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Debuting as the re-activated master of horror machine was still churning out adaptations, quality be damned, the original film felt like a uninspired homage. Featuring a 1970s small town setting, high school cast, telepathic children and twisted community predator, it was almost imitation and, like the very worst of King’s stories, it was also awkwardly crowded.

Interestingly the source was found from the author's own lineage, as it was adapted from a brief tale from his descendant, expanded into a film that was a shocking commercial success. It was the story of the Grabber, a cruel slayer of children who would enjoy extending the process of killing. While assault was avoided in discussion, there was something unmistakably LGBTQ-suggestive about the villain and the period references/societal fears he was intended to symbolize, emphasized by the actor playing him with a certain swishy, effeminate flare. But the film was too ambiguous to ever properly acknowledge this and even aside from that tension, it was too busily plotted and too focused on its wearisome vileness to work as only an undiscerning sleepover nightmare fuel.

The Sequel's Arrival Amidst Studio Struggles

The next chapter comes as former horror hit-makers the production company are in urgent requirement for success. This year they’ve struggled to make any film profitable, from the monster movie to the suspense story to their action film to the complete commercial failure of the robotic follow-up, and so much depends on whether the continuation can prove whether a brief narrative can become a movie that can generate multiple installments. However, there's an issue …

Ghostly Evolution

The original concluded with our surviving character Finn (Mason Thames) defeating the antagonist, assisted and trained by the ghosts of those he had killed before. It’s forced director Scott Derrickson and his collaborator C Robert Cargill to move the franchise and its antagonist toward fresh territory, transforming a human antagonist into a paranormal entity, a path that leads them through Nightmare on Elm Street with an ability to cross back into reality enabled through nightmares. But unlike Freddy Krueger, the Grabber is markedly uninventive and entirely devoid of humour. The facial covering continues to be appropriately unsettling but the film struggles to make him as terrifying as he temporarily seemed in the original, limited by convoluted and often confusing rules.

Mountain Retreat Location

The protagonist and his frustratingly crude sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) confront him anew while snowed in at a mountain religious retreat for kids, the follow-up also referencing toward Freddy’s one-time nemesis the Friday the 13th antagonist. The female lead is led there by a vision of her late mother and what could be their late tormenter’s first victims while Finn, still trying to handle his fury and newfound ability to fight back, is following so he can protect her. The screenplay is excessively awkward in its contrived scene-setting, awkwardly requiring to get the siblings stranded at a place that will also add to background information for protagonist and antagonist, supplying particulars we didn’t really need or care to learn about. What also appears to be a more calculated move to edge the film toward the comparable faith-based viewers that made the Conjuring series into major blockbusters, the director includes a spiritual aspect, with virtue now more directly linked with the divine and paradise while villainy signifies Satan and damnation, religion the final defense against such a creature.

Over-stacked Narrative

What all of this does is additional over-complicate a series that was already nearly collapsing, including superfluous difficulties to what could have been a straightforward horror movie. Regularly I noticed overly occupied with inquiries about the processes and motivations of feasible and unfeasible occurrences to feel all that involved. It's an undemanding role for the performer, whose features stay concealed but he does have authentic charisma that’s typically lacking in other aspects in the acting team. The environment is at times impressively atmospheric but most of the persistently unfrightening scenes are marred by a grainy 8mm texture to separate sleep states from consciousness, an ineffective stylistic choice that appears overly conscious and designed to reflect the frightening randomness of living through a genuine night terror.

Unconvincing Franchise Argument

Lasting approximately two hours, Black Phone 2, comparable to earlier failures, is a unnecessarily lengthy and extremely unpersuasive justification for the establishment of a new franchise. If another installment comes, I suggest ignoring it.

• The follow-up film releases in Australia's movie houses on the sixteenth of October and in the US and UK on 17 October