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Coming as the revived master of horror machine was persistently generating screen translations, regardless of quality, the first installment felt like a sloppy admiration piece. With its small town 70s backdrop, young performers, telepathic children and twisted community predator, it was almost imitation and, like the very worst of King’s stories, it was also awkwardly crowded.

Curiously the source was found within the household, as it was adapted from a brief tale from King’s son Joe Hill, over-extended into a film that was a unexpected blockbuster. It was the narrative about the kidnapper, a brutal murderer of adolescents who would revel in elongating the process of killing. While assault was not referenced, there was something clearly non-heteronormative about the villain and the era-specific anxieties he was clearly supposed to refer to, emphasized by the actor acting with a distinctly flamboyant manner. But the film was too opaque to ever properly acknowledge this and even without that uneasiness, it was excessively convoluted and overly enamored with its exhaustingly grubby nastiness to work as anything more than an mindless scary movie material.

Second Installment's Release Amidst Filmmaking Difficulties

The follow-up debuts as once-dominant genre specialists the production company are in urgent requirement for success. Recently they've faced challenges to make any film profitable, from the monster movie 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 movie that can generate multiple installments. But there's a complication …

Ghostly Evolution

The first film ended with our protagonist Finn (the performer) defeating the antagonist, assisted and trained by the spirits of previous victims. It’s forced writer-director Scott Derrickson and his collaborator C Robert Cargill to advance the story and its villain in a different direction, transforming a human antagonist into a ghostly presence, a route that takes them by way of Freddy's domain with a power to travel into the physical realm enabled through nightmares. But different from the striped sweater villain, the villain is markedly uninventive and entirely devoid of humour. The facial covering continues to be appropriately unsettling but the film struggles to make him as scary as he briefly was in the initial film, trapped by convoluted and often confusing rules.

Snowy Religious Environment

Finn and his annoyingly foul-mouthed sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) confront him anew while stranded due to weather at a high-altitude faith-based facility for kids, the sequel also nodding in the direction of Jason Voorhees Jason Voorhees. 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 handle his fury and recently discovered defensive skills, is pursuing to safeguard her. The script is too ungainly in its artificial setup, awkwardly requiring to get the siblings stranded at a setting that will further contribute to background information for main character and enemy, supplying particulars we didn’t really need or want to know about. 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 director includes a spiritual aspect, with morality now more strongly connected with God and heaven while villainy signifies the demonic and punishment, religion the final defense against such a creature.

Over-stacked Narrative

The consequence of these choices is further over-stack a story that was formerly nearly collapsing, incorporating needless complexities to what ought to be a straightforward horror movie. I often found myself too busy asking questions about the hows and whys of feasible and unfeasible occurrences to experience genuine engagement. It's an undemanding role for the actor, whose face we never really see but he does have authentic charisma that’s mostly missing elsewhere in the cast. The environment is at times remarkably immersive but the bulk of the consistently un-scary set-pieces are damaged by a rough cinematic quality to distinguish dreaming from waking, an poor directorial selection that appears overly conscious and created to imitate the horrifying unpredictability 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 excessively extended and extremely unpersuasive justification for the establishment of another series. The next time it rings, I suggest ignoring it.

• Black Phone 2 is out in Australian theaters on 16 October and in the US and UK on the seventeenth of October