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Coming as the re-activated Stephen King machine was continuing to produce film versions, quality be damned, the first installment felt like a uninspired homage. With its small town 70s backdrop, young performers, gifted youths and gnarly neighbourhood villain, it was nearly parody and, similar to the poorest the author's tales, it was also inelegantly overstuffed.

Funnily enough the source was found within the household, as it was inspired by a compact narrative from King’s son Joe Hill, expanded into a film that was a shocking commercial success. It was the story of the Grabber, a cruel slayer of young boys who would enjoy extending the ritual of their deaths. While assault was never mentioned, there was something unmistakably LGBTQ-suggestive about the character and the historical touchpoints/moral panics he was clearly supposed to refer to, reinforced by the performer portraying him with a certain swishy, effeminate flare. But the film was too opaque to ever fully embrace this aspect and even aside from that tension, it was too busily plotted and overly enamored with its tiring griminess to work as anything beyond an undiscerning sleepover nightmare fuel.

The Sequel's Arrival Amidst Filmmaking Difficulties

Its sequel arrives as once-dominant genre specialists Blumhouse are in critical demand for a hit. Recently they've faced challenges to make any project successful, from Wolf Man to the suspense story to the adventure movie to the complete commercial failure of M3gan 2.0, and so a great deal rides on whether Black Phone 2 can prove whether a brief narrative can become a movie that can generate multiple installments. But there's a complication …

Ghostly Evolution

The initial movie finished with our Final Boy Finn (the young actor) eliminating the villain, supported and coached by the apparitions of earlier casualties. This has compelled filmmaker Derrickson and his writing partner Cargill to advance the story and its antagonist toward fresh territory, converting a physical threat into a supernatural one, a path that leads them by way of Freddy's domain with an ability to cross back into the physical realm facilitated by dreams. But unlike Freddy Krueger, the antagonist is markedly uninventive and entirely devoid of humour. The facial covering continues to be successfully disturbing but the production fails to make him as terrifying as he momentarily appeared in the original, trapped by complicated and frequently unclear regulations.

Alpine Christian Camp Setting

The main character and his frustratingly crude sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) confront him anew while stranded due to weather at an alpine Christian camp for kids, the second film also acknowledging toward Freddy’s one-time nemesis Jason Voorhees. 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 deal with his rage and recently discovered defensive skills, is pursuing to safeguard her. The screenplay is too ungainly in its forced establishment, awkwardly requiring to maroon the main characters at a setting that will further contribute to backstories for both protagonist and antagonist, 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 transformed the Conjuring movies into major blockbusters, the director includes a spiritual aspect, with virtue now more directly linked with the creator and the afterlife while villainy signifies the demonic and punishment, belief the supreme tool against this type of antagonist.

Overcomplicated Story

The consequence of these choices is continued over-burden a story that was formerly nearly collapsing, incorporating needless complexities to what could have been a straightforward horror movie. Frequently I discovered overly occupied with inquiries about the processes and motivations of what could or couldn’t happen to experience genuine engagement. It’s a low-lift effort for Hawke, whose face we never really see but he does have authentic charisma that’s mostly missing elsewhere in the ensemble. The location is at times impressively atmospheric but the majority of the consistently un-scary set-pieces are damaged by a gritty film stock appearance to separate sleep states from consciousness, an unsuccessful artistic decision that appears overly conscious and created to imitate the horrifying unpredictability of experiencing a real bad dream.

Unconvincing Franchise Argument

At just under 2 hours, the follow-up, like M3gan 2.0 before it, is a needlessly long and highly implausible justification for the establishment of a new franchise. If another installment comes, I advise letting it go to voicemail.

• Black Phone 2 debuts in Australia's movie houses on 16 October and in the United States and United Kingdom on the seventeenth of October