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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 uninspired homage. With its 1970s small town setting, high school cast, psychic kids and disturbing local antagonist, it was almost imitation 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 based on a short story from his descendant, stretched into a film that was a unexpected blockbuster. It was the story of the Grabber, a cruel slayer of adolescents who would enjoy extending their fatal ceremony. While sexual abuse was avoided in discussion, there was something unmistakably LGBTQ-suggestive about the villain and the historical touchpoints/moral panics he was intended to symbolize, emphasized by Ethan Hawke playing him with a noticeably camp style. But the film was too vague to ever really admit that and even excluding that discomfort, it was too busily plotted and too high on its tiring griminess to work as anything more than an mindless scary movie material.

Second Installment's Release During Studio Struggles

The follow-up debuts as previous scary movie successes Blumhouse are in critical demand for a hit. This year they’ve struggled to make any project successful, from Wolf Man to their thriller to Drop to the complete commercial failure of M3gan 2.0, and so much depends on whether the continuation can prove whether a compact tale can become a movie that can generate multiple installments. But there's a complication …

Ghostly Evolution

The original concluded with our protagonist Finn (the young actor) eliminating the villain, assisted and trained by the ghosts of those he had killed before. This situation has required 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 ghostly presence, a path that leads them by way of Freddy's domain with an ability to cross back into the physical realm enabled through nightmares. But different from the striped sweater villain, the Grabber is clearly unimaginative and entirely devoid of humour. The facial covering continues to be successfully disturbing but the production fails to make him as terrifying as he momentarily appeared in the original, trapped by convoluted and often confusing rules.

Snowy Religious Environment

Finn and his annoyingly foul-mouthed sister Gwen (the actress) face him once more while snowed in at an alpine Christian camp for kids, the follow-up also referencing toward Freddy’s one-time nemesis the camp slasher. Gwen is guided there by a ghostly image of her dead mother and what might be their late tormenter’s first victims while the brother, still attempting to handle his fury and fresh capacity for resistance, is following so he can protect her. The writing is excessively awkward in its artificial setup, awkwardly requiring to get the siblings stranded at a location that will additionally provide to histories of protagonist and antagonist, filling in details we didn't actually require or care to learn about. What also appears to be a more strategic decision to push the movie towards the similar religious audiences that transformed the Conjuring movies into massive hits, the filmmaker incorporates a faith-based component, with morality now more strongly connected with God and heaven while villainy signifies the devil and hell, religion the final defense against this type of antagonist.

Overloaded Plot

The result of these decisions is additional over-complicate a series that was already almost failing, incorporating needless complexities to what could have been a simple Friday night engine. Frequently I discovered too busy asking questions about the methods and reasons of possible and impossible events to become truly immersed. It’s a low-lift effort for the actor, whose face we never really see but he maintains authentic charisma that’s generally absent in other areas in the cast. The environment is at times remarkably immersive but the majority of the persistently unfrightening scenes are flawed by a grainy 8mm texture to distinguish dreaming from waking, an poor directorial selection that feels too self-aware and designed to reflect the horrifying unpredictability of being in an actual nightmare.

Unpersuasive Series Justification

Lasting approximately two hours, Black Phone 2, similar to its predecessor, is a unnecessarily lengthy and hugely unconvincing argument for the birth of another series. When it calls again, I recommend not answering.

• The follow-up film debuts in Australian theaters on the sixteenth of October and in the United States and United Kingdom on the seventeenth of October