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Debuting as the re-activated Stephen King machine was continuing to produce film versions, without concern for excellence, The Black Phone felt like a lazy fanboy tribute. With its retro suburban environment, teenage actors, psychic kids and disturbing local antagonist, it was almost imitation and, similar to the poorest King’s stories, it was also clumsily packed.

Funnily enough the inspiration originated from inside the family home, as it was adapted from a brief tale from his descendant, over-extended into a film that was a surprise $161m hit. It was the tale of the antagonist, a brutal murderer of children who would take pleasure in prolonging their fatal ceremony. While assault was never mentioned, there was something inescapably queer-coded about the character and the historical touchpoints/moral panics he was clearly supposed to refer to, reinforced by Ethan Hawke acting with a distinctly flamboyant manner. But the film was too ambiguous to ever fully embrace this aspect and even without that uneasiness, it was too busily plotted and too focused on its tiring griminess to work as only an unthinking horror entertainment.

Follow-up Film's Debut Amidst Filmmaking Difficulties

The next chapter comes as once-dominant genre specialists the production company are in urgent requirement for success. This year they’ve struggled to make any project successful, from their werewolf film to The Woman in the Yard to the adventure movie to the utter financial disappointment of M3gan 2.0, and so much depends on whether the sequel can prove whether a compact tale can become a movie that can generate multiple installments. But there's a complication …

Ghostly Evolution

The initial movie finished with our surviving character Finn (the young actor) defeating the antagonist, assisted and trained by the ghosts of those he had killed before. This has compelled writer-director Scott Derrickson and his collaborator C Robert Cargill to move the franchise and its killer to a new place, transforming a human antagonist into a supernatural one, a path that leads them through Nightmare on Elm Street with an ability to cross back into reality made possible by sleep. But in contrast to the dream killer, the Grabber is clearly unimaginative and completely lacking comedy. The mask remains successfully disturbing but the production fails to make him as frightening as he briefly was in the first, trapped by complex and typically puzzling guidelines.

Snowy Religious Environment

The main character and his frustratingly crude sister Gwen (the actress) confront him anew while snowed in at an alpine Christian camp for kids, the second film also acknowledging regarding the hockey mask killer the Friday the 13th antagonist. The female lead is led there by an apparition of her deceased parent and what might be their late tormenter’s first victims while the brother, still attempting to deal with his rage and fresh capacity for resistance, is tracking to defend her. The screenplay is too ungainly in its artificial setup, clumsily needing to maroon the main characters at a location that will additionally provide to backstories for both main character and enemy, providing information we didn’t really need or care to learn about. In what also feels like a more deliberate action to edge the film toward the comparable faith-based viewers that made the Conjuring series into huge successes, the director includes a spiritual aspect, with virtue now more directly linked with the creator and the afterlife while evil symbolizes Satan and damnation, faith the ultimate weapon against a monster like this.

Over-stacked Narrative

The consequence of these choices is additional over-complicate a story that was formerly close to toppling over, including superfluous difficulties to what could have been a straightforward horror movie. Frequently I discovered too busy asking questions about the hows and whys of possible and impossible events to become truly immersed. It's minimal work for Hawke, whose visage remains hidden but he maintains authentic charisma that’s mostly missing elsewhere in the cast. The setting is at times impressively atmospheric but the bulk of the persistently unfrightening scenes are flawed by a gritty film stock appearance to distinguish dreaming from waking, an ineffective stylistic choice that feels too self-aware and constructed to mirror the terrifying uncertainty of experiencing a real bad dream.

Unpersuasive Series Justification

Lasting approximately two hours, the follow-up, like M3gan 2.0 before it, is a excessively extended and extremely unpersuasive argument for the birth of an additional film universe. The next time it rings, I recommend not answering.

• The follow-up film is out in Australian theaters on the sixteenth of October and in the United States and United Kingdom on the seventeenth of October