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Arriving as the resurrected bestselling author machine was continuing to produce film versions, regardless of quality, the original film felt like a sloppy admiration piece. Featuring a small town 70s backdrop, young performers, gifted youths and gnarly neighbourhood villain, it was almost imitation and, similar to the poorest his literary works, it was also clumsily packed.

Curiously the call came from within the household, as it was adapted from a brief tale from his descendant, stretched into a film that was a shocking commercial success. It was the tale of the antagonist, a sadistic killer of adolescents who would revel in elongating their fatal ceremony. While assault was not referenced, there was something unmistakably LGBTQ-suggestive about the villain and the historical touchpoints/moral panics he was intended to symbolize, emphasized by the actor playing him with a distinctly flamboyant manner. But the film was too opaque to ever really admit that and even without that uneasiness, it was excessively convoluted and too focused on its wearisome vileness to work as only an undiscerning sleepover nightmare fuel.

The Sequel's Arrival Amidst Production Company Challenges

Its sequel arrives as former horror hit-makers the production company are in desperate need of a win. Lately they've encountered difficulties to make any film profitable, from Wolf Man to The Woman in the Yard to Drop to the total box office disaster of the robotic follow-up, and so significant pressure rests on whether Black Phone 2 can prove whether a short story can become a film that can spawn a franchise. But there's a complication …

Paranormal Shift

The first film ended with our Final Boy Finn (the young actor) eliminating the villain, helped and guided by the ghosts of those he had killed before. This has compelled writer-director Scott Derrickson and his collaborator C Robert Cargill to take the series and its killer to a new place, turning a flesh and blood villain into a paranormal entity, a path that leads them by way of Freddy's domain with a power to travel into the real world made possible by sleep. But different from the striped sweater villain, the villain is clearly unimaginative and entirely devoid of humour. The mask remains effectively jarring but the movie has difficulty to make him as terrifying as he briefly was in the original, limited by complicated and frequently unclear regulations.

Mountain Retreat Location

The main character and his irritatingly profane sibling Gwen (the performer) encounter him again while stranded due to weather at an alpine Christian camp for kids, the second film also acknowledging in the direction of Jason Voorhees the Friday the 13th antagonist. Gwen is guided there by a vision of her late mother and what might be their late tormenter’s first victims while the protagonist, continuing to deal with his rage and newfound ability to fight back, is pursuing to safeguard her. The screenplay is overly clumsy in its artificial setup, inelegantly demanding to leave the brother and sister trapped at a setting that will further contribute to backstories for both hero and villain, providing information we didn't actually require or care to learn about. In what also feels like a more calculated move to push the movie towards the comparable faith-based viewers that made the Conjuring series into major blockbusters, Derrickson adds a spiritual aspect, with virtue now more directly linked with the creator and the afterlife while bad represents Satan and damnation, belief the supreme tool against a monster like this.

Overloaded Plot

The consequence of these choices is continued over-burden a series that was already close to toppling over, adding unnecessary complications to what ought to be a basic scary film. I often found myself overly occupied with inquiries about the processes and motivations of possible and impossible events to experience genuine engagement. It's minimal work for Hawke, whose features stay concealed but he maintains real screen magnetism that’s typically lacking in other aspects in the acting team. The environment is at times impressively atmospheric but the bulk of the continuously non-terrifying sequences are damaged by a rough cinematic quality to separate sleep states from consciousness, an ineffective stylistic choice that appears overly conscious and created to imitate the terrifying uncertainty of experiencing a real bad dream.

Weak Continuation Rationale

Running nearly 120 minutes, the follow-up, comparable to earlier failures, is a unnecessarily lengthy and hugely unconvincing argument for the birth of an additional film universe. When it calls again, I suggest ignoring it.

• The sequel releases in Australian theaters on the sixteenth of October and in the US and UK on October 17