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Debuting as the revived master of horror machine was continuing to produce screen translations, without concern for excellence, 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 nearly parody and, like the very worst of King’s stories, it was also inelegantly overstuffed.

Curiously the source was found from the author's own lineage, as it was inspired by a compact narrative from King’s son Joe Hill, stretched into a film that was a unexpected blockbuster. It was the story of the Grabber, a brutal murderer of children who would revel in elongating their fatal ceremony. While molestation was not referenced, there was something inescapably queer-coded about the villain and the historical touchpoints/moral panics he was intended to symbolize, reinforced by the performer portraying him with a distinctly flamboyant manner. But the film was too vague to ever really admit that and even aside from that tension, it was excessively convoluted and too focused on its wearisome vileness to work as anything more than an mindless scary movie material.

Follow-up Film's Debut In the Middle of Filmmaking Difficulties

Its sequel arrives as once-dominant genre specialists the studio are in desperate need of a win. Lately they've encountered difficulties to make anything work, from Wolf Man to the suspense story to the adventure movie to the utter financial disappointment of the robotic follow-up, and so significant pressure rests on whether the sequel can prove whether a brief narrative can become a film that can spawn a franchise. However, there's an issue …

Ghostly Evolution

The original concluded with our protagonist Finn (Mason Thames) eliminating the villain, helped and guided by the ghosts of those he had killed before. It’s forced 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 direction that guides them through Nightmare on Elm Street with a power to travel into the real world made possible by sleep. But unlike Freddy Krueger, the antagonist is clearly unimaginative and totally without wit. The mask remains appropriately unsettling but the movie has difficulty to make him as terrifying as he briefly was in the original, limited by complicated and frequently unclear regulations.

Snowy Religious Environment

Finn and his annoyingly foul-mouthed sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) face him once more while snowed in at a high-altitude faith-based facility for kids, the second film also acknowledging toward Freddy’s one-time nemesis Jason Voorhees. Gwen is guided there by a vision of her late mother and potentially their deceased villain's initial casualties while the brother, still attempting to process his anger and recently discovered defensive skills, is tracking to defend her. The screenplay is overly clumsy in its artificial setup, inelegantly demanding to leave the brother and sister trapped at a location that will additionally provide to histories of main character and enemy, providing information we didn't actually require or desire to understand. In what also feels like a more calculated move to guide the production in the direction of the same church-attending crowds that turned the Conjuring franchise into major blockbusters, the filmmaker incorporates a religious element, with morality now more strongly connected with the creator and the afterlife while bad represents Satan and damnation, faith the ultimate weapon against a monster like this.

Overloaded Plot

The result of these decisions is additional over-complicate a series that was already close to toppling over, including superfluous difficulties to what ought to be a straightforward horror movie. I often found myself overly occupied with inquiries about the processes and motivations of what could or couldn’t happen to feel all that involved. It's an undemanding role for Hawke, whose features stay concealed but he does have real screen magnetism that’s generally absent in other areas in the acting team. The setting is at times atmospherically grand but most of the consistently un-scary set-pieces are damaged by a grainy 8mm texture to differentiate asleep and awake, an unsuccessful artistic decision that appears overly conscious and created to imitate the frightening randomness of experiencing a real bad dream.

Unconvincing Franchise Argument

Running nearly 120 minutes, the follow-up, like M3gan 2.0 before it, is a needlessly long and extremely unpersuasive case for the creation of an additional film universe. If another installment comes, I recommend not answering.

• Black Phone 2 releases in Australian theaters on October 16 and in America and Britain on 17 October