🔗 Share this article

Debuting as the revived Stephen King machine was persistently generating screen translations, quality be damned, the original film felt like a sloppy admiration piece. Featuring a small town 70s backdrop, young performers, psychic kids and gnarly neighbourhood villain, it was nearly parody and, like the very worst of the author's tales, it was also clumsily packed.

Funnily enough the source was found inside the family home, as it was based on a short story from the author's offspring, stretched into a film that was a shocking commercial success. It was the narrative about the kidnapper, a brutal murderer of young boys who would revel in elongating their fatal ceremony. While sexual abuse was avoided in discussion, there was something clearly non-heteronormative about the villain and the historical touchpoints/moral panics he was intended to symbolize, emphasized by the performer acting with a certain swishy, effeminate flare. But the film was too opaque to ever really admit that 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.

The Sequel's Arrival During Studio Struggles

The follow-up debuts as former horror hit-makers the production company are in desperate need of a win. This year they’ve struggled to make any film profitable, from the monster movie to their thriller to Drop to the utter financial disappointment of the robotic follow-up, and so a great deal rides on whether Black Phone 2 can prove whether a short story can become a motion picture that can create a series. However, there's an issue …

Supernatural Transformation

The original concluded with our surviving character Finn (the performer) eliminating the villain, helped and guided by the apparitions of earlier casualties. It’s forced director Scott Derrickson and his co-writer C Robert Cargill to take the series and its antagonist toward fresh territory, turning a flesh and blood villain into a supernatural one, a route that takes them via Elm Street with a capability to return into reality enabled through nightmares. But in contrast to the dream killer, the antagonist is markedly uninventive and totally without wit. The facial covering continues to be successfully disturbing but the production fails to make him as terrifying as he temporarily seemed in the first, constrained by complicated and frequently unclear regulations.

Alpine Christian Camp Setting

The protagonist and his annoyingly foul-mouthed sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) encounter him again while trapped by snow at a high-altitude faith-based facility for kids, the sequel also nodding regarding the hockey mask killer the Friday the 13th antagonist. The sister is directed there by an apparition of her deceased parent and what might be their late tormenter’s first victims while the protagonist, continuing to process his anger and recently discovered defensive skills, is tracking to defend her. The screenplay is overly clumsy in its artificial setup, awkwardly requiring to maroon the main characters at a location that will additionally provide to background information for protagonist and antagonist, filling in details we didn't actually require or desire to understand. In what also feels like a more deliberate action to push the movie towards the similar religious audiences that turned the Conjuring franchise into massive hits, Derrickson adds a faith-based component, with virtue now more directly linked with God and heaven while bad represents Satan and damnation, belief the supreme tool against this type of antagonist.

Overcomplicated Story

What all of this does is further over-stack a series that was already close to toppling over, adding unnecessary complications to what could have been a basic scary film. Frequently I discovered overly occupied with inquiries about the processes and motivations of possible and impossible events to feel all that involved. It's an undemanding role for Hawke, whose visage remains hidden but he does have genuine presence that’s generally absent in other areas in the acting team. The environment is at times remarkably immersive but the majority of the continuously non-terrifying sequences are flawed by a rough cinematic quality to differentiate asleep and awake, an ineffective stylistic choice that appears overly conscious and constructed to mirror the frightening randomness of living through a genuine night terror.

Unconvincing Franchise Argument

At just under 2 hours, Black Phone 2, comparable to earlier failures, is a needlessly long and highly implausible case for the creation of another series. When it calls again, I suggest ignoring it.

• The follow-up film is out in Australian cinemas on 16 October and in the United States and United Kingdom on the seventeenth of October