🔗 Share this article

Coming as the revived master of horror machine was still churning out adaptations, without concern for excellence, The Black Phone felt like a uninspired homage. Featuring a small town 70s backdrop, teenage actors, telepathic children and gnarly neighbourhood villain, it was almost imitation and, similar to the poorest his literary works, it was also clumsily packed.

Interestingly the inspiration originated from inside the family home, as it was inspired by a compact narrative from the author's offspring, expanded into a film that was a surprise $161m hit. It was the story of the Grabber, a cruel slayer of young boys who would take pleasure in prolonging the process of killing. While sexual abuse was not referenced, there was something inescapably queer-coded about the character and the historical touchpoints/moral panics he was intended to symbolize, emphasized by the actor portraying him with a distinctly flamboyant manner. But the film was too opaque to ever fully embrace this aspect and even excluding that discomfort, it was excessively convoluted and overly enamored with its tiring griminess to work as anything beyond an mindless scary movie material.

The Sequel's Arrival Amidst Studio Struggles

The next chapter comes as former horror hit-makers Blumhouse are in desperate need of a win. Recently they've faced challenges to make anything work, from their werewolf film to The Woman in the Yard to the adventure movie to the complete commercial failure of M3gan 2.0, and so significant pressure rests on whether the sequel can prove whether a brief narrative can become a motion picture that can create a series. But there's a complication …

Supernatural Transformation

The first film ended with our protagonist Finn (the performer) eliminating the villain, assisted and trained by the ghosts of those he had killed before. This has compelled director Scott Derrickson and his writing partner Cargill to move the franchise and its villain in a different direction, turning a flesh and blood villain into a ghostly presence, a direction that guides them via Elm Street with an ability to cross back into the real world made possible by sleep. But unlike Freddy Krueger, the villain is clearly unimaginative and entirely devoid of humour. The disguise stays effectively jarring but the movie has difficulty to make him as terrifying as he momentarily appeared in the first, limited by convoluted and often confusing rules.

Alpine Christian Camp Setting

The main character and his irritatingly profane sibling Gwen (the performer) encounter him again while trapped by snow at a mountain religious retreat for kids, the sequel also nodding in the direction of Jason Voorhees Jason Voorhees. The female lead is led there by an apparition of her deceased parent and what might be their deceased villain's initial casualties while the brother, still attempting to deal with his rage and fresh capacity for resistance, is tracking to defend her. The script is excessively awkward in its forced establishment, inelegantly demanding to leave the brother and sister trapped at a place that will also add to backstories for both main character and enemy, supplying particulars we weren't particularly interested in or want to know about. What also appears to be a more calculated move to guide the production in the direction of the comparable faith-based viewers that made the Conjuring series into massive hits, Derrickson adds a religious element, with virtue now more directly linked with God and heaven while evil symbolizes the demonic and punishment, religion the final defense against a monster like this.

Overcomplicated Story

What all of this does is further over-stack a franchise that was previously nearly collapsing, incorporating needless complexities to what could have been a simple Friday night engine. Regularly I noticed too busy asking questions about the methods and reasons of feasible and unfeasible occurrences to experience genuine engagement. It's minimal work for the actor, whose visage remains hidden but he maintains authentic charisma that’s mostly missing elsewhere in the cast. The setting is at times remarkably immersive but the majority of the consistently un-scary set-pieces are marred by a grainy 8mm texture to differentiate asleep and awake, an unsuccessful artistic decision that appears overly conscious and constructed to mirror the horrifying unpredictability of living through a genuine night terror.

Unconvincing Franchise Argument

Lasting approximately two hours, the follow-up, similar to its predecessor, is a excessively extended and highly implausible justification for the establishment of a new franchise. If another installment comes, I recommend not answering.

• The sequel releases in Australia's movie houses on 16 October and in America and Britain on the seventeenth of October