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Coming as the revived Stephen King machine was continuing to produce adaptations, quality be damned, The Black Phone felt like a uninspired homage. Set against a retro suburban environment, teenage actors, gifted youths and twisted community predator, it was nearly parody and, like the very worst of the author's tales, it was also inelegantly overstuffed.

Funnily enough the source was found from the author's own lineage, as it was inspired by a compact narrative from the author's offspring, stretched into a film that was a shocking commercial success. It was the tale of the antagonist, a cruel slayer of children who would enjoy extending the ritual of their deaths. While sexual abuse was not referenced, there was something unmistakably LGBTQ-suggestive about the character and the historical touchpoints/moral panics he was intended to symbolize, reinforced by Ethan Hawke playing him with a certain swishy, effeminate flare. But the film was too ambiguous to ever really admit that and even aside from that tension, it was too busily plotted and overly enamored with its wearisome vileness to work as only an undiscerning sleepover nightmare fuel.

Second Installment's Release During Studio Struggles

The follow-up debuts as once-dominant genre specialists the production company are in desperate need of a win. Lately they've encountered difficulties to make any film profitable, from the monster movie to the suspense story to the adventure movie to the utter financial disappointment of M3gan 2.0, and so significant pressure rests on whether the sequel can prove whether a short story can become a motion picture that can generate multiple installments. However, there's an issue …

Ghostly Evolution

The initial movie finished with our protagonist Finn (Mason Thames) defeating the antagonist, supported and coached by the apparitions of earlier casualties. This has compelled writer-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 paranormal entity, a direction that guides them through Nightmare on Elm Street with an ability to cross back into the physical realm facilitated by dreams. But in contrast to the dream killer, the villain is noticeably uncreative and completely lacking comedy. The mask remains successfully disturbing but the film struggles to make him as scary as he momentarily appeared in the original, constrained by complicated and frequently unclear regulations.

Mountain Retreat Location

Finn and his frustratingly crude sister Gwen (the actress) face him once more while snowed in at a mountain religious retreat for kids, the follow-up also referencing regarding the hockey mask killer the camp slasher. Gwen is guided there by a vision of her late mother and what might be their dead antagonist's original prey while the brother, still attempting to handle his fury and newfound ability to fight back, is following so he can protect her. The screenplay is overly clumsy in its contrived scene-setting, clumsily needing to leave the brother and sister trapped at a location that will additionally provide to backstories for both main character and enemy, providing information we weren't particularly interested in or care to learn about. Additionally seeming like a more calculated move to guide the production in the direction of the same church-attending crowds that transformed the Conjuring movies into huge successes, Derrickson adds a spiritual aspect, with good now more closely associated with the divine and paradise while villainy signifies the demonic and punishment, belief the supreme tool against such a creature.

Overloaded Plot

The result of these decisions is further over-stack a series that was already close to toppling over, incorporating needless complexities to what could have been a basic scary film. Frequently I discovered overly occupied with inquiries about the processes and motivations of what could or couldn’t happen to become truly immersed. It’s a low-lift effort for Hawke, whose visage remains hidden but he possesses real screen magnetism that’s generally absent in other areas in the cast. The location 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 frightening randomness of experiencing a real bad dream.

Unconvincing Franchise Argument

Lasting approximately two hours, the sequel, like M3gan 2.0 before it, is a unnecessarily lengthy and hugely unconvincing justification for the establishment of an additional film universe. The next time it rings, I recommend not answering.

• The sequel releases in Australian cinemas on the sixteenth of October and in America and Britain on the seventeenth of October