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Arriving as the resurrected bestselling author machine was still churning out adaptations, regardless of quality, the original film felt like a sloppy admiration piece. Set against a small town 70s backdrop, young performers, psychic kids and disturbing local antagonist, it was almost imitation and, similar to the poorest King’s stories, it was also inelegantly overstuffed.

Interestingly the inspiration originated from inside the family home, as it was inspired by a compact narrative from his descendant, stretched into a film that was a shocking commercial success. It was the narrative about the kidnapper, a sadistic killer of young boys who would take pleasure in prolonging the ritual of their deaths. While sexual abuse was not referenced, there was something inescapably queer-coded about the antagonist 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 ambiguous to ever really admit that and even excluding that discomfort, it was overly complicated and overly enamored with its tiring griminess to work as anything more than an unthinking horror entertainment.

Second Installment's Release In the Middle of Studio Struggles

Its sequel arrives as former horror hit-makers the production company are in critical demand for a hit. Recently they've faced challenges to make any project successful, from the monster movie to The Woman in the Yard to their action film to the utter financial disappointment of the AI sequel, and so significant pressure rests on whether Black Phone 2 can prove whether a compact tale can become a film that can create a series. There’s just one slight problem …

Ghostly Evolution

The initial movie finished with our surviving character Finn (the young actor) killing the Grabber, helped and guided by the spirits of previous victims. It’s forced writer-director Scott Derrickson and his collaborator C Robert Cargill to move the franchise and its killer to a new place, turning a flesh and blood villain into a ghostly presence, a path that leads them via Elm Street with an ability to cross back into reality enabled through nightmares. But in contrast to the dream killer, the antagonist is noticeably uncreative and entirely devoid of humour. The facial covering continues to be appropriately unsettling but the production fails to make him as terrifying as he temporarily seemed in the initial film, trapped by complex and typically puzzling guidelines.

Snowy Religious Environment

Finn and his irritatingly profane sibling Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) encounter him again while stranded due to weather at an alpine Christian camp for kids, the second film also acknowledging regarding the hockey mask killer the Friday the 13th antagonist. The sister is directed there by a ghostly image of her dead mother and what might be their dead antagonist's original prey while the protagonist, continuing to handle his fury and fresh capacity for resistance, is pursuing to safeguard her. The script is excessively awkward in its artificial setup, clumsily needing to maroon the main characters at a setting that will further contribute to backstories for both hero and villain, providing information we didn’t really need or care to learn about. What also appears to be a more calculated move to guide the production in the direction of the comparable faith-based viewers that made the Conjuring series into huge successes, the filmmaker incorporates a religious element, with virtue now more directly linked with God and heaven while evil symbolizes Satan and damnation, belief the supreme tool against such a creature.

Overcomplicated Story

The result of these decisions is additional over-complicate a franchise that was previously nearly collapsing, incorporating needless complexities to what could have been a simple Friday night engine. I often found myself too busy asking questions about the methods and reasons of what could or couldn’t happen to become truly immersed. It's an undemanding role for the performer, whose face we never really see but he maintains real screen magnetism that’s mostly missing elsewhere in the cast. The environment is at times remarkably immersive but most of the persistently unfrightening scenes are marred by a grainy 8mm texture to differentiate asleep and awake, an poor directorial selection that seems excessively meta and created to imitate the horrifying unpredictability of experiencing a real bad dream.

Unconvincing Franchise Argument

At just under 2 hours, the follow-up, comparable to earlier failures, is a excessively extended and extremely unpersuasive argument for the birth of an additional film universe. If another installment comes, I recommend not answering.

• Black Phone 2 debuts in Australian cinemas on 16 October and in America and Britain on October 17