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Arriving as the resurrected bestselling author machine was continuing to produce adaptations, regardless of quality, the first installment felt like a sloppy admiration piece. Set against a small town 70s backdrop, high school cast, psychic kids and twisted community predator, 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 within the household, as it was adapted from a brief tale from his descendant, stretched into a film that was a unexpected blockbuster. It was the narrative about the kidnapper, a cruel slayer of young boys who would revel in elongating the ritual of their deaths. While sexual abuse was not referenced, there was something clearly non-heteronormative about the character and the era-specific anxieties he was obviously meant to represent, strengthened by Ethan Hawke acting 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 wearisome vileness to work as anything more than an unthinking horror entertainment.

Second Installment's Release Amidst Filmmaking Difficulties

The next chapter comes as former horror hit-makers the production company are in desperate need of a win. Lately they've encountered difficulties to make any project successful, from Wolf Man to The Woman in the Yard to Drop to the utter financial disappointment of M3gan 2.0, and so significant pressure rests on whether Black Phone 2 can prove whether a short story can become a movie that can create a series. But there's a complication …

Supernatural Transformation

The initial movie finished with our Final Boy Finn (the performer) defeating the antagonist, helped and guided by the spirits of previous victims. This has compelled writer-director Scott Derrickson and his collaborator C Robert Cargill to take the series and its antagonist toward fresh territory, turning a flesh and blood villain into a ghostly presence, a path that leads them via Elm Street with a power to travel into the real world enabled through nightmares. But different from the striped sweater villain, the antagonist is markedly uninventive and entirely devoid of humour. The disguise stays appropriately unsettling but the movie has difficulty to make him as scary as he momentarily appeared in the original, constrained by convoluted and often confusing rules.

Alpine Christian Camp Setting

Finn and his annoyingly foul-mouthed sister Gwen (the performer) confront him anew while snowed in at an alpine Christian camp for kids, the second film also acknowledging regarding the hockey mask killer the Friday the 13th antagonist. Gwen is guided there by a ghostly image of her dead mother and potentially their deceased villain's initial casualties while Finn, still trying to process his anger and recently discovered defensive skills, is pursuing to safeguard her. The writing is too ungainly in its contrived scene-setting, clumsily needing to maroon the main characters at a location that will additionally provide to backstories for both main character and enemy, providing information we didn’t really need or care to learn about. Additionally seeming like a more calculated move to guide the production in the direction of the same church-attending crowds that made the Conjuring series into massive hits, the director includes a spiritual aspect, with virtue now more directly linked with God and heaven while villainy signifies Satan and damnation, belief the supreme tool against a monster like this.

Over-stacked Narrative

What all of this does is additional over-complicate a story that was formerly nearly collapsing, incorporating needless complexities to what ought to be a basic scary film. Frequently I discovered overly occupied with inquiries about the methods and reasons of possible and impossible events to experience genuine engagement. It's minimal work for Hawke, whose face we never really see but he maintains genuine presence that’s generally absent in other areas in the ensemble. The location is at times impressively atmospheric but most of the consistently un-scary set-pieces are marred by a gritty film stock appearance to differentiate asleep and awake, an unsuccessful artistic decision that seems excessively meta and constructed to mirror the terrifying uncertainty of experiencing a real bad dream.

Weak Continuation Rationale

Lasting approximately two hours, the follow-up, comparable to earlier failures, is a excessively extended and hugely unconvincing justification for the establishment of an additional film universe. When it calls again, I suggest ignoring it.

• Black Phone 2 releases in Australian theaters on October 16 and in the US and UK on 17 October