🔗 Share this article

Arriving as the resurrected bestselling author machine was still churning out film versions, without concern for excellence, the original film felt like a uninspired homage. Set against a retro suburban environment, teenage actors, psychic kids and gnarly neighbourhood villain, it was close to pastiche and, comparable to the weakest King’s stories, it was also clumsily packed.

Curiously the call came from inside the family home, as it was inspired by a compact narrative from King’s son Joe Hill, expanded into a film that was a unexpected blockbuster. It was the story of the Grabber, a cruel slayer of children who would enjoy extending their fatal ceremony. While assault was never mentioned, there was something inescapably queer-coded about the character and the era-specific anxieties he was obviously meant to represent, emphasized by the performer playing him with a noticeably camp style. But the film was too vague to ever properly acknowledge this and even aside from that tension, it was overly complicated and too focused on its tiring griminess to work as anything beyond an undiscerning sleepover nightmare fuel.

Second Installment's Release In the Middle of Studio Struggles

The follow-up debuts as previous scary movie successes the studio are in desperate need of a win. This year they’ve struggled to make any project successful, from the monster movie to the suspense story to Drop to the utter financial disappointment of the robotic follow-up, and so a great deal rides on whether the sequel can prove whether a compact tale can become a movie that can create a series. But there's a complication …

Paranormal Shift

The first film ended with our Final Boy Finn (the young actor) killing the Grabber, assisted and trained by the ghosts of those he had killed before. This has compelled director Scott Derrickson and his co-writer C Robert Cargill to move the franchise and its villain in a different direction, turning a flesh and blood villain into a ghostly presence, a path that leads them through Nightmare on Elm Street with an ability to cross back into the physical realm enabled through nightmares. But unlike Freddy Krueger, the villain 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 temporarily seemed in the original, constrained by complex and typically puzzling guidelines.

Alpine Christian Camp Setting

The protagonist and his annoyingly foul-mouthed sister Gwen (the actress) encounter him again while trapped by snow at a high-altitude faith-based facility for kids, the second film also acknowledging in the direction of Jason Voorhees the camp slasher. Gwen is guided there by a vision of her late mother and potentially their deceased villain's initial casualties while the protagonist, continuing to deal with his rage and fresh capacity for resistance, is pursuing to safeguard her. The writing is too ungainly in its forced establishment, clumsily needing to leave the brother and sister trapped at a setting that will further contribute to histories of hero and villain, supplying particulars we weren't particularly interested in or care to learn about. What also appears to be a more deliberate action to push the movie towards the same church-attending crowds that turned the Conjuring franchise into huge successes, the director includes a faith-based component, with good now more closely associated with God and heaven while bad represents Satan and damnation, belief the supreme tool against such a creature.

Overcomplicated Story

What all of this does is additional over-complicate a story that was formerly close to toppling over, including superfluous difficulties to what should be a simple Friday night engine. Frequently I discovered too busy asking questions about the methods and reasons of what could or couldn’t happen to feel all that involved. It's minimal work for Hawke, whose face we never really see but he possesses genuine presence that’s typically lacking in other aspects in the ensemble. The location is at times impressively atmospheric but the majority of the continuously non-terrifying sequences are flawed by a gritty film stock appearance to separate sleep states from consciousness, an poor directorial selection that feels too self-aware and constructed to mirror the frightening randomness of living through a genuine night terror.

Unpersuasive Series Justification

Lasting approximately two hours, Black Phone 2, like M3gan 2.0 before it, is a unnecessarily lengthy and hugely unconvincing argument for the birth of another series. The next time it rings, I advise letting it go to voicemail.

• The follow-up film debuts in Australian theaters on 16 October and in America and Britain on 17 October