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Debuting as the revived Stephen King machine was persistently generating screen translations, quality be damned, The Black Phone felt like a uninspired homage. With its retro suburban environment, young performers, telepathic children and disturbing local antagonist, it was almost imitation and, comparable to the weakest the author's tales, it was also clumsily packed.

Interestingly the source was found inside the family home, as it was based on a short story from the author's offspring, over-extended into a film that was a unexpected blockbuster. It was the narrative about the kidnapper, a cruel slayer of adolescents who would revel in elongating the process of killing. While molestation was not referenced, there was something unmistakably LGBTQ-suggestive about the antagonist and the era-specific anxieties he was clearly supposed to refer to, emphasized by Ethan Hawke portraying him with a distinctly flamboyant manner. But the film was too ambiguous to ever properly acknowledge this and even without that uneasiness, it was too busily plotted and too focused on its exhaustingly grubby nastiness to work as anything beyond an mindless scary movie material.

Follow-up Film's Debut Amidst Studio Struggles

The next chapter comes as former horror hit-makers the studio are in desperate need of a win. Recently they've faced challenges to make any film profitable, from their werewolf film to The Woman in the Yard to their action film to the complete commercial failure of the AI sequel, and so significant pressure rests on whether the sequel can prove whether a compact tale can become a movie that can spawn a franchise. However, there's an issue …

Supernatural Transformation

The initial movie finished with our surviving character Finn (the performer) defeating the antagonist, helped and guided by the spirits of previous victims. This has compelled director Scott Derrickson and his co-writer C Robert Cargill to take the series and its villain in a different direction, converting a physical threat into a paranormal entity, a route that takes them by way of Freddy's domain with a capability to return into reality made possible by sleep. But unlike Freddy Krueger, the Grabber is noticeably uncreative and completely lacking comedy. The disguise stays appropriately unsettling but the movie has difficulty to make him as frightening as he temporarily seemed in the original, limited by convoluted and often confusing rules.

Mountain Retreat Location

The protagonist and his annoyingly foul-mouthed sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) face him once more while snowed in at an alpine Christian camp for kids, the sequel also nodding in the direction of Jason Voorhees 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 protagonist, continuing to handle his fury and newfound ability to fight back, is tracking to defend her. The writing is excessively awkward in its artificial setup, clumsily needing to get the siblings stranded at a place that will also add to histories of hero and villain, supplying particulars we weren't particularly interested in or want to know about. Additionally seeming like a more deliberate action to push the movie towards the comparable faith-based viewers that transformed the Conjuring movies into major blockbusters, Derrickson adds a faith-based component, with morality now more strongly connected with the creator and the afterlife while evil symbolizes the devil and hell, faith the ultimate weapon against such a creature.

Over-stacked Narrative

What all of this does is further over-stack a series that was already close to toppling over, including superfluous difficulties to what could have been a basic scary film. Regularly I noticed overly occupied with inquiries about the methods and reasons 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 ensemble. The location is at times atmospherically grand but most of the continuously non-terrifying sequences are flawed by a rough cinematic quality to distinguish dreaming from waking, an poor directorial selection that appears overly conscious and designed to reflect the frightening randomness of being in an actual nightmare.

Unconvincing Franchise Argument

Running nearly 120 minutes, the follow-up, comparable to earlier failures, is a unnecessarily lengthy and hugely unconvincing case for the creation of an additional film universe. The next time it rings, I recommend not answering.

• The sequel releases in Australian cinemas on 16 October and in America and Britain on 17 October