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Debuting as the resurrected Stephen King machine was still churning out adaptations, regardless of quality, the first installment felt like a uninspired homage. With its small town 70s backdrop, high school cast, telepathic children and twisted community predator, it was nearly parody and, comparable to the weakest King’s stories, it was also awkwardly crowded.

Curiously the call came from 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 unexpected blockbuster. It was the tale of the antagonist, a sadistic killer of children who would revel in elongating the ritual of their deaths. While sexual abuse was never mentioned, there was something unmistakably LGBTQ-suggestive about the character and the period references/societal fears he was clearly supposed to refer to, reinforced by the actor acting with a certain swishy, effeminate flare. But the film was too ambiguous to ever fully embrace this aspect and even excluding that discomfort, it was too busily plotted and overly enamored with its wearisome vileness to work as only an unthinking horror entertainment.

Second Installment's Release During Production Company Challenges

The follow-up debuts as former horror hit-makers Blumhouse are in desperate need of a win. Lately they've encountered difficulties to make any project successful, from Wolf Man to their thriller to their action film to the complete commercial failure of M3gan 2.0, and so a great deal rides on whether the continuation can prove whether a brief narrative can become a film that can create a series. However, there's an issue …

Paranormal Shift

The first film ended with our surviving character Finn (Mason Thames) killing the Grabber, supported and coached by the spirits of previous victims. It’s forced director Scott Derrickson and his collaborator C Robert Cargill to move the franchise and its antagonist toward fresh territory, converting a physical threat into a paranormal entity, a path that leads them by way of Freddy's domain with a capability to return into reality made possible by sleep. But different from the striped sweater villain, the Grabber is markedly uninventive and totally without wit. The facial covering continues to be appropriately unsettling but the movie has difficulty to make him as frightening as he briefly was in the first, constrained by convoluted and often confusing rules.

Alpine Christian Camp Setting

The main character and his annoyingly foul-mouthed sister Gwen (the performer) confront him anew while snowed in at an alpine Christian camp for kids, the follow-up also referencing in the direction of Jason Voorhees the Friday the 13th antagonist. The sister is directed there by a ghostly image of her dead mother and what might be their dead antagonist's original prey while the brother, still attempting to deal with his rage and recently discovered defensive skills, is following so he can protect her. The writing is too ungainly in its artificial setup, clumsily needing to maroon the main characters at a location that will additionally provide 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 edge the film toward the same church-attending crowds that made the Conjuring series into major blockbusters, the filmmaker incorporates a spiritual aspect, with morality now more strongly connected with the creator and the afterlife while evil symbolizes the devil and hell, belief the supreme tool against a monster like this.

Overloaded Plot

The result of these decisions is continued over-burden a franchise that was previously close to toppling over, incorporating needless complexities to what should be a basic scary film. I often found myself excessively engaged in questioning about the methods and reasons of feasible and unfeasible occurrences to feel all that involved. It’s a low-lift effort for the actor, whose visage remains hidden but he maintains real screen magnetism that’s generally absent in other areas in the ensemble. The location is at times atmospherically grand but most of the persistently unfrightening scenes are marred by a gritty film stock appearance to differentiate asleep and awake, an poor directorial selection that appears overly conscious and created to imitate the terrifying uncertainty of living through a genuine night terror.

Unpersuasive Series Justification

Lasting approximately two hours, Black Phone 2, similar to its predecessor, is a needlessly long and extremely unpersuasive case for the creation of an additional film universe. If another installment comes, I recommend not answering.

• The follow-up film debuts in Australian cinemas on October 16 and in the US and UK on October 17