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Debuting as the resurrected Stephen King machine was still churning out film versions, without concern for excellence, the first installment felt like a lazy fanboy tribute. Set against a small town 70s backdrop, young performers, telepathic children and disturbing local antagonist, it was nearly parody and, similar to the poorest his literary works, it was also awkwardly crowded.

Funnily enough the call came from within the household, as it was inspired by a compact narrative from his descendant, over-extended into a film that was a shocking commercial success. It was the story of the Grabber, a brutal murderer of young boys who would enjoy extending the ritual of their deaths. While assault was avoided in discussion, there was something inescapably queer-coded about the antagonist and the era-specific anxieties he was intended to symbolize, reinforced by the performer portraying him with a noticeably camp style. But the film was too opaque to ever really admit that and even aside from that tension, it was overly complicated and too high on its tiring griminess to work as anything more than an mindless scary movie material.

The Sequel's Arrival During Studio Struggles

The next chapter comes as former horror hit-makers Blumhouse are in critical demand for a hit. Lately they've encountered difficulties to make any project successful, from their werewolf film to their thriller to Drop to the complete commercial failure of M3gan 2.0, and so a great deal rides on whether the continuation can prove whether a short story can become a movie that can spawn a franchise. However, there's an issue …

Ghostly Evolution

The initial movie finished with our surviving character Finn (the performer) killing the Grabber, assisted and trained by the ghosts of those he had killed before. It’s forced filmmaker Derrickson and his writing partner Cargill to move the franchise and its villain in a different direction, converting a physical threat into a supernatural one, a route that takes them by way of Freddy's domain with an ability to cross back into the physical realm facilitated by dreams. But in contrast to the dream killer, the antagonist is noticeably uncreative and totally without wit. The disguise stays effectively jarring but the movie has difficulty to make him as scary as he momentarily appeared in the first, trapped by convoluted and often confusing rules.

Mountain Retreat Location

The protagonist and his frustratingly crude sister Gwen (the actress) confront him anew while stranded due to weather at an alpine Christian camp for kids, the sequel also nodding 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 late tormenter’s first victims while the protagonist, continuing to deal with his rage and recently discovered defensive skills, is tracking to defend her. The script is overly clumsy in its artificial setup, inelegantly demanding to maroon the main characters at a place that will also add to backstories for both hero and villain, supplying particulars we weren't particularly interested in or want to know about. What also appears to be a more calculated move to guide the production in the direction of the similar religious audiences that made the Conjuring series into huge successes, the filmmaker incorporates a faith-based component, with virtue now more directly linked with God and heaven while bad represents the demonic and punishment, belief the supreme tool against a monster like this.

Overcomplicated Story

The consequence of these choices is additional over-complicate a series that was already nearly collapsing, incorporating needless complexities to what ought to be a basic scary film. Frequently I discovered excessively engaged in questioning about the hows and whys of feasible and unfeasible occurrences to experience genuine engagement. It’s a low-lift effort for the actor, whose features stay concealed but he does have genuine presence that’s mostly missing elsewhere in the ensemble. The setting is at times atmospherically grand but the bulk of the continuously non-terrifying sequences are damaged by a gritty film stock appearance to separate sleep states from consciousness, an unsuccessful artistic decision that seems excessively meta and constructed to mirror the frightening randomness of experiencing a real bad dream.

Unpersuasive Series Justification

At just under 2 hours, Black Phone 2, comparable to earlier failures, is a unnecessarily lengthy and hugely unconvincing argument for the birth of an additional film universe. When it calls again, I advise letting it go to voicemail.

• The follow-up film debuts in Australia's movie houses on October 16 and in the US and UK on October 17