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Arriving as the re-activated Stephen King machine was continuing to produce screen translations, without concern for excellence, the first installment felt like a lazy fanboy tribute. Featuring a retro suburban environment, young performers, psychic kids and twisted community predator, it was close to pastiche and, like the very worst of the author's tales, it was also clumsily packed.

Funnily enough the source was found within the household, as it was based on a short story from his descendant, expanded into a film that was a unexpected blockbuster. It was the story of the Grabber, a brutal murderer of children who would enjoy extending their fatal ceremony. While sexual abuse was avoided in discussion, there was something inescapably queer-coded about the character and the period references/societal fears he was obviously meant to represent, reinforced by Ethan Hawke playing him with a noticeably camp style. But the film was too vague to ever properly acknowledge this and even aside from that tension, it was too busily plotted and too focused on its tiring griminess to work as only an mindless scary movie material.

Second Installment's Release Amidst Filmmaking Difficulties

The next chapter comes as once-dominant genre specialists Blumhouse are in critical demand for a hit. Lately they've encountered difficulties to make any project successful, from their werewolf film to The Woman in the Yard to the adventure movie to the utter financial disappointment of the AI sequel, and so much depends on whether the sequel can prove whether a compact tale can become a movie that can generate multiple installments. But there's a complication …

Supernatural Transformation

The initial movie finished with our surviving character Finn (the young actor) defeating the antagonist, helped and guided by the apparitions of earlier casualties. This has compelled writer-director Scott Derrickson and his writing partner 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 through Nightmare on Elm Street with a capability to return into the real world enabled through nightmares. But in contrast to the dream killer, the Grabber is clearly unimaginative and entirely devoid of humour. The disguise stays successfully disturbing but the film struggles to make him as frightening as he temporarily seemed in the initial film, constrained by convoluted and often confusing rules.

Snowy Religious Environment

The main character and his irritatingly profane sibling Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) encounter him again while stranded due to weather at a high-altitude faith-based facility for kids, the second film also acknowledging toward Freddy’s one-time nemesis the Friday the 13th antagonist. The female lead is led there by a vision of her late mother and what could be their dead antagonist's original prey while the protagonist, continuing to process his anger and recently discovered defensive skills, is pursuing to safeguard her. The script is too ungainly in its forced establishment, awkwardly requiring to leave the brother and sister trapped at a place that will also add to background information for main character and enemy, providing information we didn’t really need or desire to understand. 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 huge successes, Derrickson adds a religious element, with good now more closely associated with God and heaven while evil symbolizes the devil and hell, faith the ultimate weapon against such a creature.

Overloaded Plot

The result of these decisions is continued over-burden a story that was formerly nearly collapsing, incorporating needless complexities to what ought to be a simple Friday night engine. Regularly I noticed overly occupied with inquiries about the methods and reasons of possible and impossible events to feel all that involved. It's an undemanding role for the performer, whose face we never really see but he does have genuine presence that’s mostly missing elsewhere in the acting team. The setting is at times remarkably immersive but the bulk of the continuously non-terrifying sequences are flawed by a grainy 8mm texture to separate sleep states from consciousness, an poor directorial selection that seems excessively meta and designed to reflect the terrifying uncertainty of living through a genuine night terror.

Unpersuasive Series Justification

Running nearly 120 minutes, Black Phone 2, like M3gan 2.0 before it, is a unnecessarily lengthy and hugely unconvincing justification for the establishment of an additional film universe. The next time it rings, I advise letting it go to voicemail.

• Black Phone 2 releases in Australian theaters on 16 October and in America and Britain on October 17