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Coming as the resurrected master of horror machine was persistently generating adaptations, quality be damned, the first installment felt like a lazy fanboy tribute. With its 1970s small town setting, teenage actors, telepathic children and twisted community predator, it was almost imitation and, similar to the poorest the author's tales, it was also awkwardly crowded.

Interestingly the inspiration originated from inside the family home, as it was adapted from a brief tale from his descendant, expanded into a film that was a surprise $161m hit. It was the tale of the antagonist, a brutal murderer of adolescents who would revel in elongating their fatal ceremony. While molestation was avoided in discussion, there was something inescapably queer-coded about the character and the period references/societal fears he was clearly supposed to refer to, emphasized by Ethan Hawke playing him with a noticeably camp style. But the film was too opaque to ever fully embrace this aspect and even without that uneasiness, it was excessively convoluted and too focused on its exhaustingly grubby nastiness to work as only an mindless scary movie material.

The Sequel's Arrival In the Middle of Production Company Challenges

Its sequel arrives as once-dominant genre specialists Blumhouse are in critical demand for a hit. This year they’ve struggled to make any film profitable, from Wolf Man to their thriller to their action film to the utter financial disappointment of M3gan 2.0, and so much depends on whether the continuation can prove whether a brief narrative can become a motion picture that can create a series. But there's a complication …

Supernatural Transformation

The first film ended with our protagonist Finn (the performer) eliminating the villain, supported and coached by the spirits of previous victims. This has compelled director Scott Derrickson and his co-writer C Robert Cargill to take the series and its killer to a new place, converting a physical threat into a supernatural one, a path that leads them through Nightmare on Elm Street with a power to travel into the real world made possible by sleep. But unlike Freddy Krueger, the Grabber is markedly uninventive and completely lacking comedy. The mask remains appropriately unsettling but the movie has difficulty to make him as scary as he briefly was in the first, limited by complicated and frequently unclear regulations.

Mountain Retreat Location

The protagonist and his frustratingly crude sister Gwen (the actress) confront him anew while trapped by snow at an alpine Christian camp for kids, the second film also acknowledging toward Freddy’s one-time nemesis the Friday the 13th antagonist. Gwen is guided there by a ghostly image of her dead mother and what could be their dead antagonist's original prey while the protagonist, continuing 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 get the siblings stranded at a place that will also add to backstories for both main character and enemy, supplying particulars we weren't particularly interested in or care to learn about. In what also feels like a more strategic decision to edge the film toward the comparable faith-based viewers that turned the Conjuring franchise into major blockbusters, the filmmaker incorporates a spiritual aspect, with virtue now more directly linked with the divine and paradise while bad represents Satan and damnation, belief the supreme tool against a monster like this.

Overloaded Plot

What all of this does is further over-stack a story that was formerly nearly collapsing, incorporating needless complexities to what could have been a straightforward horror movie. Frequently I discovered overly occupied with inquiries about the hows and whys of possible and impossible events to experience genuine engagement. It's an undemanding role for the actor, whose features stay concealed but he possesses genuine presence that’s mostly missing elsewhere in the acting team. The setting is at times atmospherically grand but most of the consistently un-scary set-pieces are marred by a gritty film stock appearance to separate sleep states from consciousness, an poor directorial selection that seems excessively meta and created to imitate the terrifying uncertainty of living through a genuine night terror.

Unconvincing Franchise Argument

Lasting approximately two hours, Black Phone 2, similar to its predecessor, is a needlessly long and highly implausible argument for the birth of an additional film universe. If another installment comes, I advise letting it go to voicemail.

• The follow-up film releases in Australian theaters on October 16 and in America and Britain on the seventeenth of October