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Debuting as the revived Stephen King machine was continuing to produce screen translations, regardless of quality, the first installment felt like a uninspired homage. With its small town 70s backdrop, high school cast, gifted youths and gnarly neighbourhood villain, it was almost imitation and, comparable to the weakest King’s stories, it was also inelegantly overstuffed.

Curiously the source was found inside the family home, as it was inspired by a compact narrative from his descendant, stretched into a film that was a unexpected blockbuster. It was the story of the Grabber, a cruel slayer of children who would enjoy extending their fatal ceremony. While sexual abuse was avoided in discussion, there was something clearly non-heteronormative about the antagonist and the historical touchpoints/moral panics he was clearly supposed to refer to, reinforced by the performer portraying him with a distinctly flamboyant manner. But the film was too vague to ever properly acknowledge this and even excluding that discomfort, it was too busily plotted and overly enamored with its tiring griminess to work as anything more than an mindless scary movie material.

The Sequel's Arrival During Production Company Challenges

The next chapter comes as once-dominant genre specialists Blumhouse are in desperate need of a win. This year they’ve struggled to make any film profitable, from the monster movie to The Woman in the Yard to Drop to the utter financial disappointment of the robotic follow-up, and so a great deal rides on whether the sequel can prove whether a compact tale can become a film that can create a series. However, there's an issue …

Ghostly Evolution

The original concluded with our Final Boy Finn (Mason Thames) eliminating the villain, helped and guided by the spirits of previous victims. This situation has required filmmaker Derrickson and his co-writer C Robert Cargill to advance the story and its killer to a new place, transforming a human antagonist into a supernatural one, a direction that guides them by way of Freddy's domain with a capability to return into reality facilitated by dreams. But unlike Freddy Krueger, the Grabber is clearly unimaginative and entirely devoid of humour. The disguise stays effectively jarring but the film struggles to make him as scary as he briefly was in the first, constrained by complex and typically puzzling guidelines.

Alpine Christian Camp Setting

Finn and his irritatingly profane sibling Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) face him once more while snowed in at a high-altitude faith-based facility for kids, the second film also acknowledging in the direction of Jason Voorhees the Friday the 13th antagonist. The female lead is led there by a vision of her late mother and what could be their dead antagonist's original prey while the protagonist, continuing to process his anger and recently discovered defensive skills, is following so he can protect her. The writing is too ungainly in its contrived scene-setting, awkwardly requiring to get the siblings stranded at a place that will also add to histories of protagonist and antagonist, supplying particulars we weren't particularly interested in or want to know about. In what also feels like a more deliberate action to guide the production in the direction of the same church-attending crowds that made the Conjuring series into major blockbusters, the director includes a religious element, with morality now more strongly connected with God and heaven while villainy signifies Satan and damnation, faith the ultimate weapon against this type of antagonist.

Overloaded Plot

What all of this does is continued over-burden a series that was already almost failing, incorporating needless complexities to what could have been a simple Friday night engine. Regularly I noticed excessively engaged in questioning about the processes and motivations of possible and impossible events to become truly immersed. It's an undemanding role for Hawke, whose face we never really see but he does have authentic charisma that’s generally absent in other areas in the cast. The setting is at times impressively atmospheric but the bulk of the consistently un-scary set-pieces are damaged by a gritty film stock appearance to separate sleep states from consciousness, an ineffective stylistic choice that feels too self-aware and designed to reflect the horrifying unpredictability of living through a genuine night terror.

Weak Continuation Rationale

At just under 2 hours, the follow-up, like M3gan 2.0 before it, is a unnecessarily lengthy and extremely unpersuasive argument for the birth of an additional film universe. If another installment comes, I suggest ignoring it.

• Black Phone 2 debuts in Australian cinemas on October 16 and in America and Britain on 17 October