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Coming as the resurrected Stephen King machine was persistently generating film versions, without concern for excellence, The Black Phone felt like a sloppy admiration piece. Featuring a retro suburban environment, high school cast, psychic kids and twisted community predator, it was almost imitation and, comparable to the weakest the author's tales, it was also awkwardly crowded.

Funnily enough the inspiration originated from within the household, as it was based on a short story 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 young boys who would enjoy extending the process of killing. While sexual abuse was never mentioned, there was something unmistakably LGBTQ-suggestive about the character and the era-specific anxieties he was clearly supposed to refer to, reinforced by the performer playing him with a distinctly flamboyant manner. But the film was too opaque to ever properly acknowledge this and even excluding that discomfort, it was excessively convoluted and too focused on its exhaustingly grubby nastiness to work as anything beyond an undiscerning sleepover nightmare fuel.

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

Its sequel arrives as once-dominant genre specialists the production company are in critical demand for a hit. Recently they've faced challenges to make any film profitable, from the monster movie to The Woman in the Yard to the adventure movie to the complete commercial failure of the AI sequel, and so significant pressure rests on whether the sequel 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 (Mason Thames) defeating the antagonist, helped and guided by the ghosts of those he had killed before. It’s forced director Scott Derrickson and his co-writer C Robert Cargill to move the franchise and its villain in a different direction, turning a flesh and blood villain into a paranormal entity, a route that takes them via Elm Street with a capability to return into reality facilitated by dreams. But unlike Freddy Krueger, the Grabber is markedly uninventive and totally without wit. The facial covering continues to be successfully disturbing but the movie has difficulty to make him as scary as he briefly was in the original, constrained by complex and typically puzzling guidelines.

Mountain Retreat Location

Finn and his annoyingly foul-mouthed sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) encounter him again while trapped by snow at a high-altitude faith-based facility for kids, the sequel also nodding regarding the hockey mask killer the camp slasher. Gwen is guided 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 screenplay is excessively awkward in its forced establishment, awkwardly requiring to leave the brother and sister trapped at a setting that will further contribute to histories of protagonist and antagonist, filling in details we didn't actually require or want to know about. What also appears to be a more strategic decision to guide the production in the direction of the same church-attending crowds that made the Conjuring series into major blockbusters, Derrickson adds a faith-based component, with good now more closely associated with the divine and paradise while bad represents the devil and hell, belief the supreme tool against a monster like this.

Overloaded Plot

What all of this does is additional over-complicate a franchise that was previously close to toppling over, incorporating needless complexities to what should be a basic scary film. I often found myself overly occupied with inquiries about the hows and whys of feasible and unfeasible occurrences to experience genuine engagement. It's minimal work for the performer, whose visage remains hidden but he possesses genuine presence that’s generally absent in other areas in the acting team. The location is at times remarkably immersive but the majority of the consistently un-scary set-pieces are damaged by a grainy 8mm texture to distinguish dreaming from waking, an poor directorial selection that appears overly conscious and created to imitate the horrifying unpredictability of experiencing a real bad dream.

Weak Continuation Rationale

At just under 2 hours, the sequel, like M3gan 2.0 before it, is a excessively extended and highly implausible case for the creation of another series. If another installment comes, I suggest ignoring it.

• The follow-up film debuts in Australian theaters on October 16 and in America and Britain on 17 October