🔗 Share this article

Arriving as the re-activated bestselling author machine was continuing to produce screen translations, without concern for excellence, The Black Phone felt like a uninspired homage. Set against a small town 70s backdrop, young performers, psychic kids and twisted community predator, it was close to pastiche and, similar to the poorest his literary works, it was also awkwardly crowded.

Curiously the inspiration originated from from the author's own lineage, as it was adapted from a brief tale from King’s son Joe Hill, stretched into a film that was a surprise $161m hit. It was the narrative about the kidnapper, a cruel slayer of adolescents who would enjoy extending the process of killing. While molestation was not referenced, there was something unmistakably LGBTQ-suggestive about the antagonist and the period references/societal fears he was clearly supposed to refer to, strengthened by the actor portraying him with a certain swishy, effeminate flare. But the film was too vague to ever fully embrace this aspect and even excluding that discomfort, it was overly complicated and too high on its exhaustingly grubby nastiness to work as anything beyond an mindless scary movie material.

The Sequel's Arrival In the Middle of Studio Struggles

The next chapter comes as once-dominant genre specialists the production company are in critical demand for a hit. This year they’ve struggled to make any film profitable, from the monster movie to The Woman in the Yard to the adventure movie to the utter financial disappointment of the AI sequel, and so a great deal rides on whether the continuation can prove whether a compact tale can become a film that can generate multiple installments. However, there's an issue …

Supernatural Transformation

The first film ended with our Final Boy Finn (the performer) killing the Grabber, assisted and trained by the ghosts of those he had killed before. This situation has required writer-director Scott Derrickson and his collaborator C Robert Cargill to move the franchise and its villain in a different direction, transforming a human antagonist into a supernatural one, a direction that guides them through Nightmare on Elm Street with a power to travel into the real world facilitated by dreams. But in contrast to the dream killer, the Grabber is clearly unimaginative and entirely devoid of humour. The mask remains appropriately unsettling but the movie has difficulty to make him as terrifying as he momentarily appeared in the initial film, trapped by complex and typically puzzling guidelines.

Alpine Christian Camp Setting

The protagonist and his annoyingly foul-mouthed sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) face him once more while trapped by snow at an alpine Christian camp for kids, the second film also acknowledging toward Freddy’s one-time nemesis the camp slasher. The female lead is led there by a ghostly image of her dead mother and what could be their dead antagonist's original prey while Finn, still trying to handle his fury and recently discovered defensive skills, is tracking to defend her. The screenplay is excessively awkward in its artificial setup, inelegantly demanding to maroon the main characters at a location that will additionally provide to histories of main character and enemy, filling in details we weren't particularly interested in or want to know about. What also appears to be a more deliberate action to edge the film toward the same church-attending crowds that turned the Conjuring franchise into massive hits, Derrickson adds a spiritual aspect, with virtue now more directly linked with the creator and the afterlife while villainy signifies the demonic and punishment, faith the ultimate weapon against this type of antagonist.

Overloaded Plot

The result of these decisions 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. Regularly I noticed too busy asking questions about the methods and reasons of what could or couldn’t happen to experience genuine engagement. It's minimal work for the performer, whose features stay concealed but he does have real screen magnetism that’s typically lacking in other aspects in the acting team. The location is at times atmospherically grand but the majority of the consistently un-scary set-pieces are damaged by a gritty film stock appearance to distinguish dreaming from waking, an ineffective stylistic choice that feels too self-aware and designed to reflect the terrifying uncertainty of experiencing a real bad dream.

Weak Continuation Rationale

Lasting approximately two hours, Black Phone 2, comparable to earlier failures, is a unnecessarily lengthy and highly implausible case for the creation of a new franchise. The next time it rings, I advise letting it go to voicemail.

• The sequel debuts in Australia's movie houses on 16 October and in the US and UK on the seventeenth of October