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Debuting as the revived Stephen King machine was continuing to produce adaptations, quality be damned, the first installment felt like a uninspired homage. Set against a retro suburban environment, high school cast, psychic kids and disturbing local antagonist, it was nearly parody and, like the very worst of his literary works, it was also inelegantly overstuffed.

Curiously the call came from from the author's own lineage, as it was inspired by a compact narrative from his descendant, over-extended into a film that was a shocking commercial success. It was the narrative about the kidnapper, a cruel slayer of young boys who would take pleasure in prolonging the ritual of their deaths. While molestation was avoided in discussion, there was something clearly non-heteronormative about the antagonist and the historical touchpoints/moral panics he was intended to symbolize, reinforced by the actor portraying him with a certain swishy, effeminate flare. But the film was too ambiguous to ever really admit that and even excluding that discomfort, it was excessively convoluted and too focused on its wearisome vileness to work as only an undiscerning sleepover nightmare fuel.

The Sequel's Arrival In the Middle of Filmmaking Difficulties

Its sequel arrives as previous scary movie successes Blumhouse are in desperate need of a win. Lately they've encountered difficulties to make any project successful, from the monster movie to The Woman in the Yard to their action film to the complete commercial failure of the robotic follow-up, and so significant pressure rests on whether Black Phone 2 can prove whether a brief narrative can become a movie that can create a series. But there's a complication …

Ghostly Evolution

The first film ended with our protagonist Finn (Mason Thames) defeating the antagonist, helped and guided by the apparitions of earlier casualties. This has compelled director Scott Derrickson and his writing partner Cargill to move the franchise and its antagonist toward fresh territory, turning a flesh and blood villain into a supernatural one, a path that leads them by way of Freddy's domain with a capability to return into the real world facilitated by dreams. But different from the striped sweater villain, the Grabber is noticeably uncreative and completely lacking comedy. The disguise stays appropriately unsettling but the production fails to make him as scary as he temporarily seemed in the first, constrained by convoluted and often confusing rules.

Snowy Religious Environment

Finn and his irritatingly profane sibling Gwen (the actress) face him once more while trapped by snow at a high-altitude faith-based facility for kids, the sequel also nodding in the direction of Jason Voorhees the camp slasher. The female lead is led there by an apparition of her deceased parent and what could be their deceased villain's initial casualties while the protagonist, continuing to handle his fury and recently discovered defensive skills, is following so he can protect her. The script is overly clumsy in its forced establishment, awkwardly requiring to leave the brother and sister trapped at a setting that will further contribute to background information for protagonist and antagonist, providing information we weren't particularly interested in or want to know about. In what also feels like a more strategic decision to guide the production in the direction of the same church-attending crowds that transformed the Conjuring movies into massive hits, the filmmaker incorporates a religious element, with good now more closely associated with the creator and the afterlife while bad represents the demonic and punishment, faith the ultimate weapon against this type of antagonist.

Over-stacked Narrative

The result of these decisions is further over-stack a series that was already close to toppling over, including superfluous difficulties to what ought to be a simple Friday night engine. Regularly I noticed too busy asking questions about the hows and whys of possible and impossible events to experience genuine engagement. It's minimal work for the actor, whose visage remains hidden but he does have real screen magnetism that’s mostly missing elsewhere in the ensemble. The location is at times impressively atmospheric but most of the continuously non-terrifying sequences are marred 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 being in an actual nightmare.

Weak Continuation Rationale

Lasting approximately two hours, the follow-up, comparable to earlier failures, is a unnecessarily lengthy and hugely unconvincing justification for the establishment of a new franchise. If another installment comes, I recommend not answering.

• The sequel releases in Australia's movie houses on the sixteenth of October and in America and Britain on the seventeenth of October