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Coming as the revived Stephen King machine was persistently generating screen translations, regardless of quality, The Black Phone felt like a lazy fanboy tribute. Featuring a retro suburban environment, teenage actors, 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 within the household, as it was inspired by a compact narrative from his descendant, over-extended 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 ritual of their deaths. While sexual abuse was never mentioned, there was something clearly non-heteronormative about the villain and the era-specific anxieties he was clearly supposed to refer to, emphasized by the actor portraying him with a certain swishy, effeminate flare. But the film was too vague to ever really admit that and even excluding that discomfort, it was excessively convoluted and too high on its tiring griminess to work as anything more than an undiscerning sleepover nightmare fuel.

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

The next chapter comes as former horror hit-makers Blumhouse are in desperate need of a win. This year they’ve struggled to make anything work, from Wolf Man to their thriller to their action film to the complete commercial failure of the AI sequel, and so a great deal rides on whether the continuation can prove whether a short story can become a movie that can create a series. But there's a complication …

Paranormal Shift

The original concluded with our Final Boy Finn (the performer) defeating the antagonist, assisted and trained by the ghosts of those he had killed before. This has compelled filmmaker Derrickson and his co-writer C Robert Cargill to take the series and its antagonist toward fresh territory, transforming a human antagonist into a supernatural one, a path that leads them by way of Freddy's domain with a power to travel into the real world facilitated by dreams. But different from the striped sweater villain, the villain is noticeably uncreative and totally without wit. The mask remains successfully disturbing but the movie has difficulty to make him as frightening as he temporarily seemed in the original, trapped by complicated and frequently unclear regulations.

Mountain Retreat Location

The protagonist and his annoyingly foul-mouthed sister Gwen (the performer) face him once more while stranded due to weather at a high-altitude faith-based facility for kids, the follow-up also referencing toward Freddy’s one-time nemesis Jason Voorhees. The sister is directed there by an apparition of her deceased parent and what could be their late tormenter’s first victims while the brother, still attempting to process his anger and recently discovered defensive skills, is pursuing to safeguard her. The writing is excessively awkward in its contrived scene-setting, awkwardly requiring to get the siblings stranded at a place that will also add to histories of main character and enemy, providing information we weren't particularly interested in or want to know about. In what also feels like a more calculated move to push the movie towards the similar religious audiences that turned the Conjuring franchise into huge successes, Derrickson adds a religious element, with morality now more strongly connected with God and heaven while evil symbolizes the demonic and punishment, belief the supreme tool against such a creature.

Overloaded Plot

The consequence of these choices is continued over-burden a series that was already nearly collapsing, incorporating needless complexities to what should be a basic scary film. I often found myself too busy asking questions about the hows and whys of feasible and unfeasible occurrences to become truly immersed. It's an undemanding role for the performer, whose face we never really see but he possesses authentic charisma that’s typically lacking in other aspects in the acting team. The setting is at times remarkably immersive but the bulk of the continuously non-terrifying sequences are marred by a gritty film stock appearance to distinguish dreaming from waking, an unsuccessful artistic decision that feels too self-aware and created to imitate the frightening randomness of being in an actual nightmare.

Unpersuasive Series Justification

Running nearly 120 minutes, Black Phone 2, like M3gan 2.0 before it, is a unnecessarily lengthy and extremely unpersuasive argument for the birth of another series. When it calls again, I advise letting it go to voicemail.

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