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Debuting as the resurrected bestselling author machine was still churning out adaptations, regardless of quality, The Black Phone felt like a sloppy admiration piece. Set against a 1970s small town setting, teenage actors, psychic kids and disturbing local antagonist, it was close to pastiche and, like the very worst of the author's tales, it was also awkwardly crowded.

Curiously the call came from within the household, as it was based on a short story from the author's offspring, stretched into a film that was a unexpected blockbuster. It was the tale of the antagonist, a cruel slayer of children who would enjoy extending their fatal ceremony. While molestation was never mentioned, there was something unmistakably LGBTQ-suggestive about the character and the historical touchpoints/moral panics he was obviously meant to represent, emphasized by the actor acting with a distinctly flamboyant manner. But the film was too opaque to ever really admit that and even aside from that tension, it was overly complicated and too high on its tiring griminess to work as anything more than an mindless scary movie material.

Second Installment's Release During Studio Struggles

The follow-up debuts as former horror hit-makers Blumhouse are in desperate need of a win. Lately they've encountered difficulties to make any project successful, from their werewolf film to the suspense story to their action film to the total box office disaster of the robotic follow-up, and so significant pressure rests on whether Black Phone 2 can prove whether a compact tale can become a movie that can create a series. But there's a complication …

Ghostly Evolution

The first film ended with our Final Boy Finn (the performer) killing the Grabber, assisted and trained by the apparitions of earlier casualties. This situation has required writer-director Scott Derrickson and his writing partner Cargill to move the franchise and its villain in a different direction, transforming a human antagonist into a ghostly presence, a route that takes them via Elm Street with a capability to return into the physical realm enabled through nightmares. But unlike Freddy Krueger, the antagonist is clearly unimaginative and entirely devoid of humour. The mask remains successfully disturbing but the production fails to make him as terrifying as he briefly was in the initial film, limited by complex and typically puzzling guidelines.

Mountain Retreat Location

The protagonist and his annoyingly foul-mouthed sister Gwen (the performer) confront him anew while stranded due to weather at an alpine Christian camp for kids, the follow-up also referencing toward Freddy’s one-time nemesis the Friday the 13th antagonist. The female lead is led there by a vision of her late mother and potentially their deceased villain's initial casualties while the protagonist, continuing to deal with his rage and recently discovered defensive skills, is following so he can protect her. The screenplay is overly clumsy in its forced establishment, awkwardly requiring to maroon the main characters at a location that will additionally provide to background information for hero and villain, filling in details we weren't particularly interested in or care to learn about. Additionally seeming like a more strategic decision to guide the production in the direction of the similar religious audiences that turned the Conjuring franchise into major blockbusters, the director includes a spiritual aspect, with virtue now more directly linked with God and heaven while evil symbolizes the demonic and punishment, faith the ultimate weapon against a monster like this.

Overloaded Plot

The result of these decisions is further over-stack a franchise that was previously close to toppling over, incorporating needless complexities to what ought to be a straightforward horror movie. Frequently I discovered too busy asking questions about the methods and reasons of what could or couldn’t happen to experience genuine engagement. It's minimal work for the actor, whose face we never really see but he possesses authentic charisma that’s generally absent in other areas in the acting team. The location is at times remarkably immersive but the majority of the continuously non-terrifying sequences are damaged by a rough cinematic quality to differentiate asleep and awake, an unsuccessful artistic decision that appears overly conscious and created to imitate the frightening randomness of experiencing a real bad dream.

Weak Continuation Rationale

At just under 2 hours, the sequel, comparable to earlier failures, is a excessively extended and extremely unpersuasive case for the creation of an additional film universe. If another installment comes, I suggest ignoring it.

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