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Coming as the resurrected bestselling author machine was persistently generating film versions, regardless of quality, the first installment felt like a sloppy admiration piece. Featuring a 1970s small town setting, young performers, telepathic children and disturbing local antagonist, it was almost imitation and, like the very worst of his literary works, it was also clumsily packed.

Curiously the call came from inside the family home, as it was adapted from a brief tale from his descendant, stretched into a film that was a unexpected blockbuster. It was the narrative about the kidnapper, a sadistic killer of adolescents who would take pleasure in prolonging their fatal ceremony. While assault was avoided in discussion, there was something unmistakably LGBTQ-suggestive 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 fully embrace this aspect and even excluding that discomfort, it was too busily plotted and overly enamored with its tiring griminess to work as anything more than an mindless scary movie material.

Follow-up Film's Debut In the Middle of Production Company Challenges

Its sequel arrives as former horror hit-makers Blumhouse are in desperate need of a win. This year they’ve struggled to make any film profitable, from Wolf Man to their thriller to Drop to the complete commercial failure of the robotic follow-up, and so a great deal rides on whether the continuation can prove whether a short story can become a film that can spawn a franchise. There’s just one slight problem …

Ghostly Evolution

The original concluded with our protagonist Finn (Mason Thames) killing the Grabber, supported and coached by the spirits of previous victims. This has compelled filmmaker Derrickson and his co-writer C Robert Cargill to advance the story and its antagonist toward fresh territory, transforming a human antagonist into a paranormal entity, a path that leads them through Nightmare on Elm Street with an ability to cross back into the real world facilitated by dreams. But different from the striped sweater villain, the antagonist is noticeably uncreative and entirely devoid of humour. The mask remains appropriately unsettling but the production fails to make him as terrifying as he temporarily seemed in the original, limited by complex and typically puzzling guidelines.

Snowy Religious Environment

Finn and his annoyingly foul-mouthed sister Gwen (the actress) encounter him again while stranded due to weather at a mountain religious retreat for kids, the follow-up also referencing regarding the hockey mask killer the camp slasher. The sister is directed there by an apparition of her deceased parent and what could be their dead antagonist's original prey while the brother, still attempting to deal with his rage and recently discovered defensive skills, is pursuing to safeguard her. The script is overly clumsy in its contrived scene-setting, inelegantly demanding to get the siblings stranded at a place that will also add to backstories for both main character and enemy, providing information we didn’t really need or want to know about. In what also feels like a more strategic decision to push the movie towards the same church-attending crowds that transformed the Conjuring movies into massive hits, the filmmaker incorporates a religious element, with morality now more strongly connected with God and heaven while bad represents the devil and hell, faith the ultimate weapon against this type of antagonist.

Overloaded Plot

What all of this does is further over-stack a series that was already nearly collapsing, adding unnecessary complications to what should be a simple Friday night engine. Frequently I discovered overly occupied with inquiries about the processes and motivations of feasible and unfeasible occurrences to experience genuine engagement. It’s a low-lift effort for Hawke, whose visage remains hidden but he does have authentic charisma that’s mostly missing elsewhere in the acting team. The setting is at times atmospherically grand but the bulk of the continuously non-terrifying sequences are flawed by a rough cinematic quality to distinguish dreaming from waking, an poor directorial selection that seems excessively meta and created to imitate the horrifying unpredictability of experiencing a real bad dream.

Unconvincing Franchise Argument

Running nearly 120 minutes, Black Phone 2, similar to its predecessor, is a excessively extended and extremely unpersuasive justification for the establishment of an additional film universe. If another installment comes, I suggest ignoring it.

• The follow-up film debuts in Australia's movie houses on the sixteenth of October and in America and Britain on 17 October