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Arriving as the revived master of horror machine was continuing to produce adaptations, without concern for excellence, the original film felt like a lazy fanboy tribute. Featuring a small town 70s backdrop, teenage actors, telepathic children and gnarly neighbourhood villain, it was nearly parody and, like the very worst of the author's tales, it was also inelegantly overstuffed.

Interestingly the call came from from the author's own lineage, as it was inspired by a compact narrative from his descendant, stretched into a film that was a unexpected blockbuster. It was the tale of the antagonist, a sadistic killer of children who would take pleasure in prolonging the process of killing. While assault was not referenced, there was something unmistakably LGBTQ-suggestive about the villain and the historical touchpoints/moral panics he was intended to symbolize, strengthened by the performer 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 excessively convoluted and too focused on its wearisome vileness to work as anything beyond an unthinking horror entertainment.

Second Installment's Release During Filmmaking Difficulties

The next chapter comes as previous scary movie successes the production company are in critical demand for a hit. 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 the AI sequel, and so significant pressure rests on whether Black Phone 2 can prove whether a short story can become a movie that can spawn a franchise. There’s just one slight problem …

Ghostly Evolution

The first film ended with our Final Boy Finn (the performer) eliminating the villain, 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 direction that guides them through Nightmare on Elm Street with a capability to return into the physical realm made possible by sleep. But different from the striped sweater villain, the Grabber is noticeably uncreative and entirely devoid of humour. The facial covering continues to be effectively jarring but the production fails to make him as terrifying as he temporarily seemed in the original, limited by convoluted and often confusing rules.

Snowy Religious Environment

The main character and his annoyingly foul-mouthed sister Gwen (the actress) face him once more while snowed in at a mountain religious retreat for kids, the sequel also nodding toward Freddy’s one-time nemesis the camp slasher. The sister is directed there by a vision of her late mother and potentially their late tormenter’s first victims while the brother, still attempting to handle his fury and recently discovered defensive skills, is pursuing to safeguard her. The writing is overly clumsy in its artificial setup, inelegantly demanding to get the siblings stranded at a setting that will further contribute to backstories for both hero and villain, supplying particulars we didn't actually require or want to know about. Additionally seeming like a more calculated move to guide the production in the direction of the same church-attending crowds that transformed the Conjuring movies into massive hits, Derrickson adds a faith-based component, with virtue now more directly linked with the creator and the afterlife while evil symbolizes the demonic and punishment, belief the supreme tool against a monster like this.

Over-stacked Narrative

What all of this does is further over-stack a series that was already almost failing, including superfluous difficulties to what could have been a simple Friday night engine. Frequently I discovered excessively engaged in questioning about the hows and whys of what could or couldn’t happen to feel all that involved. It's minimal work for the actor, whose face we never really see but he possesses genuine presence that’s mostly missing elsewhere in the cast. The location is at times impressively atmospheric but the bulk of the continuously non-terrifying sequences are flawed by a rough cinematic quality to separate sleep states from consciousness, an unsuccessful artistic decision that appears overly conscious and designed to reflect the frightening randomness of living through a genuine night terror.

Weak Continuation Rationale

Lasting approximately two hours, the follow-up, similar to its predecessor, is a unnecessarily lengthy and highly implausible justification for the establishment of a new franchise. When it calls again, I recommend not answering.

• Black Phone 2 releases in Australian theaters on 16 October and in the US and UK on the seventeenth of October