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Arriving as the revived bestselling author machine was persistently generating film versions, without concern for excellence, the first installment felt like a sloppy admiration piece. Featuring a retro suburban environment, young performers, telepathic children and gnarly neighbourhood villain, it was almost imitation and, similar to the poorest the author's tales, it was also inelegantly overstuffed.

Interestingly the inspiration originated from inside the family home, as it was based on a short story from his descendant, over-extended into a film that was a surprise $161m hit. It was the tale of the antagonist, a sadistic killer of adolescents who would revel in elongating the process of killing. While assault was never mentioned, there was something inescapably queer-coded about the antagonist and the historical touchpoints/moral panics he was intended to symbolize, strengthened by the performer playing him with a distinctly flamboyant manner. But the film was too ambiguous to ever properly acknowledge this and even without that uneasiness, it was overly complicated and too focused on its wearisome vileness to work as only an mindless scary movie material.

The Sequel's Arrival Amidst Filmmaking Difficulties

Its sequel arrives as once-dominant genre specialists 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 their thriller to their action film to the total box office disaster of the AI sequel, and so significant pressure rests on whether Black Phone 2 can prove whether a compact tale can become a movie that can generate multiple installments. However, there's an issue …

Supernatural Transformation

The first film ended with our protagonist Finn (Mason Thames) killing the Grabber, helped and guided by the ghosts of those he had killed before. This situation has required writer-director Scott Derrickson and his writing partner Cargill to advance the story and its killer to a new place, transforming a human antagonist into a ghostly presence, a route that takes them through Nightmare on Elm Street with a capability to return into the physical realm enabled through nightmares. But in contrast to the dream killer, the antagonist is clearly unimaginative and totally without wit. The facial covering continues to be effectively jarring but the production fails to make him as scary as he briefly was in the initial film, trapped by complicated and frequently unclear regulations.

Alpine Christian Camp Setting

The main character and his irritatingly profane sibling Gwen (the performer) face him once more while snowed in at a high-altitude faith-based facility for kids, the second film also acknowledging regarding the hockey mask killer the camp slasher. Gwen is guided there by an apparition of her deceased parent and what could be their deceased villain's initial casualties while the protagonist, continuing to process his anger and recently discovered defensive skills, is following so he can protect her. The writing is overly clumsy in its artificial setup, inelegantly demanding to leave the brother and sister trapped at a place that will also add to background information for protagonist and antagonist, providing information we didn't actually require or desire to understand. What also appears to be a more calculated move to edge the film toward the similar religious audiences that transformed the Conjuring movies into massive hits, the filmmaker incorporates a religious element, with morality now more strongly connected with the creator and the afterlife while evil symbolizes the demonic and punishment, faith the ultimate weapon against such a creature.

Over-stacked Narrative

The consequence of these choices is additional over-complicate a franchise that was previously almost failing, incorporating needless complexities to what could have been a simple Friday night engine. Frequently I discovered overly occupied with inquiries about the processes and motivations of feasible and unfeasible occurrences to feel all that involved. It's minimal work for Hawke, whose visage remains hidden but he does have real screen magnetism that’s typically lacking in other aspects in the ensemble. The location is at times atmospherically grand but most of the consistently un-scary set-pieces are flawed by a rough cinematic quality to separate sleep states from consciousness, an ineffective stylistic choice that feels too self-aware and constructed to mirror the frightening randomness of being in an actual nightmare.

Weak Continuation Rationale

Running nearly 120 minutes, the sequel, like M3gan 2.0 before it, is a unnecessarily lengthy and highly implausible case for the creation of a new franchise. When it calls again, I recommend not answering.

• The sequel releases in Australian theaters on 16 October and in the US and UK on 17 October