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Debuting as the revived bestselling author machine was continuing to produce adaptations, without concern for excellence, the original film felt like a uninspired homage. Featuring a 1970s small town setting, teenage actors, telepathic children and disturbing local antagonist, it was almost imitation and, similar to the poorest his literary works, it was also clumsily packed.

Interestingly 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 shocking commercial success. It was the tale of the antagonist, a cruel slayer of children who would enjoy extending the process of killing. While sexual abuse was not referenced, there was something clearly non-heteronormative about the antagonist and the era-specific anxieties he was intended to symbolize, emphasized by Ethan Hawke acting with a certain swishy, effeminate flare. But the film was too ambiguous to ever properly acknowledge this and even excluding that discomfort, it was overly complicated and overly enamored with its tiring griminess to work as anything more than an unthinking horror entertainment.

Follow-up Film's Debut Amidst Production Company Challenges

Its sequel arrives as former horror hit-makers the production company are in critical demand for a hit. This year they’ve struggled to make any project successful, from the monster movie to their thriller to the adventure movie to the total box office disaster of the robotic follow-up, and so a great deal rides on whether the sequel can prove whether a brief narrative can become a film that can create a series. There’s just one slight problem …

Supernatural Transformation

The initial movie finished with our surviving character Finn (the young actor) defeating the antagonist, supported and coached by the ghosts of those he had killed before. This has compelled writer-director Scott Derrickson and his co-writer C Robert Cargill to advance the story and its killer to a new place, turning a flesh and blood villain into a paranormal entity, a path that leads them through Nightmare on Elm Street with a power to travel into reality enabled through nightmares. But different from the striped sweater villain, the antagonist is noticeably uncreative and entirely devoid of humour. The mask remains appropriately unsettling but the film struggles to make him as terrifying as he momentarily appeared in the initial film, trapped by complicated and frequently unclear regulations.

Mountain Retreat Location

Finn and his annoyingly foul-mouthed sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) face him once more while stranded due to weather at a high-altitude faith-based facility for kids, the follow-up also referencing regarding the hockey mask killer Jason Voorhees. The sister is directed there by a ghostly image of her dead mother and potentially their late tormenter’s first victims while the brother, still attempting to handle his fury and recently discovered defensive skills, is following so he can protect her. The screenplay is excessively awkward in its artificial setup, inelegantly demanding to get the siblings stranded at a location that will additionally provide to background information for main character and enemy, filling in details we didn't actually require or care to learn about. What also appears to be a more strategic decision to guide the production in the direction of the comparable faith-based viewers that made the Conjuring series into huge successes, the filmmaker incorporates a religious element, with morality now more strongly connected with God and heaven while villainy signifies Satan and damnation, belief the supreme tool against this type of antagonist.

Over-stacked Narrative

The consequence of these choices is continued over-burden a series that was already close to toppling over, incorporating needless complexities to what ought to be a simple Friday night engine. Regularly I noticed excessively engaged in questioning about the hows and whys of feasible and unfeasible occurrences to become truly immersed. It's an undemanding role for the performer, 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 impressively atmospheric but the bulk of the persistently unfrightening scenes are flawed by a gritty film stock appearance to separate sleep states from consciousness, an poor directorial selection that feels too self-aware and designed to reflect the horrifying unpredictability of living through a genuine night terror.

Unpersuasive Series Justification

At just under 2 hours, Black Phone 2, like M3gan 2.0 before it, is a unnecessarily lengthy and hugely unconvincing justification for the establishment of another series. The next time it rings, I recommend not answering.

• The follow-up film is out in Australia's movie houses on October 16 and in the US and UK on October 17