🔗 Share this article

Debuting as the re-activated bestselling author machine was continuing to produce screen translations, quality be damned, the first installment felt like a uninspired homage. With its retro suburban environment, teenage actors, psychic kids and gnarly neighbourhood villain, it was close to pastiche and, similar to the poorest the author's tales, it was also clumsily packed.

Interestingly the source was found from the author's own lineage, as it was based on a short story from the author's offspring, stretched into a film that was a unexpected blockbuster. It was the story of the Grabber, a cruel slayer of young boys who would revel in elongating the ritual of their deaths. While assault was never mentioned, there was something clearly non-heteronormative about the villain and the era-specific anxieties he was intended to symbolize, strengthened by the performer acting with a noticeably camp style. But the film was too vague to ever properly acknowledge this and even without that uneasiness, it was overly complicated and too high on its wearisome vileness to work as only an undiscerning sleepover nightmare fuel.

The Sequel's Arrival Amidst Filmmaking Difficulties

The follow-up debuts as former horror hit-makers Blumhouse are in critical demand for a hit. This year they’ve struggled to make any film profitable, from their werewolf film to The Woman in the Yard to their action film to the complete commercial failure of M3gan 2.0, and so much depends on whether the sequel can prove whether a compact tale can become a film that can spawn a franchise. However, there's an issue …

Supernatural Transformation

The initial movie finished with our surviving character Finn (the young actor) eliminating the villain, helped and guided by the spirits of previous victims. It’s forced director Scott Derrickson and his collaborator C Robert Cargill to move the franchise and its killer to a new place, transforming a human antagonist into a supernatural one, a direction that guides them through Nightmare on Elm Street with an ability to cross back into the physical realm made possible by sleep. But unlike Freddy Krueger, the villain is markedly uninventive and entirely devoid of humour. The facial covering continues to be effectively jarring but the film struggles to make him as scary as he briefly was in the original, constrained by complex and typically puzzling guidelines.

Alpine Christian Camp Setting

Finn and his frustratingly crude sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) face him once more while stranded due to weather at a high-altitude faith-based facility for kids, the sequel also nodding toward Freddy’s one-time nemesis the Friday the 13th antagonist. Gwen is guided there by an apparition of her deceased parent and what might be their dead antagonist's original prey while the protagonist, continuing to process his anger and recently discovered defensive skills, is pursuing to safeguard her. The writing is excessively awkward in its forced establishment, awkwardly requiring to get the siblings stranded at a setting that will further contribute to histories of hero and villain, filling in details 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 made the Conjuring series into major blockbusters, the filmmaker incorporates a spiritual aspect, with virtue now more directly linked with God and heaven while villainy signifies the demonic and punishment, religion the final defense against this type of antagonist.

Overloaded Plot

The result of these decisions is further over-stack a story that was formerly almost failing, including superfluous difficulties to what should be a basic scary film. Regularly I noticed too busy asking questions about the processes and motivations of possible and impossible events to experience genuine engagement. It’s a low-lift effort for the performer, whose visage remains hidden but he does have genuine presence that’s mostly missing elsewhere in the ensemble. The environment is at times atmospherically grand but the majority of the persistently unfrightening scenes are damaged by a grainy 8mm texture to separate sleep states from consciousness, an ineffective stylistic choice that feels too self-aware and created to imitate the frightening randomness of living through a genuine night terror.

Weak Continuation Rationale

Running nearly 120 minutes, the follow-up, comparable to earlier failures, is a unnecessarily lengthy and extremely unpersuasive case for the creation of another series. If another installment comes, I advise letting it go to voicemail.

• Black Phone 2 is out in Australian theaters on 16 October and in the US and UK on October 17