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Debuting as the resurrected Stephen King machine was persistently generating screen translations, quality be damned, The Black Phone felt like a uninspired homage. With its small town 70s backdrop, high school cast, gifted youths and gnarly neighbourhood villain, it was close to pastiche and, like the very worst of his literary works, it was also inelegantly overstuffed.

Funnily enough the inspiration originated from from the author's own lineage, as it was adapted from a brief tale from the author's offspring, expanded into a film that was a unexpected blockbuster. It was the tale of the antagonist, a sadistic killer of adolescents who would take pleasure in prolonging their fatal ceremony. While sexual abuse was avoided in discussion, there was something inescapably queer-coded about the character and the historical touchpoints/moral panics he was obviously meant to represent, emphasized by the actor portraying him with a certain swishy, effeminate flare. But the film was too vague to ever fully embrace this aspect and even without that uneasiness, it was overly complicated and too high on its wearisome vileness to work as anything more than an undiscerning sleepover nightmare fuel.

The Sequel's Arrival During Studio Struggles

The follow-up debuts as former horror hit-makers the production company are in urgent requirement for success. Recently they've faced challenges to make any film profitable, from the monster movie to the suspense story to the adventure movie to the complete commercial failure of the AI sequel, and so much depends on whether the continuation can prove whether a compact tale can become a movie that can spawn a franchise. But there's a complication …

Ghostly Evolution

The initial movie finished with our protagonist Finn (Mason Thames) killing the Grabber, helped and guided by the ghosts of those he had killed before. This has compelled director Scott Derrickson and his writing partner Cargill to take the series and its villain in a different direction, transforming a human antagonist into a paranormal entity, a direction that guides them via Elm Street with a capability to return into reality made possible by sleep. But different from the striped sweater villain, 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 scary as he temporarily seemed in the initial film, trapped by convoluted and often confusing rules.

Mountain Retreat Location

Finn and his irritatingly profane sibling Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) face him once more while trapped by snow at a mountain religious retreat for kids, the second film also acknowledging regarding the hockey mask killer Jason Voorhees. The female lead is led there by a vision of her late mother and potentially their late tormenter’s first victims while the brother, still attempting to handle his fury and fresh capacity for resistance, is following so he can protect her. The script is too ungainly in its contrived scene-setting, clumsily needing to get the siblings stranded at a location that will additionally provide to histories of hero and villain, providing information we weren't particularly interested in or want to know about. In what also feels like a more deliberate action to edge the film toward the comparable faith-based viewers that made the Conjuring series into major blockbusters, the filmmaker incorporates a faith-based component, with morality now more strongly connected with the creator and the afterlife while villainy signifies the devil and hell, religion the final defense against a monster like this.

Overcomplicated Story

The consequence of these choices is further over-stack a franchise that was previously nearly collapsing, incorporating needless complexities to what should be a straightforward horror movie. Regularly I noticed too busy asking questions about the processes and motivations of what could or couldn’t happen to become truly immersed. It's minimal work for Hawke, whose face we never really see but he does have real screen magnetism that’s mostly missing elsewhere in the ensemble. The location is at times impressively atmospheric but the bulk of the continuously non-terrifying sequences are marred by a gritty film stock appearance to distinguish dreaming from waking, an unsuccessful artistic decision that feels too self-aware and constructed to mirror the terrifying uncertainty of experiencing a real bad dream.

Weak Continuation Rationale

Running nearly 120 minutes, Black Phone 2, like M3gan 2.0 before it, is a excessively extended and highly implausible case for the creation of a new franchise. When it calls again, I suggest ignoring it.

• The sequel releases in Australia's movie houses on the sixteenth of October and in the US and UK on October 17