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Debuting as the resurrected bestselling author machine was continuing to produce adaptations, regardless of quality, The Black Phone felt like a sloppy admiration piece. Set against a retro suburban environment, young performers, psychic kids and disturbing local antagonist, it was close to pastiche and, comparable to the weakest his literary works, it was also inelegantly overstuffed.

Funnily enough the call came from within the household, as it was adapted from a brief tale from the author's offspring, expanded into a film that was a surprise $161m hit. It was the narrative about the kidnapper, a cruel slayer of adolescents who would take pleasure in prolonging the process of killing. While assault was not referenced, there was something inescapably queer-coded about the villain and the era-specific anxieties he was clearly supposed to refer to, strengthened by the actor acting with a distinctly flamboyant manner. But the film was too vague to ever really admit that and even excluding that discomfort, it was too busily plotted and too high on its exhaustingly grubby nastiness to work as anything beyond an undiscerning sleepover nightmare fuel.

Second Installment's Release In the Middle of Filmmaking Difficulties

The next chapter comes as once-dominant genre specialists the production company are in urgent requirement for success. Recently they've faced challenges to make any project successful, from Wolf Man to the suspense story to Drop to the complete commercial failure of M3gan 2.0, and so significant pressure rests on whether Black Phone 2 can prove whether a compact tale can become a motion picture that can spawn a franchise. There’s just one slight problem …

Paranormal Shift

The first film ended with our protagonist Finn (the young actor) eliminating the villain, assisted and trained by the apparitions of earlier casualties. It’s forced writer-director Scott Derrickson and his collaborator C Robert Cargill to take the series and its antagonist toward fresh territory, turning a flesh and blood villain into a ghostly presence, a route that takes them by way of Freddy's domain with an ability to cross back into reality made possible by sleep. But unlike Freddy Krueger, the villain is noticeably uncreative and totally without wit. The facial covering continues to be successfully disturbing but the film struggles to make him as scary as he briefly was in the initial film, constrained by convoluted and often confusing rules.

Alpine Christian Camp Setting

The protagonist and his frustratingly crude sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) face him once more while stranded due to weather at an alpine Christian camp for kids, the follow-up also referencing in the direction of Jason Voorhees the Friday the 13th antagonist. Gwen is guided there by a ghostly image of her dead mother and what could be their dead antagonist's original prey while the brother, still attempting to deal with his rage and fresh capacity for resistance, is following so he can protect her. The script is overly clumsy in its forced establishment, inelegantly demanding to get the siblings stranded at a setting that will further contribute to background information for hero and villain, providing information we didn’t really need or care to learn about. Additionally seeming like a more strategic decision to push the movie towards the same church-attending crowds that transformed the Conjuring movies into massive hits, Derrickson adds a faith-based component, with morality now more strongly connected with the creator and the afterlife while bad represents the demonic and punishment, religion the final defense against a monster like this.

Overloaded Plot

The consequence of these choices is continued over-burden a franchise that was previously close to toppling over, including superfluous difficulties to what ought to be a straightforward horror movie. I often found myself too busy asking questions about the hows and whys of what could or couldn’t happen to feel all that involved. It's minimal work for Hawke, whose visage remains hidden but he does have real screen magnetism that’s typically lacking in other aspects in the ensemble. The environment is at times atmospherically grand but most of the continuously non-terrifying sequences are flawed by a grainy 8mm texture to distinguish dreaming from waking, an ineffective stylistic choice that seems excessively meta and constructed to mirror the terrifying uncertainty of living through a genuine night terror.

Weak Continuation Rationale

Lasting approximately two hours, Black Phone 2, like M3gan 2.0 before it, is a unnecessarily lengthy and extremely unpersuasive argument for the birth of another series. The next time it rings, I recommend not answering.

• The follow-up film releases in Australian cinemas on 16 October and in the United States and United Kingdom on 17 October