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Arriving as the revived Stephen King machine was continuing to produce screen translations, without concern for excellence, the first installment felt like a sloppy admiration piece. Set against a small town 70s backdrop, high school cast, gifted youths and gnarly neighbourhood villain, it was nearly parody and, comparable to the weakest King’s stories, it was also clumsily packed.

Curiously the inspiration originated from within the household, as it was adapted from a brief tale from King’s son Joe Hill, expanded into a film that was a unexpected blockbuster. It was the story of the Grabber, a brutal murderer of adolescents who would take pleasure in prolonging their fatal ceremony. While sexual abuse was never mentioned, there was something unmistakably LGBTQ-suggestive about the character and the historical touchpoints/moral panics he was intended to symbolize, strengthened by the performer portraying him with a distinctly flamboyant manner. But the film was too vague to ever properly acknowledge this and even aside from that tension, it was too busily plotted and overly enamored with its exhaustingly grubby nastiness to work as anything beyond an undiscerning sleepover nightmare fuel.

Second Installment's Release Amidst Production Company Challenges

Its sequel arrives as former horror hit-makers Blumhouse are in critical demand for a hit. Lately they've encountered difficulties to make any project successful, from Wolf Man to the suspense story to Drop to the complete commercial failure of the robotic follow-up, and so much depends on whether the sequel can prove whether a brief narrative can become a movie that can create a series. There’s just one slight problem …

Ghostly Evolution

The initial movie finished with our surviving character Finn (Mason Thames) eliminating the villain, assisted and trained by the apparitions of earlier casualties. This situation has required writer-director Scott Derrickson and his collaborator C Robert Cargill to advance the story and its villain in a different direction, turning a flesh and blood villain into a supernatural one, a route that takes them through Nightmare on Elm Street with an ability to cross back into reality made possible by sleep. But different from the striped sweater villain, the villain is markedly uninventive and totally without wit. The facial covering continues to be appropriately unsettling but the movie has difficulty to make him as terrifying as he momentarily appeared in the first, limited by complicated and frequently unclear regulations.

Alpine Christian Camp Setting

Finn and his frustratingly crude sister Gwen (the actress) confront him anew while snowed in at a high-altitude faith-based facility for kids, the second film also acknowledging in the direction of Jason Voorhees the Friday the 13th antagonist. Gwen is guided there by an apparition of her deceased parent and what could be their dead antagonist's original prey while the brother, still attempting to handle his fury and recently discovered defensive skills, is tracking to defend her. The screenplay is overly clumsy in its contrived scene-setting, awkwardly requiring to maroon the main characters at a location that will additionally provide to backstories for both protagonist and antagonist, supplying particulars we didn’t really need or desire to understand. What also appears to be a more calculated move to guide the production in the direction of the same church-attending crowds that transformed the Conjuring movies into major blockbusters, Derrickson adds a faith-based component, with morality now more strongly connected with God and heaven while bad represents Satan and damnation, religion the final defense against such a creature.

Overloaded Plot

What all of this does is further over-stack a franchise that was previously nearly collapsing, adding unnecessary complications to what should be a basic scary film. I often found myself too busy asking questions about the hows and whys of feasible and unfeasible occurrences to feel all that involved. It's an undemanding role for Hawke, whose features stay concealed but he does have authentic charisma that’s generally absent in other areas in the cast. The setting is at times impressively atmospheric but most of the persistently unfrightening scenes are damaged by a rough cinematic quality to differentiate asleep and awake, an unsuccessful artistic decision that seems excessively meta and created to imitate the horrifying unpredictability of being in an actual nightmare.

Unconvincing Franchise Argument

At just under 2 hours, Black Phone 2, comparable to earlier failures, is a unnecessarily lengthy and hugely unconvincing argument for the birth of another series. The next time it rings, I suggest ignoring it.

• The sequel is out in Australian theaters on the sixteenth of October and in America and Britain on 17 October