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Debuting as the revived Stephen King machine was still churning out screen translations, without concern for excellence, the original film felt like a lazy fanboy tribute. With its 1970s small town setting, high school cast, gifted youths and gnarly neighbourhood villain, it was nearly parody and, like the very worst of the author's tales, it was also clumsily packed.

Funnily enough the source was found from the author's own lineage, as it was inspired by a compact narrative from the author's offspring, expanded into a film that was a unexpected blockbuster. It was the narrative about the kidnapper, a sadistic killer of children who would enjoy extending their fatal ceremony. While assault was avoided in discussion, there was something inescapably queer-coded about the antagonist and the historical touchpoints/moral panics he was intended to symbolize, reinforced by Ethan Hawke playing him with a noticeably camp style. But the film was too vague to ever properly acknowledge this and even excluding that discomfort, it was excessively convoluted and too high on its tiring griminess to work as anything beyond an mindless scary movie material.

Second Installment's Release Amidst Filmmaking Difficulties

Its sequel arrives as once-dominant genre specialists the studio are in urgent requirement for success. Lately they've encountered difficulties to make any project successful, from the monster movie to The Woman in the Yard 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 compact tale can become a film that can generate multiple installments. However, there's an issue …

Supernatural Transformation

The original concluded with our protagonist Finn (Mason Thames) eliminating the villain, supported and coached by the ghosts of those he had killed before. This situation has required director Scott Derrickson and his writing partner Cargill to advance the story and its villain in a different direction, 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 real world made possible by sleep. But different from the striped sweater villain, the villain is markedly uninventive and completely lacking comedy. The disguise stays effectively jarring but the movie has difficulty to make him as terrifying as he momentarily appeared in the first, limited by complicated and frequently unclear regulations.

Snowy Religious Environment

The protagonist and his frustratingly crude sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) face him once more while trapped by snow at a high-altitude faith-based facility for kids, the sequel also nodding regarding the hockey mask killer 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 Finn, still trying to deal with his rage and newfound ability to fight back, is following so he can protect her. The script is excessively awkward in its forced establishment, inelegantly demanding to get the siblings stranded at a place that will also add to backstories for both hero and villain, providing information we didn’t really need 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 turned the Conjuring franchise into major blockbusters, the filmmaker incorporates a religious element, with virtue now more directly linked with the creator and the afterlife while evil symbolizes the devil and hell, religion the final defense against a monster like this.

Overloaded Plot

The consequence of these choices is continued over-burden a franchise that was previously nearly collapsing, adding unnecessary complications to what could have been a simple Friday night engine. 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 Hawke, whose visage remains hidden but he does have authentic charisma that’s typically lacking in other aspects in the acting team. 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 separate sleep states from consciousness, an poor directorial selection that seems excessively meta and created to imitate the frightening randomness of being in an actual nightmare.

Unpersuasive Series Justification

Lasting approximately two hours, Black Phone 2, like M3gan 2.0 before it, is a unnecessarily lengthy and extremely unpersuasive justification for the establishment of a new franchise. The next time it rings, I suggest ignoring it.

• Black Phone 2 debuts in Australian theaters on 16 October and in America and Britain on October 17