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Coming as the resurrected master of horror machine was persistently generating film versions, regardless of quality, The Black Phone felt like a uninspired homage. With its small town 70s backdrop, teenage actors, gifted youths and twisted community predator, it was nearly parody and, similar to the poorest King’s stories, it was also inelegantly overstuffed.

Funnily enough the source was found within the household, as it was based on a short story from King’s son Joe Hill, over-extended into a film that was a unexpected blockbuster. It was the narrative about the kidnapper, 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 unmistakably LGBTQ-suggestive about the character and the historical touchpoints/moral panics he was clearly supposed to refer to, emphasized by Ethan Hawke acting with a certain swishy, effeminate flare. But the film was too ambiguous to ever fully embrace this aspect and even aside from that tension, it was excessively convoluted and overly enamored with its wearisome vileness to work as only an undiscerning sleepover nightmare fuel.

The Sequel's Arrival Amidst Filmmaking Difficulties

The next chapter comes as previous scary movie successes the studio are in desperate need of a win. Lately they've encountered difficulties to make any film profitable, from their werewolf film to their thriller to the adventure movie to the complete commercial failure of M3gan 2.0, and so much depends on whether the sequel can prove whether a brief narrative can become a movie that can create a series. However, there's an issue …

Supernatural Transformation

The first film ended with our surviving character Finn (the young actor) killing the Grabber, supported and coached by the apparitions of earlier casualties. This situation has required director Scott Derrickson and his collaborator C Robert Cargill to take the series and its killer to a new place, turning a flesh and blood villain into a supernatural one, a path that leads them through Nightmare on Elm Street with a capability to return into the real world made possible by sleep. But unlike Freddy Krueger, the Grabber is clearly unimaginative and entirely devoid of humour. The facial covering continues to be successfully disturbing but the film struggles to make him as terrifying as he momentarily appeared in the original, trapped by complex and typically puzzling guidelines.

Mountain Retreat Location

Finn and his frustratingly crude sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) encounter him again while trapped by snow at an alpine Christian camp for kids, the follow-up also referencing in the direction of Jason Voorhees Jason Voorhees. Gwen is guided there by a ghostly image of her dead mother and potentially their late tormenter’s first victims while Finn, still trying to handle his fury and recently discovered defensive skills, is following so he can protect her. The script is excessively awkward in its artificial setup, awkwardly requiring to get the siblings stranded at a setting that will further contribute to histories of protagonist and antagonist, providing information we didn't actually require or desire to understand. What also appears to be a more strategic decision to push the movie towards the comparable faith-based viewers that transformed the Conjuring movies into massive hits, Derrickson adds a religious element, with good now more closely associated with the divine and paradise while villainy signifies the demonic and punishment, faith the ultimate weapon 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, adding unnecessary complications to what should be a straightforward horror movie. Regularly I noticed too busy asking questions about the hows and whys of feasible and unfeasible occurrences to experience genuine engagement. It’s a low-lift effort for the performer, whose features stay concealed but he possesses genuine presence that’s mostly missing elsewhere in the ensemble. The setting is at times atmospherically grand but the majority of the consistently un-scary set-pieces are marred by a grainy 8mm texture to differentiate asleep and awake, an ineffective stylistic choice that appears overly conscious and constructed to mirror the terrifying uncertainty of experiencing a real bad dream.

Unconvincing Franchise Argument

At just under 2 hours, the follow-up, similar to its predecessor, is a unnecessarily lengthy and extremely unpersuasive case for the creation of an additional film universe. The next time it rings, I suggest ignoring it.

• The follow-up film debuts in Australian theaters on 16 October and in the United States and United Kingdom on the seventeenth of October