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Arriving as the revived master of horror machine was still churning out screen translations, quality be damned, the first installment felt like a sloppy admiration piece. Set against a 1970s small town setting, teenage actors, psychic kids and gnarly neighbourhood villain, it was nearly parody and, similar to the poorest the author's tales, it was also inelegantly overstuffed.

Interestingly the source was found inside the family home, as it was based on a short story from King’s son Joe Hill, stretched into a film that was a shocking commercial success. It was the tale of the antagonist, a sadistic killer of adolescents who would revel in elongating the process of killing. While assault was not referenced, there was something clearly non-heteronormative about the antagonist and the historical touchpoints/moral panics he was intended to symbolize, strengthened by Ethan Hawke playing him with a distinctly flamboyant manner. But the film was too ambiguous to ever really admit that and even without that uneasiness, it was excessively convoluted and overly enamored with its wearisome vileness to work as anything more than an unthinking horror entertainment.

Follow-up Film's Debut Amidst Filmmaking Difficulties

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 Wolf Man to the suspense story to their action film to the total box office disaster of the robotic follow-up, and so much depends on whether Black Phone 2 can prove whether a brief narrative can become a motion picture that can create a series. But there's a complication …

Supernatural Transformation

The first film ended with our protagonist Finn (Mason Thames) eliminating the villain, assisted and trained by the spirits of previous victims. It’s forced writer-director Scott Derrickson and his writing partner Cargill to advance the story and its killer to a new place, turning a flesh and blood villain into a ghostly presence, a direction that guides them via Elm Street with a capability to return into the real world enabled through nightmares. But in contrast to the dream killer, the antagonist is clearly unimaginative and completely lacking comedy. The mask remains successfully disturbing but the movie has difficulty to make him as frightening as he briefly was in the first, constrained by complicated and frequently unclear regulations.

Mountain Retreat Location

Finn and his irritatingly profane sibling Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) encounter him again while snowed in at an alpine Christian camp for kids, the second film also acknowledging regarding the hockey mask killer the camp slasher. Gwen is guided there by an apparition of her deceased parent and what could be their dead antagonist's original prey while the protagonist, continuing to handle his fury and newfound ability to fight back, is following so he can protect her. The writing is too ungainly in its artificial setup, inelegantly demanding to maroon the main characters at a setting that will further contribute to background information for main character and enemy, supplying particulars we weren't particularly interested in or desire to understand. Additionally seeming like a more strategic decision to edge the film toward the similar religious audiences that turned the Conjuring franchise into massive hits, Derrickson adds a faith-based component, with morality now more strongly connected with the divine and paradise while evil symbolizes the devil and hell, belief the supreme tool against this type of antagonist.

Over-stacked Narrative

The consequence of these choices is continued over-burden a franchise that was previously almost failing, including superfluous difficulties to what should be a simple Friday night engine. Regularly I noticed too busy asking questions about the hows and whys of what could or couldn’t happen to feel all that involved. It's an undemanding role for the actor, whose visage remains hidden but he maintains real screen magnetism that’s mostly missing elsewhere in the acting team. The environment is at times impressively atmospheric but most of the continuously non-terrifying sequences are marred by a gritty film stock appearance to separate sleep states from consciousness, an unsuccessful artistic decision that feels too self-aware and designed to reflect the frightening randomness of being in an actual nightmare.

Weak Continuation Rationale

Running nearly 120 minutes, the follow-up, like M3gan 2.0 before it, is a needlessly long and extremely unpersuasive argument for the birth of a new franchise. The next time it rings, I suggest ignoring it.

• Black Phone 2 releases in Australian cinemas on October 16 and in America and Britain on the seventeenth of October