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Debuting as the revived bestselling author machine was persistently generating adaptations, quality be damned, the first installment felt like a sloppy admiration piece. Set against a small town 70s backdrop, high school cast, gifted youths and twisted community predator, it was close to pastiche and, like the very worst of King’s stories, it was also awkwardly crowded.

Curiously the source was found inside the family home, as it was based on a short story from King’s son Joe Hill, expanded into a film that was a surprise $161m hit. It was the narrative about the kidnapper, a sadistic killer of children who would enjoy extending the ritual of their deaths. While sexual abuse was not referenced, there was something clearly non-heteronormative about the antagonist and the period references/societal fears he was obviously meant to represent, emphasized by Ethan Hawke playing him with a noticeably camp style. But the film was too vague to ever fully embrace this aspect and even aside from that tension, it was excessively convoluted and overly enamored with its exhaustingly grubby nastiness to work as only an undiscerning sleepover nightmare fuel.

The Sequel's Arrival In the Middle of Filmmaking Difficulties

The next chapter comes as once-dominant genre specialists the studio are in urgent requirement for success. Recently they've faced challenges to make any film profitable, from the monster movie to their thriller to their action film to the total box office disaster of M3gan 2.0, and so much depends on whether Black Phone 2 can prove whether a brief narrative can become a film that can create a series. However, there's an issue …

Ghostly Evolution

The initial movie finished with our protagonist Finn (Mason Thames) eliminating the villain, assisted and trained by the spirits of previous victims. This has compelled filmmaker Derrickson and his co-writer C Robert Cargill to advance the story and its villain in a different direction, transforming a human antagonist into a supernatural one, a route that takes them via Elm Street with a capability to return into the real world enabled through nightmares. But unlike Freddy Krueger, the Grabber is noticeably uncreative and entirely devoid of humour. The mask remains effectively jarring but the production fails to make him as scary as he momentarily appeared in the first, trapped by complicated and frequently unclear regulations.

Snowy Religious Environment

Finn and his frustratingly crude sister Gwen (the performer) encounter him again while trapped by snow at a mountain religious retreat for kids, the sequel also nodding in the direction of Jason Voorhees Jason Voorhees. Gwen is guided there by a ghostly image of her dead mother and potentially their deceased villain's initial casualties while the protagonist, continuing to process his anger and fresh capacity for resistance, is following so he can protect her. The script is excessively awkward in its artificial setup, clumsily needing to maroon the main characters at a place that will also add to background information for main character and enemy, supplying particulars we didn't actually require or want to know about. In what also feels like a more calculated move to edge the film toward the similar religious audiences that turned the Conjuring franchise into huge successes, Derrickson adds a religious element, with virtue now more directly linked with the creator and the afterlife while villainy signifies the devil and hell, faith the ultimate weapon against such a creature.

Over-stacked Narrative

The result of these decisions is further over-stack a story that was formerly close to toppling over, adding unnecessary complications to what ought to be a simple Friday night engine. Regularly I noticed too busy asking questions about the hows and whys of what could or couldn’t happen to feel all that involved. It's minimal work for Hawke, whose visage remains hidden but he does have real screen magnetism that’s typically lacking in other aspects in the ensemble. The setting is at times impressively atmospheric but most of the persistently unfrightening scenes are flawed by a rough cinematic quality to differentiate asleep and awake, an poor directorial selection that appears overly conscious and created to imitate the frightening randomness of living through a genuine night terror.

Weak Continuation Rationale

Running nearly 120 minutes, the sequel, similar to its predecessor, is a excessively extended and highly implausible argument for the birth of another series. If another installment comes, I suggest ignoring it.

• The follow-up film debuts in Australian theaters on October 16 and in the US and UK on the seventeenth of October