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Coming as the revived Stephen King machine was persistently generating film versions, without concern for excellence, the first installment felt like a lazy fanboy tribute. With its 1970s small town setting, high school cast, gifted youths and gnarly neighbourhood villain, it was almost imitation and, similar to the poorest his literary works, it was also awkwardly crowded.

Curiously the call came from inside the family home, as it was adapted from a brief tale from the author's offspring, expanded into a film that was a shocking commercial success. It was the narrative about the kidnapper, a sadistic killer of children who would enjoy extending the process of killing. While assault was not referenced, there was something unmistakably LGBTQ-suggestive about the character and the historical touchpoints/moral panics he was intended to symbolize, strengthened by the performer playing him with a distinctly flamboyant manner. But the film was too vague to ever properly acknowledge this and even excluding that discomfort, it was too busily plotted and overly enamored with its tiring griminess to work as anything beyond an mindless scary movie material.

Follow-up Film's Debut Amidst Studio Struggles

The next chapter comes as previous scary movie successes Blumhouse are in critical demand for a hit. This year they’ve struggled to make any project successful, from their werewolf film to The Woman in the Yard to the adventure movie to the utter financial disappointment of M3gan 2.0, and so a great deal rides on whether the continuation can prove whether a short story can become a motion picture that can create a series. There’s just one slight problem …

Paranormal Shift

The first film ended with our surviving character Finn (the performer) defeating the antagonist, supported and coached by the ghosts of those he had killed before. This has compelled filmmaker Derrickson and his collaborator C Robert Cargill to move the franchise and its antagonist toward fresh territory, transforming a human antagonist into a paranormal entity, a direction that guides them through Nightmare on Elm Street with a capability to return into the physical realm facilitated by dreams. But unlike Freddy Krueger, the Grabber is markedly uninventive and completely lacking comedy. The facial covering continues to be effectively jarring but the film struggles to make him as frightening as he briefly was in the first, trapped by convoluted and often confusing rules.

Alpine Christian Camp Setting

The protagonist and his irritatingly profane sibling Gwen (the performer) confront him anew while trapped by snow at an alpine Christian camp for kids, the sequel also nodding regarding the hockey mask killer the Friday the 13th antagonist. The female lead is led there by a ghostly image of her dead mother and what might be their deceased villain's initial casualties while the protagonist, continuing to deal with his rage and fresh capacity for resistance, is pursuing to safeguard her. The script is overly clumsy in its contrived scene-setting, clumsily needing to leave the brother and sister trapped at a place that will also add to background information for main character and enemy, filling in details we didn't actually require or care to learn about. What also appears to be a more deliberate action to push the movie towards the same church-attending crowds that made the Conjuring series into major blockbusters, the filmmaker incorporates a religious element, with virtue now more directly linked with the creator and the afterlife while evil symbolizes the demonic and punishment, belief the supreme tool against this type of antagonist.

Over-stacked Narrative

The result of these decisions is continued over-burden a story that was formerly nearly collapsing, incorporating needless complexities to what could have been a simple Friday night engine. I often found myself too busy asking questions about the processes and motivations of what could or couldn’t happen to experience genuine engagement. It’s a low-lift effort for Hawke, whose visage remains hidden but he does have authentic charisma that’s generally absent in other areas in the ensemble. The environment is at times atmospherically grand but most of the continuously non-terrifying sequences are damaged by a rough cinematic quality to differentiate asleep and awake, an unsuccessful artistic decision that feels too self-aware and created to imitate the frightening randomness of experiencing a real bad dream.

Unconvincing Franchise Argument

Lasting approximately two hours, the follow-up, similar to its predecessor, is a excessively extended and extremely unpersuasive case for the creation of an additional film universe. The next time it rings, I advise letting it go to voicemail.

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