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Arriving as the resurrected master of horror machine was persistently generating screen translations, without concern for excellence, the first installment felt like a uninspired homage. Set against a 1970s small town setting, young performers, telepathic children and gnarly neighbourhood villain, it was close to pastiche and, similar to the poorest the author's tales, it was also clumsily packed.

Interestingly the source was found from the author's own lineage, as it was based on a short story from the author's offspring, stretched into a film that was a surprise $161m hit. It was the tale of the antagonist, a brutal murderer of young boys who would take pleasure in prolonging the ritual of their deaths. While assault was not referenced, there was something clearly non-heteronormative about the character and the era-specific anxieties he was intended to symbolize, reinforced by the actor acting with a distinctly flamboyant manner. But the film was too opaque to ever fully embrace this aspect and even aside from that tension, it was overly complicated and too high on its tiring griminess to work as anything more than an unthinking horror entertainment.

Follow-up Film's Debut Amidst Filmmaking Difficulties

The next chapter comes as once-dominant genre specialists the studio are in desperate need of a win. Recently they've faced challenges to make any project successful, from Wolf Man to their thriller to Drop to the total box office disaster of the robotic follow-up, and so significant pressure rests on whether Black Phone 2 can prove whether a brief narrative can become a film that can create a series. There’s just one slight problem …

Paranormal Shift

The initial movie finished with our protagonist Finn (the young actor) eliminating the villain, helped and guided by the ghosts of those he had killed before. It’s forced filmmaker Derrickson and his co-writer C Robert Cargill to take the series and its killer to a new place, turning a flesh and blood villain into a supernatural one, a route that takes them by way of Freddy's domain with an ability to cross back into the physical realm enabled through nightmares. But unlike Freddy Krueger, the Grabber is markedly uninventive and completely lacking comedy. The facial covering continues to be appropriately unsettling but the production fails to make him as scary as he temporarily seemed in the original, limited by complicated and frequently unclear regulations.

Snowy Religious Environment

Finn and his frustratingly crude sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) confront him anew while trapped by snow at an alpine Christian camp for kids, the sequel also nodding regarding the hockey mask killer Jason Voorhees. The female lead is led there by an apparition of her deceased parent and potentially their late tormenter’s first victims while the protagonist, continuing to process his anger and newfound ability to fight back, is tracking to defend her. The script is excessively awkward in its contrived scene-setting, awkwardly requiring to maroon the main characters at a place that will also add to histories of hero and villain, filling in details we didn’t really need or want to know about. What also appears to be a more strategic decision to push the movie towards the similar religious audiences that turned the Conjuring franchise into major blockbusters, Derrickson adds a faith-based component, with morality now more strongly connected with the creator and the afterlife while villainy signifies the devil and hell, faith the ultimate weapon against this type of antagonist.

Over-stacked Narrative

The result of these decisions is further over-stack a franchise that was previously almost failing, incorporating needless complexities to what ought to be a straightforward horror movie. Regularly I noticed excessively engaged in questioning about the methods and reasons of feasible and unfeasible occurrences to feel all that involved. It's minimal work for Hawke, whose features stay concealed but he maintains real screen magnetism that’s generally absent in other areas in the acting team. The setting is at times atmospherically grand but the bulk of the continuously non-terrifying sequences are damaged by a rough cinematic quality to distinguish dreaming from waking, an ineffective stylistic choice that feels too self-aware and constructed to mirror the horrifying unpredictability of experiencing a real bad dream.

Unpersuasive Series Justification

Lasting approximately two hours, the sequel, like M3gan 2.0 before it, is a needlessly long and highly implausible justification for the establishment of another series. The next time it rings, I advise letting it go to voicemail.

• The sequel is out in Australian theaters on 16 October and in the United States and United Kingdom on the seventeenth of October