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Debuting as the re-activated bestselling author machine was persistently generating film versions, regardless of quality, the first installment felt like a uninspired homage. Set against a small town 70s backdrop, high school cast, telepathic children and twisted community predator, it was almost imitation and, similar to the poorest his literary works, it was also clumsily packed.

Curiously the call came from within the household, 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 brutal murderer of young boys who would revel in elongating the ritual of their deaths. While molestation was avoided in discussion, there was something unmistakably LGBTQ-suggestive about the villain and the historical touchpoints/moral panics he was obviously meant to represent, emphasized by the actor acting with a certain swishy, effeminate flare. But the film was too opaque to ever fully embrace this aspect and even aside from that tension, it was excessively convoluted and too focused on its exhaustingly grubby nastiness to work as only an unthinking horror entertainment.

The Sequel's Arrival Amidst Production Company Challenges

Its sequel arrives as former horror hit-makers the production company are in critical demand for a hit. Lately they've encountered difficulties to make any film profitable, from their werewolf film to the suspense story to the adventure movie to the complete commercial failure of M3gan 2.0, and so significant pressure rests on whether Black Phone 2 can prove whether a compact tale can become a film that can generate multiple installments. There’s just one slight problem …

Supernatural Transformation

The original concluded with our surviving character Finn (Mason Thames) defeating the antagonist, supported and coached by the ghosts of those he had killed before. It’s forced filmmaker Derrickson and his writing partner Cargill to advance the story and its villain in a different direction, transforming a human antagonist into a supernatural one, a direction that guides them by way of Freddy's domain with an ability to cross back into the physical realm made possible by sleep. But in contrast to the dream killer, the antagonist is noticeably uncreative and totally without wit. The disguise stays appropriately unsettling but the movie has difficulty to make him as scary as he temporarily seemed in the first, limited by complex and typically puzzling guidelines.

Alpine Christian Camp Setting

The protagonist and his irritatingly profane sibling Gwen (the performer) encounter him again while trapped by snow at a mountain religious retreat for kids, the follow-up also referencing regarding the hockey mask killer Jason Voorhees. Gwen is guided there by a vision of her late mother and what could be their deceased villain's initial casualties while the brother, still attempting to handle his fury and newfound ability to fight back, is following so he can protect her. The script is excessively awkward in its artificial setup, clumsily needing to get the siblings stranded at a setting that will further contribute to background information for protagonist and antagonist, providing information we didn't actually require or desire to understand. Additionally seeming like a more strategic decision to guide the production in the direction of the comparable faith-based viewers that made the Conjuring series into major blockbusters, Derrickson adds a spiritual aspect, with morality now more strongly connected with the divine and paradise while bad represents the demonic and punishment, religion the final defense against such a creature.

Overcomplicated Story

What all of this does is continued over-burden a series that was already nearly collapsing, incorporating needless complexities to what could have been a straightforward horror movie. Regularly I noticed too busy asking questions about the processes and motivations of possible and impossible events to experience genuine engagement. It’s a low-lift effort for Hawke, whose visage remains hidden but he possesses real screen magnetism that’s mostly missing elsewhere in the acting team. The location is at times atmospherically grand but the bulk of the consistently un-scary set-pieces are flawed by a grainy 8mm texture to distinguish dreaming from waking, an poor directorial selection that feels too self-aware and created to imitate the horrifying unpredictability of being in an actual nightmare.

Unconvincing Franchise Argument

Lasting approximately two hours, the follow-up, similar to its predecessor, is a excessively extended and extremely unpersuasive argument for the birth of another series. When it calls again, I recommend not answering.

• The follow-up film is out in Australian cinemas on the sixteenth of October and in the United States and United Kingdom on October 17