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Arriving as the revived Stephen King machine was continuing to produce adaptations, quality be damned, the first installment felt like a uninspired homage. With its small town 70s backdrop, high school cast, psychic kids and gnarly neighbourhood villain, it was close to pastiche and, like the very worst of King’s stories, it was also awkwardly crowded.

Funnily enough the inspiration originated from 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 surprise $161m hit. It was the tale of the antagonist, a sadistic killer of young boys who would enjoy extending the ritual of their deaths. While molestation was never mentioned, there was something clearly non-heteronormative about the antagonist and the era-specific anxieties he was intended to symbolize, strengthened by the actor playing him with a distinctly flamboyant manner. But the film was too opaque to ever really admit that and even aside from that tension, it was overly complicated and too focused on its wearisome vileness to work as anything beyond an undiscerning sleepover nightmare fuel.

Second Installment's Release Amidst Filmmaking Difficulties

The follow-up debuts as previous scary movie successes the studio are in desperate need of a win. Recently they've faced challenges to make any film profitable, from the monster movie to The Woman in the Yard to the adventure movie to the complete commercial failure of the AI sequel, and so a great deal rides on whether Black Phone 2 can prove whether a brief narrative can become a motion picture that can spawn a franchise. There’s just one slight problem …

Paranormal Shift

The original concluded with our protagonist Finn (the performer) defeating the antagonist, assisted and trained by the ghosts of those he had killed before. This situation has required filmmaker Derrickson and his collaborator C Robert Cargill to move the franchise and its killer to a new place, converting a physical threat into a paranormal entity, a path that leads them through Nightmare on Elm Street with a power to travel into the physical realm facilitated by dreams. But unlike Freddy Krueger, the villain is markedly uninventive and totally without wit. The facial covering continues to be successfully disturbing but the movie has difficulty to make him as scary as he briefly was in the original, limited by complicated and frequently unclear regulations.

Mountain Retreat Location

The protagonist and his irritatingly profane sibling Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) encounter him again while trapped by snow at a high-altitude faith-based facility for kids, the follow-up also referencing regarding the hockey mask killer Jason Voorhees. The female lead is led there by an apparition of her deceased parent and what might be their dead antagonist's original prey while the brother, still attempting to handle his fury and fresh capacity for resistance, is tracking to defend her. The script is too ungainly in its artificial setup, inelegantly demanding to get the siblings stranded at a place that will also add to histories of protagonist and antagonist, providing information we didn't actually require or want to know about. Additionally seeming like a more deliberate action to push the movie towards the similar religious audiences that made the Conjuring series into major blockbusters, the filmmaker incorporates a spiritual aspect, with good now more closely associated with the divine and paradise while evil symbolizes the demonic and punishment, religion the final defense against a monster like this.

Overloaded Plot

The consequence of these choices is continued over-burden a story that was formerly almost failing, including superfluous difficulties to what could have been a basic scary film. I often found myself excessively engaged in questioning about the hows and whys of possible and impossible events to feel all that involved. It's minimal work for Hawke, whose visage remains hidden but he possesses authentic charisma that’s generally absent in other areas in the acting team. The environment is at times remarkably immersive but the majority 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 designed to reflect the terrifying uncertainty of living through a genuine night terror.

Weak Continuation Rationale

Lasting approximately two hours, Black Phone 2, similar to its predecessor, is a needlessly long and hugely unconvincing justification for the establishment of a new franchise. If another installment comes, I recommend not answering.

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