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Arriving as the re-activated Stephen King machine was still churning out adaptations, quality be damned, the first installment felt like a uninspired homage. Set against a retro suburban environment, teenage actors, psychic kids and disturbing local antagonist, it was almost imitation and, similar to the poorest King’s stories, it was also clumsily packed.

Funnily enough 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 shocking commercial success. It was the narrative about the kidnapper, a cruel slayer of adolescents who would take pleasure in prolonging their fatal ceremony. While sexual abuse was not referenced, there was something clearly non-heteronormative about the character and the period references/societal fears he was clearly supposed to refer to, reinforced by the performer acting with a noticeably camp style. But the film was too ambiguous to ever properly acknowledge this and even aside from that tension, it was excessively convoluted and too focused on its tiring griminess to work as only an mindless scary movie material.

Second Installment's Release In the Middle of Production Company Challenges

The follow-up debuts as previous scary movie successes the studio are in urgent requirement for success. Lately they've encountered difficulties to make anything work, from Wolf Man to The Woman in the Yard to their action film to the complete commercial failure of the robotic follow-up, and so much depends on whether the sequel can prove whether a compact tale can become a film that can generate multiple installments. There’s just one slight problem …

Supernatural Transformation

The first film ended with our surviving character Finn (Mason Thames) eliminating the villain, helped and guided by the spirits of previous victims. This situation has required writer-director Scott Derrickson and his writing partner Cargill to move the franchise and its antagonist toward fresh territory, converting a physical threat into a supernatural one, a direction that guides them by way of Freddy's domain with a capability to return into reality made possible by sleep. But in contrast to the dream killer, the villain is noticeably uncreative and entirely devoid of humour. The mask remains appropriately unsettling but the production fails to make him as terrifying as he briefly was in the first, limited by complex and typically puzzling guidelines.

Alpine Christian Camp Setting

The main character and his irritatingly profane sibling Gwen (the actress) face him once more while trapped by snow 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 ghostly image of her dead mother and what might be their dead antagonist's original prey while Finn, still trying to deal with his rage and recently discovered defensive skills, is tracking to defend her. The script is overly clumsy in its contrived scene-setting, clumsily needing to leave the brother and sister trapped at a place that will also add to background information for protagonist and antagonist, filling in details we weren't particularly interested in or desire to understand. What also appears to be a more calculated move to edge the film toward the similar religious audiences that made the Conjuring series into huge successes, the filmmaker incorporates a religious element, with virtue now more directly linked with the creator and the afterlife while bad represents the devil and hell, religion the final defense against a monster like this.

Over-stacked Narrative

The consequence of these choices is continued over-burden a story that was formerly almost failing, incorporating needless complexities to what should be a straightforward horror movie. Frequently I discovered too busy asking questions about the methods and reasons of possible and impossible events to feel all that involved. It’s a low-lift effort for the performer, whose features stay concealed but he maintains genuine presence that’s mostly missing elsewhere in the cast. The environment is at times remarkably immersive but the bulk of the consistently un-scary set-pieces are flawed by a gritty film stock appearance to separate sleep states from consciousness, an unsuccessful artistic decision that seems excessively meta and designed to reflect the terrifying uncertainty of being in an actual nightmare.

Weak Continuation Rationale

At just under 2 hours, Black Phone 2, comparable to earlier failures, is a excessively extended and extremely unpersuasive argument for the birth of a new franchise. The next time it rings, I advise letting it go to voicemail.

• The follow-up film releases in Australia's movie houses on 16 October and in the United States and United Kingdom on the seventeenth of October