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Arriving as the revived master of horror machine was still churning out screen translations, without concern for excellence, the original film felt like a sloppy admiration piece. Featuring a small town 70s backdrop, high school cast, psychic kids and gnarly neighbourhood villain, it was close to pastiche and, similar to the poorest the author's tales, it was also awkwardly crowded.

Interestingly the inspiration originated from inside the family home, as it was adapted from a brief tale from the author's offspring, stretched into a film that was a shocking commercial success. It was the story of the Grabber, a cruel slayer of children who would take pleasure in prolonging the ritual of their deaths. While molestation was not referenced, there was something clearly non-heteronormative about the antagonist and the era-specific anxieties he was intended to symbolize, strengthened by the performer portraying him with a certain swishy, effeminate flare. But the film was too opaque to ever properly acknowledge this and even excluding that discomfort, it was too busily plotted and overly enamored with its exhaustingly grubby nastiness to work as only an mindless scary movie material.

The Sequel's Arrival In the Middle of Studio Struggles

Its sequel arrives as previous scary movie successes Blumhouse are in desperate need of a win. This year they’ve struggled to make any film profitable, from their werewolf film to their thriller to their action film to the total box office disaster of the robotic follow-up, and so a great deal rides on whether Black Phone 2 can prove whether a brief narrative can become a film that can spawn a franchise. But there's a complication …

Supernatural Transformation

The initial movie finished with our Final Boy Finn (the performer) defeating the antagonist, supported and coached by the ghosts of those he had killed before. This has compelled filmmaker Derrickson and his writing partner Cargill to take the series and its killer to a new place, converting a physical threat into a paranormal entity, a direction that guides them through Nightmare on Elm Street with a power to travel into the physical realm facilitated by dreams. But unlike Freddy Krueger, the antagonist is markedly uninventive and entirely devoid of humour. The disguise stays appropriately unsettling but the movie has difficulty to make him as frightening as he temporarily seemed in the initial film, trapped by convoluted and often confusing rules.

Alpine Christian Camp Setting

The protagonist and his irritatingly profane sibling Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) confront him anew while stranded due to weather at a mountain religious retreat for kids, the second film also acknowledging toward Freddy’s one-time nemesis the Friday the 13th antagonist. The sister is directed there by a vision of her late mother and what could be their late tormenter’s first victims while the brother, still attempting to deal with his rage and newfound ability to fight back, is tracking to defend her. The writing is overly clumsy in its contrived scene-setting, clumsily needing to get the siblings stranded at a place that will also add to background information for hero and villain, providing information we didn’t really need 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 transformed the Conjuring movies into huge successes, the director includes a faith-based component, with good now more closely associated with God and heaven while evil symbolizes the devil and hell, belief the supreme tool against such a creature.

Overcomplicated Story

What all of this does is further over-stack a series that was already nearly collapsing, including superfluous difficulties to what ought to be a basic scary film. I often found myself excessively engaged in questioning about the methods and reasons of possible and impossible events to feel all that involved. It's an undemanding role for Hawke, whose features stay concealed but he possesses genuine presence that’s typically lacking in other aspects in the ensemble. The setting is at times atmospherically grand but the majority of the continuously non-terrifying sequences are marred by a rough cinematic quality to differentiate asleep and awake, an unsuccessful artistic decision that seems excessively meta and designed to reflect the frightening randomness of being in an actual nightmare.

Weak Continuation Rationale

Running nearly 120 minutes, the sequel, similar to its predecessor, is a needlessly long and extremely unpersuasive case for the creation of an additional film universe. When it calls again, I suggest ignoring it.

• The sequel is out in Australia's movie houses on October 16 and in the US and UK on October 17