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Coming as the revived bestselling author machine was persistently generating adaptations, regardless of quality, the original film felt like a lazy fanboy tribute. Featuring a retro suburban environment, young performers, psychic kids and gnarly neighbourhood villain, it was almost imitation and, comparable to the weakest King’s stories, it was also awkwardly crowded.

Curiously the inspiration originated from from the author's own lineage, as it was based on a short story from King’s son Joe Hill, expanded into a film that was a shocking commercial success. It was the narrative about the kidnapper, a brutal murderer of children who would enjoy extending their fatal ceremony. While sexual abuse was not referenced, there was something clearly non-heteronormative about the character and the era-specific anxieties he was intended to symbolize, reinforced by Ethan Hawke playing him with a certain swishy, effeminate flare. But the film was too vague to ever properly acknowledge this and even aside from that tension, it was too busily plotted and too high on its wearisome vileness to work as anything more than an undiscerning sleepover nightmare fuel.

The Sequel's Arrival In the Middle of Production Company Challenges

Its sequel arrives as former horror hit-makers Blumhouse are in critical demand for a hit. This year they’ve struggled to make anything work, from the monster movie to their thriller to the adventure movie to the utter financial disappointment of the robotic follow-up, and so significant pressure rests on whether Black Phone 2 can prove whether a short story can become a film that can spawn a franchise. However, there's an issue …

Supernatural Transformation

The original concluded with our surviving character Finn (the performer) killing the Grabber, supported and coached by the apparitions of earlier casualties. This situation has required filmmaker Derrickson and his collaborator C Robert Cargill to move the franchise and its villain in a different direction, converting a physical threat into a ghostly presence, a path that leads them through Nightmare on Elm Street with a capability to return into the real world made possible by sleep. But different from the striped sweater villain, the antagonist is noticeably uncreative and entirely devoid of humour. The mask remains appropriately unsettling but the production fails to make him as frightening as he momentarily appeared in the initial film, constrained by complex and typically puzzling guidelines.

Snowy Religious Environment

The protagonist and his frustratingly crude sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) confront him anew while snowed in at a high-altitude faith-based facility for kids, the follow-up also referencing regarding the hockey mask killer the Friday the 13th antagonist. The sister is directed there by a vision of her late mother and what could be their late tormenter’s first victims while the protagonist, continuing to deal with his rage and recently discovered defensive skills, is tracking to defend her. The writing is too ungainly in its artificial setup, clumsily needing to get the siblings stranded at a location that will additionally provide to background information for hero and villain, providing information we didn't actually require or care to learn about. Additionally seeming like a more strategic decision to push the movie towards the comparable faith-based viewers that transformed the Conjuring movies into major blockbusters, Derrickson adds a religious element, with good now more closely associated with the creator and the afterlife while bad represents Satan and damnation, religion the final defense against a monster like this.

Over-stacked Narrative

The consequence of these choices is additional over-complicate a series that was already close to toppling over, incorporating needless complexities to what could have been a basic scary film. Frequently I discovered overly occupied with inquiries about the processes and motivations of what could or couldn’t happen to become truly immersed. It's minimal work for the actor, whose face we never really see but he possesses real screen magnetism that’s typically lacking in other aspects in the acting team. The setting is at times impressively atmospheric but most of the consistently un-scary set-pieces are marred by a rough cinematic quality to separate sleep states from consciousness, an unsuccessful artistic decision that seems excessively meta and designed to reflect the frightening randomness of experiencing a real bad dream.

Unpersuasive Series Justification

At just under 2 hours, Black Phone 2, comparable to earlier failures, is a unnecessarily lengthy and highly implausible argument for the birth of another series. When it calls again, I suggest ignoring it.

• The follow-up film is out in Australian cinemas on the sixteenth of October and in the United States and United Kingdom on the seventeenth of October