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Coming as the resurrected master of horror machine was continuing to produce film versions, without concern for excellence, The Black Phone felt like a uninspired homage. Set against a small town 70s backdrop, high school cast, gifted youths and gnarly neighbourhood villain, it was almost imitation and, comparable to the weakest King’s stories, it was also clumsily packed.

Funnily enough the call came from within the household, as it was adapted from a brief tale from King’s son Joe Hill, over-extended into a film that was a shocking commercial success. It was the tale of the antagonist, a cruel slayer of adolescents who would enjoy extending their fatal ceremony. While molestation was never mentioned, there was something inescapably queer-coded about the antagonist and the historical touchpoints/moral panics he was obviously meant to represent, strengthened by the actor playing him with a noticeably camp style. But the film was too opaque to ever really admit that and even without that uneasiness, it was overly complicated and overly enamored with its exhaustingly grubby nastiness to work as anything beyond an unthinking horror entertainment.

Follow-up Film's Debut In the Middle of Filmmaking Difficulties

The follow-up debuts as once-dominant genre specialists the production company are in urgent requirement for success. This year they’ve struggled to make any film profitable, from the monster movie to the suspense story to Drop to the utter financial disappointment of M3gan 2.0, and so a great deal rides on whether the sequel can prove whether a compact tale can become a motion picture that can create a series. However, there's an issue …

Supernatural Transformation

The first film ended with our Final Boy Finn (Mason Thames) killing the Grabber, assisted and trained by the apparitions of earlier casualties. It’s forced writer-director Scott Derrickson and his collaborator C Robert Cargill to move the franchise and its killer to a new place, transforming a human antagonist into a paranormal entity, a path that leads them via Elm Street with a power to travel into the physical realm enabled through nightmares. But in contrast to the dream killer, the Grabber is noticeably uncreative and totally without wit. The facial covering continues to be appropriately unsettling but the production fails to make him as frightening as he temporarily seemed in the initial film, trapped by convoluted and often confusing rules.

Alpine Christian Camp Setting

The main character and his annoyingly foul-mouthed sister Gwen (the performer) face him once more while snowed in at a high-altitude faith-based facility for kids, the sequel also nodding in the direction of Jason Voorhees the camp slasher. The sister is directed there by a ghostly image of her dead mother and potentially their dead antagonist's original prey while Finn, still trying to deal with his rage and newfound ability to fight back, is pursuing to safeguard her. The writing is too ungainly in its artificial setup, awkwardly requiring to get the siblings stranded at a location that will additionally provide to backstories for both main character and enemy, supplying particulars we weren't particularly interested in or care to learn about. In what also feels like a more calculated move to guide the production in the direction of the similar religious audiences that made the Conjuring series into massive hits, the filmmaker incorporates a spiritual aspect, with morality now more strongly connected with God and heaven while villainy signifies Satan and damnation, religion the final defense against this type of antagonist.

Over-stacked Narrative

The result of these decisions is continued over-burden a series that was already almost failing, incorporating needless complexities to what should be a simple Friday night engine. Frequently I discovered overly occupied with inquiries about the methods and reasons of possible and impossible events to feel all that involved. It’s a low-lift effort for Hawke, whose visage remains hidden but he possesses authentic charisma that’s generally absent in other areas in the acting team. The setting is at times remarkably immersive but most of the persistently unfrightening scenes are damaged by a gritty film stock appearance to distinguish dreaming from waking, an unsuccessful artistic decision that seems excessively meta and created to imitate the terrifying uncertainty of experiencing a real bad dream.

Weak Continuation Rationale

Running nearly 120 minutes, the follow-up, like M3gan 2.0 before it, is a needlessly long and highly implausible argument for the birth of an additional film universe. When it calls again, I suggest ignoring it.

• Black Phone 2 releases in Australia's movie houses on the sixteenth of October and in the United States and United Kingdom on October 17