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Debuting as the resurrected master of horror machine was persistently generating film versions, without concern for excellence, the first installment felt like a uninspired homage. With its 1970s small town setting, teenage actors, psychic kids and gnarly neighbourhood villain, it was almost imitation and, similar to the poorest his literary works, it was also clumsily packed.

Curiously the call came from inside the family home, as it was adapted from a brief tale from the author's offspring, over-extended into a film that was a unexpected blockbuster. It was the narrative about the kidnapper, a sadistic killer of adolescents who would enjoy extending the process of killing. While molestation was avoided in discussion, there was something inescapably queer-coded about the antagonist and the historical touchpoints/moral panics he was obviously meant to represent, strengthened by the performer playing him with a noticeably camp style. But the film was too vague to ever properly acknowledge this and even excluding that discomfort, it was overly complicated and too high on its wearisome vileness to work as anything more than an unthinking horror entertainment.

Follow-up Film's Debut In the Middle of Studio Struggles

The next chapter comes as previous scary movie successes Blumhouse are in urgent requirement for success. Lately they've encountered difficulties to make any project successful, from the monster movie to The Woman in the Yard to the adventure movie to the complete commercial failure of M3gan 2.0, and so much depends on whether the sequel can prove whether a brief narrative can become a film that can spawn a franchise. However, there's an issue …

Supernatural Transformation

The first film ended with our Final Boy Finn (the young actor) eliminating the villain, assisted and trained by the ghosts of those he had killed before. It’s forced director Scott Derrickson and his co-writer C Robert Cargill to take the series and its villain in a different direction, converting a physical threat into a supernatural one, a route that takes them via Elm Street with a capability to return into reality facilitated by dreams. But different from the striped sweater villain, the villain is markedly uninventive and totally without wit. The disguise stays successfully disturbing but the movie has difficulty to make him as frightening as he temporarily seemed in the original, trapped by complex and typically puzzling guidelines.

Mountain Retreat Location

Finn and his frustratingly crude sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) encounter him again while trapped by snow at a high-altitude faith-based facility for kids, the sequel also nodding toward Freddy’s one-time nemesis Jason Voorhees. The female lead is led there by a ghostly image of her dead mother and potentially their deceased villain's initial casualties while the protagonist, continuing to process his anger and newfound ability to fight back, is tracking to defend her. The script is excessively awkward in its artificial setup, awkwardly requiring to maroon the main characters at a location that will additionally provide to backstories for both main character and enemy, supplying particulars 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 similar religious audiences that turned the Conjuring franchise into huge successes, the filmmaker incorporates a religious element, with good now more closely associated with the creator and the afterlife while evil symbolizes Satan and damnation, religion the final defense against such a creature.

Overloaded Plot

What all of this does is additional over-complicate a franchise that was previously almost failing, incorporating needless complexities to what ought to be a basic scary film. I often found myself overly occupied with inquiries about the processes and motivations of possible and impossible events to become truly immersed. It’s a low-lift effort for the actor, whose features stay concealed but he does have authentic charisma that’s generally absent in other areas in the ensemble. The location is at times remarkably immersive but most of the persistently unfrightening scenes are damaged by a grainy 8mm texture to distinguish dreaming from waking, an poor directorial selection that seems excessively meta and designed to reflect the terrifying uncertainty of being in an actual nightmare.

Unpersuasive Series Justification

At just under 2 hours, Black Phone 2, similar to its predecessor, is a needlessly long and hugely unconvincing case for the creation of another series. When it calls again, I advise letting it go to voicemail.

• The sequel releases in Australian theaters on the sixteenth of October and in the US and UK on October 17