer-director Scott Derrickson and his writing partner Cargill to advance the story and its villain in a different direction, turning a flesh and blood villain into a ghostly presence, a route that takes them by way of Freddy's domain with a power to travel into the physical realm facilitated by dreams. But unlike Freddy Krueger, the villain is markedly uninventive and entirely devoid of humour. The disguise stays appropriately unsettling but the movie has difficulty to make him as scary as he temporarily seemed in the initial film, trapped by complex and typically puzzling guidelines.

Snowy Religious Environment

The protagonist and his irritatingly profane sibling Gwen (the actress) face him once more while trapped by snow at an alpine Christian camp for kids, the follow-up also referencing in the direction of Jason Voorhees Jason Voorhees. Gwen is guided there by a ghostly image of her dead mother and what might be their dead antagonist's original prey while the brother, still attempting to deal with his rage and recently discovered defensive skills, is following so he can protect her. The writing is overly clumsy in its artificial setup, awkwardly requiring to leave the brother and sister trapped at a place that will also add to histories of main character and enemy, providing information we didn’t really need or care to learn about. Additionally seeming like a more strategic decision to push the movie towards the same church-attending crowds that made the Conjuring series into major blockbusters, the director includes a spiritual aspect, with good now more closely associated with the divine and paradise while bad represents the demonic and punishment, faith the ultimate weapon against this type of antagonist.

Over-stacked Narrative

What all of this does is continued over-burden a story that was formerly almost failing, incorporating needless complexities to what ought to be a simple Friday night engine. Regularly I noticed overly occupied with inquiries about the processes and motivations of feasible and unfeasible occurrences to become truly immersed. It's minimal work for the actor, whose visage remains hidden but he maintains genuine presence that’s typically lacking in other aspects in the acting team. The environment is at times atmospherically grand but the bulk of the continuously non-terrifying sequences are flawed by a gritty film stock appearance to distinguish dreaming from waking, an unsuccessful artistic decision that seems excessively meta and designed to reflect the terrifying uncertainty of experiencing a real bad dream.

Unpersuasive Series Justification

Running nearly 120 minutes, the sequel, like M3gan 2.0 before it, is a excessively extended and highly implausible justification for the establishment of another series. The next time it rings, I suggest ignoring it.

• Black Phone 2 is out in Australian theaters on October 16 and in America and Britain on October 17