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Debuting as the revived bestselling author machine was continuing to produce film versions, regardless of quality, the first installment felt like a lazy fanboy tribute. With its retro suburban environment, young performers, telepathic children and twisted community predator, it was almost imitation and, like the very worst of his literary works, it was also awkwardly crowded.

Interestingly the call came from inside the family home, as it was based on a short story from his descendant, expanded into a film that was a surprise $161m hit. It was the narrative about the kidnapper, a brutal murderer of adolescents who would revel in elongating their fatal ceremony. While sexual abuse was avoided in discussion, there was something unmistakably LGBTQ-suggestive about the antagonist and the period references/societal fears he was intended to symbolize, reinforced by the actor portraying him with a certain swishy, effeminate flare. But the film was too ambiguous to ever fully embrace this aspect and even without that uneasiness, it was overly complicated and overly enamored with its exhaustingly grubby nastiness to work as only an unthinking horror entertainment.

Second Installment's Release During Filmmaking Difficulties

Its sequel arrives as former horror hit-makers the production company are in critical demand for a hit. Lately they've encountered difficulties to make any project successful, from the monster movie to The Woman in the Yard to Drop to the utter financial disappointment of the AI sequel, and so significant pressure rests on whether Black Phone 2 can prove whether a brief narrative can become a film that can generate multiple installments. However, there's an issue …

Supernatural Transformation

The original concluded with our protagonist Finn (Mason Thames) defeating the antagonist, helped and guided by the spirits of previous victims. It’s forced writer-director Scott 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 ghostly presence, a route that takes them via Elm Street with a capability to return into the real world enabled through nightmares. But unlike Freddy Krueger, the Grabber is noticeably uncreative and entirely devoid of humour. The mask remains successfully disturbing but the production fails to make him as frightening as he briefly was in the initial film, limited by complicated and frequently unclear regulations.

Mountain Retreat Location

The protagonist and his irritatingly profane sibling Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) face him once more while snowed in at a mountain religious retreat for kids, the sequel also nodding in the direction of Jason Voorhees Jason Voorhees. Gwen is guided there by a ghostly image of her dead mother and what could be their late tormenter’s first victims while the protagonist, continuing to handle his fury and fresh capacity for resistance, is pursuing to safeguard her. The screenplay is overly clumsy in its contrived scene-setting, inelegantly demanding to get the siblings stranded at a location that will additionally provide to histories of protagonist and antagonist, supplying particulars 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 comparable faith-based viewers that transformed the Conjuring movies into massive hits, the director includes a spiritual aspect, with morality now more strongly connected with God and heaven while villainy signifies the devil and hell, belief the supreme tool against this type of antagonist.

Overloaded Plot

What all of this does is continued over-burden a franchise that was previously close to toppling over, including superfluous difficulties to what should be a straightforward horror movie. Frequently I discovered too busy asking questions about the methods and reasons of feasible and unfeasible occurrences to experience genuine engagement. It's minimal work for the performer, whose face we never really see but he maintains authentic charisma that’s generally absent in other areas in the ensemble. The environment is at times impressively atmospheric but most of the consistently un-scary set-pieces are marred by a grainy 8mm texture to distinguish dreaming from waking, an poor directorial selection that appears overly conscious and constructed to mirror the frightening randomness of living through a genuine night terror.

Unconvincing Franchise Argument

Lasting approximately two hours, the follow-up, similar to its predecessor, is a needlessly long and extremely unpersuasive case for the creation of another series. If another installment comes, I recommend not answering.

• The sequel debuts in Australian cinemas on 16 October and in the US and UK on October 17