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Debuting as the re-activated master of horror machine was persistently generating screen translations, quality be damned, the original film felt like a sloppy admiration piece. Featuring a small town 70s backdrop, teenage actors, psychic kids and twisted community predator, it was almost imitation and, similar to the poorest King’s stories, it was also inelegantly overstuffed.

Interestingly the inspiration originated from within the household, as it was inspired by a compact narrative from the author's offspring, stretched into a film that was a shocking commercial success. It was the tale of the antagonist, a cruel slayer of children who would take pleasure in prolonging the process of killing. While assault was avoided in discussion, there was something inescapably queer-coded about the villain and the historical touchpoints/moral panics he was intended to symbolize, strengthened by the performer portraying him with a certain swishy, effeminate flare. But the film was too ambiguous to ever properly acknowledge this and even excluding that discomfort, it was excessively convoluted and too focused on its wearisome vileness to work as only an mindless scary movie material.

The Sequel's Arrival Amidst Filmmaking Difficulties

The next chapter comes as previous scary movie successes the production company are in critical demand for a hit. This year they’ve struggled to make any project successful, from their werewolf film to their thriller to Drop to the total box office disaster of the AI sequel, and so a great deal rides on whether the sequel can prove whether a compact tale can become a film that can create a series. However, there's an issue …

Ghostly Evolution

The original concluded with our protagonist Finn (the young actor) killing the Grabber, helped and guided by the apparitions of earlier casualties. This has compelled director Scott Derrickson and his writing partner Cargill to take the series and its antagonist toward fresh territory, transforming a human antagonist into a ghostly presence, a direction that guides them through Nightmare on Elm Street with an ability to cross back into reality made possible by sleep. But in contrast to the dream killer, the antagonist is markedly uninventive and completely lacking comedy. The facial covering continues to be appropriately unsettling but the movie has difficulty to make him as frightening as he briefly was in the initial film, limited by complex and typically puzzling guidelines.

Mountain Retreat Location

The protagonist and his annoyingly foul-mouthed sister Gwen (the actress) encounter him again while snowed in at a high-altitude faith-based facility for kids, the second film also acknowledging toward Freddy’s one-time nemesis the camp slasher. The female lead is led there by a vision of her late mother and potentially their deceased villain's initial casualties while the protagonist, continuing to deal with his rage and newfound ability to fight back, is pursuing to safeguard her. The script is overly clumsy in its forced establishment, awkwardly requiring to leave the brother and sister trapped at a place that will also add to background information for main character and enemy, filling in details we didn't actually require or care to learn about. What also appears to be a more strategic decision to guide the production in the direction of the same church-attending crowds that turned the Conjuring franchise into massive hits, the director includes a religious element, with morality now more strongly connected with God and heaven while evil symbolizes the devil and hell, faith the ultimate weapon against a monster like this.

Overloaded Plot

What all of this does is further over-stack a franchise that was previously almost failing, incorporating needless complexities to what should be a basic scary film. I often found myself overly occupied with inquiries about the methods and reasons of possible and impossible events to become truly immersed. It's minimal work for the performer, whose features stay concealed but he maintains real screen magnetism that’s typically lacking in other aspects in the ensemble. The environment is at times remarkably immersive but the majority of the continuously non-terrifying sequences are flawed by a rough cinematic quality to differentiate asleep and awake, an poor directorial selection that feels too self-aware and designed to reflect the terrifying uncertainty of living through a genuine night terror.

Unconvincing Franchise Argument

Running nearly 120 minutes, the follow-up, comparable to earlier failures, is a excessively extended and hugely unconvincing argument for the birth of a new franchise. The next time it rings, I recommend not answering.

• Black Phone 2 is out in Australia's movie houses on the sixteenth of October and in the United States and United Kingdom on October 17