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Arriving as the revived Stephen King machine was still churning out adaptations, quality be damned, The Black Phone felt like a lazy fanboy tribute. Featuring a small town 70s backdrop, teenage actors, telepathic children and disturbing local antagonist, it was close to pastiche and, similar to the poorest his literary works, it was also inelegantly overstuffed.

Curiously the source was found within the household, as it was based on a short story from his descendant, expanded into a film that was a shocking commercial success. It was the story of the Grabber, a sadistic killer of adolescents who would take pleasure in prolonging their fatal ceremony. While molestation was not referenced, there was something clearly non-heteronormative about the antagonist and the period references/societal fears he was intended to symbolize, emphasized by the actor acting with a distinctly flamboyant manner. But the film was too ambiguous to ever properly acknowledge this and even without that uneasiness, it was excessively convoluted and too focused on its tiring griminess to work as only an mindless scary movie material.

Second Installment's Release Amidst Production Company Challenges

Its sequel arrives as once-dominant genre specialists the studio are in urgent requirement for success. This year they’ve struggled to make any project successful, from Wolf Man to The Woman in the Yard to their action film to the complete commercial failure of the robotic follow-up, and so significant pressure rests on whether the sequel can prove whether a compact tale can become a motion picture that can spawn a franchise. However, there's an issue …

Paranormal Shift

The initial movie finished with our Final Boy Finn (the young actor) eliminating the villain, assisted and trained by the spirits of previous victims. This has compelled director Scott Derrickson and his writing partner Cargill to advance the story and its killer to a new place, transforming a human antagonist into a paranormal entity, a direction that guides them by way of Freddy's domain with an ability to cross back into the real world enabled through nightmares. But in contrast to the dream killer, the Grabber is markedly uninventive and totally without wit. The disguise stays successfully disturbing but the production fails to make him as scary as he momentarily appeared in the initial film, limited by complicated and frequently unclear regulations.

Snowy Religious Environment

The protagonist and his annoyingly foul-mouthed sister Gwen (the actress) encounter him again while snowed in at an alpine Christian camp for kids, the sequel also nodding toward Freddy’s one-time nemesis Jason Voorhees. Gwen is guided there by a ghostly image of her dead mother and potentially their late tormenter’s first victims while the brother, still attempting to deal with his rage and recently discovered defensive skills, is pursuing to safeguard her. The screenplay is excessively awkward in its contrived scene-setting, awkwardly requiring to leave the brother and sister trapped at a location that will additionally provide to background information for protagonist and antagonist, filling in details we weren't particularly interested in or desire to understand. Additionally seeming like a more strategic decision to guide the production in the direction of the same church-attending crowds that made the Conjuring series into massive hits, Derrickson adds a faith-based component, with good now more closely associated with the divine and paradise while evil symbolizes the demonic and punishment, religion the final defense against such a creature.

Over-stacked Narrative

The result of these decisions is further over-stack a franchise that was previously almost failing, adding unnecessary complications to what should be a simple Friday night engine. Frequently I discovered overly occupied with inquiries about the methods and reasons of possible and impossible events to experience genuine engagement. It’s a low-lift effort for the performer, whose face we never really see but he does have authentic charisma that’s typically lacking in other aspects in the acting team. The environment is at times impressively atmospheric but the majority of the continuously non-terrifying sequences are damaged by a rough cinematic quality to differentiate asleep and awake, an ineffective stylistic choice that seems excessively meta and constructed to mirror the frightening randomness of experiencing a real bad dream.

Unconvincing Franchise Argument

At just under 2 hours, the sequel, like M3gan 2.0 before it, is a excessively extended and hugely unconvincing case for the creation of a new franchise. When it calls again, I advise letting it go to voicemail.

• The follow-up film is out in Australian theaters on 16 October and in the US and UK on the seventeenth of October