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Arriving as the re-activated master of horror machine was continuing to produce adaptations, quality be damned, The Black Phone felt like a lazy fanboy tribute. With its small town 70s backdrop, high school cast, gifted youths and gnarly neighbourhood villain, it was close to pastiche and, comparable to the weakest King’s stories, it was also awkwardly crowded.

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, over-extended into a film that was a shocking commercial success. It was the story of the Grabber, a brutal murderer of young boys who would take pleasure in prolonging the process of killing. While molestation was never mentioned, there was something unmistakably LGBTQ-suggestive about the villain and the era-specific anxieties he was obviously meant to represent, reinforced by the actor playing him with a certain swishy, effeminate flare. But the film was too ambiguous to ever really admit that and even excluding that discomfort, it was excessively convoluted and too high on its tiring griminess to work as anything more than an undiscerning sleepover nightmare fuel.

The Sequel's Arrival During Production Company Challenges

The next chapter comes as previous scary movie successes the production company are in urgent requirement for success. This year they’ve struggled to make any film profitable, from their werewolf film to The Woman in the Yard to their action film to the utter financial disappointment of M3gan 2.0, and so a great deal rides on whether the sequel can prove whether a brief narrative can become a movie that can spawn a franchise. There’s just one slight problem …

Supernatural Transformation

The original concluded with our Final Boy Finn (the performer) defeating the antagonist, supported and coached by the apparitions of earlier casualties. It’s forced filmmaker Derrickson and his co-writer C Robert Cargill to move the franchise and its villain in a different direction, transforming a human antagonist into a supernatural one, a path that leads them by way of Freddy's domain with a capability to return into the real world made possible by sleep. But unlike Freddy Krueger, the villain is clearly unimaginative and totally without wit. The mask remains effectively jarring but the film struggles to make him as scary as he temporarily seemed in the initial film, constrained by complicated and frequently unclear regulations.

Snowy Religious Environment

The main character and his irritatingly profane sibling Gwen (the performer) confront him anew while stranded due to weather at an alpine Christian camp for kids, the sequel also nodding in the direction of Jason Voorhees the camp slasher. Gwen is guided there by an apparition of her deceased parent and what could be their late tormenter’s first victims while Finn, still trying to process his anger and recently discovered defensive skills, is tracking to defend her. The screenplay is excessively awkward in its contrived scene-setting, awkwardly requiring to maroon the main characters at a location that will additionally provide to backstories for both hero and villain, supplying particulars we didn’t really need or want to know about. Additionally seeming like a more strategic decision to guide the production in the direction of the similar religious audiences that transformed the Conjuring movies into massive hits, the director includes a religious element, with morality now more strongly connected with the creator and the afterlife while evil symbolizes the devil and hell, faith the ultimate weapon against a monster like this.

Overcomplicated Story

The result of these decisions is additional over-complicate a story that was formerly close to toppling over, including superfluous difficulties to what could have been a simple Friday night engine. I often found myself too busy asking questions about the methods and reasons of possible and impossible events to feel all that involved. It's an undemanding role for the actor, whose face we never really see but he maintains authentic charisma that’s mostly missing elsewhere in the cast. The setting is at times remarkably immersive but most of the continuously non-terrifying sequences are marred by a rough cinematic quality to differentiate asleep and awake, an unsuccessful artistic decision that seems excessively meta and constructed to mirror the terrifying uncertainty of experiencing a real bad dream.

Weak Continuation Rationale

Running nearly 120 minutes, the sequel, like M3gan 2.0 before it, is a excessively extended and extremely unpersuasive argument for the birth of a new franchise. If another installment comes, I suggest ignoring it.

• The sequel is out in Australian cinemas on the sixteenth of October and in the US and UK on the seventeenth of October