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Coming as the revived master of horror machine was persistently generating screen translations, quality be damned, the first installment felt like a uninspired homage. With its retro suburban environment, young performers, telepathic children and gnarly neighbourhood villain, it was almost imitation and, comparable to the weakest King’s stories, it was also inelegantly overstuffed.

Funnily enough the call came from within the household, as it was based on a short story from the author's offspring, over-extended into a film that was a surprise $161m hit. It was the narrative about the kidnapper, a sadistic killer of children who would enjoy extending the ritual of their deaths. While sexual abuse was avoided in discussion, there was something clearly non-heteronormative about the antagonist and the period references/societal fears he was obviously meant to represent, emphasized by Ethan Hawke playing him with a certain swishy, effeminate flare. But the film was too ambiguous to ever really admit that and even aside from that tension, it was too busily plotted and too high on its tiring griminess to work as only an mindless scary movie material.

Follow-up Film's Debut Amidst Studio Struggles

The next chapter comes as former horror hit-makers the production company are in critical demand for a hit. Recently they've faced challenges to make anything work, from Wolf Man to their thriller to the adventure movie to the total box office disaster of the robotic follow-up, and so significant pressure rests on whether the continuation can prove whether a compact tale can become a motion picture that can spawn a franchise. But there's a complication …

Supernatural Transformation

The first film ended with our protagonist Finn (the performer) eliminating the villain, assisted and trained by the spirits of previous victims. This situation has required filmmaker Derrickson and his collaborator C Robert Cargill to take the series and its villain in a different direction, transforming a human antagonist into a ghostly presence, a path that leads them via Elm Street with a power to travel into the physical realm made possible by sleep. But different from the striped sweater villain, the villain is markedly uninventive and entirely devoid of humour. The mask remains successfully disturbing but the movie has difficulty to make him as scary as he temporarily seemed in the original, constrained by complex and typically puzzling guidelines.

Snowy Religious Environment

Finn and his annoyingly foul-mouthed sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) confront him anew while stranded due to weather at an alpine Christian camp for kids, the follow-up also referencing in the direction of Jason Voorhees the camp slasher. Gwen is guided there by a ghostly image of her dead mother and potentially their late tormenter’s first victims while Finn, still trying to deal with his rage and fresh capacity for resistance, is tracking to defend her. The script is excessively awkward in its forced establishment, inelegantly demanding to maroon the main characters at a location that will additionally provide to histories of hero and villain, providing information we didn’t really need or want to know about. What also appears to be a more strategic decision to guide the production in the direction of the same church-attending crowds that transformed the Conjuring movies into massive hits, the director includes a faith-based component, with morality now more strongly connected with God and heaven while villainy signifies the devil and hell, belief the supreme tool against a monster like this.

Overloaded Plot

The consequence of these choices is further over-stack a franchise that was previously almost failing, including superfluous difficulties to what ought to be a basic scary film. Regularly I noticed overly occupied with inquiries about the processes and motivations of possible and impossible events to experience genuine engagement. It’s a low-lift effort for the performer, whose face we never really see but he possesses genuine presence that’s typically lacking in other aspects in the ensemble. The environment is at times atmospherically grand but the majority of the continuously non-terrifying sequences are flawed by a grainy 8mm texture to separate sleep states from consciousness, an poor directorial selection that feels too self-aware and created to imitate the frightening randomness of experiencing a real bad dream.

Unconvincing Franchise Argument

At just under 2 hours, Black Phone 2, similar to its predecessor, is a needlessly long and highly implausible case for the creation of another series. If another installment comes, I suggest ignoring it.

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