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Arriving as the re-activated Stephen King machine was persistently generating adaptations, regardless of quality, the first installment felt like a lazy fanboy tribute. Set against a small town 70s backdrop, high school cast, psychic kids and gnarly neighbourhood villain, it was nearly parody and, similar to the poorest King’s stories, it was also clumsily packed.

Funnily enough the source was found within the household, as it was adapted from a brief tale from King’s son Joe Hill, over-extended into a film that was a shocking commercial success. It was the story of the Grabber, a sadistic killer of children who would take pleasure in prolonging the ritual of their deaths. While assault was never mentioned, there was something inescapably queer-coded about the antagonist and the era-specific anxieties he was obviously meant to represent, strengthened by the performer portraying him with a certain swishy, effeminate flare. But the film was too opaque to ever really admit that and even without that uneasiness, 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 In the Middle of Filmmaking Difficulties

The follow-up debuts as former horror hit-makers the production company are in urgent requirement for success. This year they’ve struggled to make any film profitable, from Wolf Man to The Woman in the Yard to Drop to the total box office disaster of the AI sequel, and so much depends on whether Black Phone 2 can prove whether a short story can become a motion picture that can create a series. However, there's an issue …

Paranormal Shift

The original concluded with our protagonist Finn (the performer) killing the Grabber, supported and coached by the spirits of previous victims. This situation has required filmmaker Derrickson and his writing partner Cargill to take the series and its villain in a different direction, turning a flesh and blood villain into a supernatural one, a direction that guides them through Nightmare on Elm Street with a power to travel into the physical realm made possible by sleep. But different from the striped sweater villain, the antagonist is markedly uninventive and entirely devoid of humour. The disguise stays effectively jarring but the production fails to make him as terrifying as he momentarily appeared in the original, trapped by complicated and frequently unclear regulations.

Mountain Retreat Location

The main character and his irritatingly profane sibling Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) face him once more while trapped by snow at a high-altitude faith-based facility for kids, the follow-up also referencing toward Freddy’s one-time nemesis the Friday the 13th antagonist. The female lead is led there by a ghostly image of her dead mother and what might be their late tormenter’s first victims while the brother, still attempting to process his anger and newfound ability to fight back, is pursuing to safeguard her. The screenplay is excessively awkward in its forced establishment, inelegantly demanding to leave the brother and sister trapped at a setting that will further contribute to background information for hero and villain, providing information we weren't particularly interested in or care to learn about. Additionally seeming like a more calculated move to guide the production in the direction of the similar religious audiences that turned the Conjuring franchise into huge successes, Derrickson adds a faith-based component, with morality now more strongly connected with God and heaven while bad represents Satan and damnation, religion the final defense against such a creature.

Overcomplicated Story

What all of this does is further over-stack a story that was formerly close to toppling over, incorporating needless complexities to what should be a basic scary film. Frequently I discovered too busy asking questions about the hows and whys of what could or couldn’t happen to become truly immersed. It's minimal work for Hawke, whose face we never really see but he possesses authentic charisma that’s generally absent in other areas in the acting team. The setting is at times impressively atmospheric but the bulk of the continuously non-terrifying sequences are flawed by a grainy 8mm texture to separate sleep states from consciousness, an unsuccessful artistic decision that seems excessively meta and constructed to mirror the terrifying uncertainty of experiencing a real bad dream.

Unconvincing Franchise Argument

Lasting approximately two hours, the sequel, comparable to earlier failures, is a unnecessarily lengthy and hugely unconvincing justification for the establishment of an additional film universe. If another installment comes, I suggest ignoring it.

• The sequel releases in Australia's movie houses on October 16 and in America and Britain on the seventeenth of October