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Arriving as the re-activated master of horror machine was continuing to produce adaptations, without concern for excellence, The Black Phone felt like a uninspired homage. Set against a retro suburban environment, high school cast, telepathic children and disturbing local antagonist, it was nearly parody and, similar to the poorest King’s stories, it was also awkwardly crowded.

Funnily enough the call came from inside the family home, as it was adapted from a brief tale from the author's offspring, stretched into a film that was a surprise $161m hit. It was the story of the Grabber, a cruel slayer of children who would revel in elongating the process of killing. While molestation was avoided in discussion, there was something unmistakably LGBTQ-suggestive about the antagonist and the period references/societal fears he was intended to symbolize, emphasized by the performer acting with a certain swishy, effeminate flare. But the film was too vague to ever fully embrace this aspect and even aside from that tension, it was overly complicated and overly enamored with its exhaustingly grubby nastiness to work as anything more than an mindless scary movie material.

The Sequel's Arrival During Production Company Challenges

The follow-up debuts as once-dominant genre specialists the production company are in critical demand for a hit. This year they’ve struggled to make anything work, from Wolf Man to the suspense story to Drop to the total box office disaster of the robotic follow-up, and so much depends on whether the sequel can prove whether a short story can become a movie that can generate multiple installments. However, there's an issue …

Paranormal Shift

The first film ended with our Final Boy Finn (Mason Thames) defeating the antagonist, assisted and trained by the ghosts of those he had killed before. This has compelled writer-director Scott Derrickson and his writing partner Cargill to take the series and its antagonist toward fresh territory, turning a flesh and blood villain into a paranormal entity, a direction that guides them by way of Freddy's domain with an ability to cross back into reality facilitated by dreams. But in contrast to the dream killer, the villain is clearly unimaginative and entirely devoid of humour. The mask remains appropriately unsettling but the production fails to make him as frightening as he temporarily seemed in the initial film, trapped by complicated and frequently unclear regulations.

Alpine Christian Camp Setting

Finn and his annoyingly foul-mouthed sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) confront him anew while trapped by snow at an alpine Christian camp for kids, the sequel also nodding regarding the hockey mask killer Jason Voorhees. The female lead is led there by a ghostly image of her dead mother and potentially their dead antagonist's original prey while the protagonist, continuing to handle his fury and fresh capacity for resistance, is pursuing to safeguard her. The writing is overly clumsy in its artificial setup, awkwardly requiring to leave the brother and sister trapped at a place that will also add to background information for hero and villain, filling in details we didn't actually require or care to learn about. What also appears to be a more strategic decision to edge the film toward the similar religious audiences that transformed the Conjuring movies into huge successes, Derrickson adds a faith-based component, with virtue now more directly linked with God and heaven while villainy signifies the devil and hell, faith the ultimate weapon against a monster like this.

Overloaded Plot

The result of these decisions is further over-stack a franchise that was previously almost failing, adding unnecessary complications to what could have been a simple Friday night engine. I often found myself too busy asking questions about the processes and motivations of possible and impossible events to feel all that involved. It's an undemanding role for the performer, whose face we never really see but he possesses authentic charisma that’s generally absent in other areas in the acting team. The setting is at times remarkably immersive but most of the persistently unfrightening scenes are marred by a grainy 8mm texture to differentiate asleep and awake, an poor directorial selection that seems excessively meta and constructed to mirror the terrifying uncertainty of experiencing a real bad dream.

Weak Continuation Rationale

At just under 2 hours, the sequel, similar to its predecessor, is a needlessly long and extremely unpersuasive justification for the establishment of another series. If another installment comes, I suggest ignoring it.

• The follow-up film releases in Australia's movie houses on the sixteenth of October and in the United States and United Kingdom on the seventeenth of October