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Arriving as the re-activated bestselling author machine was continuing to produce screen translations, regardless of quality, the original film felt like a lazy fanboy tribute. Featuring a retro suburban environment, young performers, psychic kids and gnarly neighbourhood villain, it was close to pastiche and, comparable to the weakest King’s stories, it was also inelegantly overstuffed.

Funnily enough the call came from from the author's own lineage, as it was inspired by a compact narrative from the author's offspring, stretched into a film that was a surprise $161m hit. It was the story of the Grabber, a sadistic killer of adolescents who would revel in elongating their fatal ceremony. While molestation was not referenced, there was something inescapably queer-coded about the character and the era-specific anxieties he was intended to symbolize, strengthened by Ethan Hawke playing him with a distinctly flamboyant manner. But the film was too opaque to ever fully embrace this aspect and even excluding that discomfort, it was excessively convoluted and too high on its wearisome vileness to work as anything more than an mindless scary movie material.

The Sequel's Arrival In the Middle of Studio Struggles

Its sequel arrives as former horror hit-makers Blumhouse are in critical demand for a hit. Recently they've faced challenges to make any project successful, from Wolf Man to their thriller to the adventure movie to the utter financial disappointment of the robotic follow-up, and so much depends on whether the sequel can prove whether a short story can become a motion picture that can create a series. However, there's an issue …

Paranormal Shift

The initial movie finished with our Final Boy Finn (the young actor) defeating the antagonist, supported and coached by the apparitions of earlier casualties. It’s forced director Scott Derrickson and his collaborator C Robert Cargill to move the franchise and its villain in a different direction, converting a physical threat into a ghostly presence, a route that takes them via Elm Street with an ability to cross back into the physical realm facilitated by dreams. But different from the striped sweater villain, the antagonist is markedly uninventive and completely lacking comedy. The facial covering continues to be successfully disturbing but the production fails to make him as terrifying as he briefly was in the first, limited by convoluted and often confusing rules.

Alpine Christian Camp Setting

The protagonist and his frustratingly crude sister Gwen (the performer) encounter him again while trapped by snow at a high-altitude faith-based facility for kids, the second film also acknowledging toward Freddy’s one-time nemesis Jason Voorhees. Gwen is guided there by a ghostly image of her dead mother and potentially their dead antagonist's original prey while Finn, still trying to handle his fury and newfound ability to fight back, is pursuing to safeguard her. The screenplay is overly clumsy in its contrived scene-setting, clumsily needing to get the siblings stranded at a setting that will further contribute to histories of hero and villain, supplying particulars we didn't actually require or desire to understand. Additionally seeming like a more calculated move to guide the production in the direction of the comparable faith-based viewers that turned the Conjuring franchise into massive hits, the director includes a faith-based component, with virtue now more directly linked with God and heaven while evil symbolizes the demonic and punishment, belief the supreme tool against this type of antagonist.

Over-stacked Narrative

What all of this does is continued over-burden a series that was already close to toppling over, adding unnecessary complications to what should be a basic scary film. I often found myself too busy asking questions about the processes and motivations of what could or couldn’t happen to experience genuine engagement. It’s a low-lift effort for Hawke, whose features stay concealed but he does have real screen magnetism that’s generally absent in other areas in the ensemble. The environment is at times impressively atmospheric but most of the consistently un-scary set-pieces are marred by a gritty film stock appearance to distinguish dreaming from waking, an ineffective stylistic choice that appears overly conscious and created to imitate the terrifying uncertainty of being in an actual nightmare.

Weak Continuation Rationale

Lasting approximately two hours, Black Phone 2, like M3gan 2.0 before it, is a excessively extended and highly implausible case for the creation of a new franchise. If another installment comes, I suggest ignoring it.

• The sequel releases in Australian theaters on the sixteenth of October and in the US and UK on 17 October