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Coming as the resurrected Stephen King machine was still churning out adaptations, regardless of quality, the original film felt like a sloppy admiration piece. Featuring a retro suburban environment, teenage actors, gifted youths and gnarly neighbourhood villain, it was close to pastiche and, like the very worst of the author's tales, it was also inelegantly overstuffed.

Curiously the source was found inside the family home, as it was based on a short story from his descendant, expanded into a film that was a surprise $161m hit. It was the story of the Grabber, a cruel slayer of young boys who would take pleasure in prolonging their fatal ceremony. While sexual abuse was not referenced, there was something clearly non-heteronormative about the villain and the historical touchpoints/moral panics he was clearly supposed to refer to, reinforced by Ethan Hawke playing him with a noticeably camp style. But the film was too vague to ever really admit that and even without that uneasiness, it was excessively convoluted and too high on its tiring griminess to work as anything more than an unthinking horror entertainment.

Second Installment's Release Amidst Production Company Challenges

The next chapter comes as former horror hit-makers Blumhouse are in critical demand for a hit. This year they’ve struggled to make anything work, from Wolf Man to The Woman in the Yard to the adventure movie to the utter financial disappointment of the AI sequel, and so much depends on whether Black Phone 2 can prove whether a short story can become a film that can spawn a franchise. However, there's an issue …

Paranormal Shift

The first film ended with our surviving character Finn (the performer) eliminating the villain, helped and guided by the ghosts of those he had killed before. It’s forced filmmaker Derrickson and his collaborator C Robert Cargill to move the franchise and its killer to a new place, turning a flesh and blood villain into a supernatural one, a direction that guides them by way of Freddy's domain with an ability to cross back into the real world facilitated by dreams. But in contrast to the dream killer, the antagonist is clearly unimaginative and entirely devoid of humour. The facial covering continues to be successfully disturbing but the movie has difficulty to make him as scary as he temporarily seemed in the initial film, constrained by convoluted and often confusing rules.

Mountain Retreat Location

Finn and his irritatingly profane sibling Gwen (the actress) encounter him again while trapped by snow at a mountain religious retreat for kids, the sequel also nodding toward Freddy’s one-time nemesis Jason Voorhees. Gwen is guided there by an apparition of her deceased parent and what could be their deceased villain's initial casualties while the protagonist, continuing to process his anger and recently discovered defensive skills, is tracking to defend her. The script is excessively awkward in its contrived scene-setting, awkwardly requiring to maroon the main characters at a place that will also add to histories of main character and enemy, providing information we didn't actually require or want to know about. What also appears to be a more strategic decision to push the movie towards the comparable faith-based viewers that turned the Conjuring franchise into huge successes, the director includes a faith-based component, with good now more closely associated with the divine and paradise while villainy signifies Satan and damnation, belief the supreme tool against this type of antagonist.

Over-stacked Narrative

The result of these decisions is additional over-complicate a franchise that was previously almost failing, adding unnecessary complications to what could have been a straightforward horror movie. Regularly I noticed excessively engaged in questioning about the methods and reasons of possible and impossible events to experience genuine engagement. It's minimal work for the performer, whose face we never really see but he does have authentic charisma that’s generally absent in other areas in the acting team. The location is at times remarkably immersive but most of the continuously non-terrifying sequences are flawed by a rough cinematic quality to separate sleep states from consciousness, an poor directorial selection that feels too self-aware and constructed to mirror the terrifying uncertainty of experiencing a real bad dream.

Weak Continuation Rationale

Running nearly 120 minutes, the follow-up, similar to its predecessor, is a unnecessarily lengthy and hugely unconvincing argument for the birth of another series. If another installment comes, I suggest ignoring it.

• The follow-up film debuts in Australian cinemas on the sixteenth of October and in the US and UK on the seventeenth of October