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Coming as the revived Stephen King machine was continuing to produce screen translations, regardless of quality, the original film felt like a lazy fanboy tribute. With its retro suburban environment, high school cast, telepathic children and gnarly neighbourhood villain, it was nearly parody and, similar to the poorest the author's tales, it was also inelegantly overstuffed.

Funnily enough the source was found within the household, as it was based on a short story from the author's offspring, over-extended into a film that was a unexpected blockbuster. It was the tale of the antagonist, a sadistic killer of adolescents who would revel in elongating the process of killing. While sexual abuse was never mentioned, there was something unmistakably LGBTQ-suggestive about the villain and the period references/societal fears he was intended to symbolize, emphasized by the actor acting with a distinctly flamboyant manner. But the film was too opaque to ever properly acknowledge this and even without that uneasiness, it was too busily plotted and overly enamored with its exhaustingly grubby nastiness to work as anything more than an undiscerning sleepover nightmare fuel.

Second Installment's Release During Filmmaking Difficulties

The next chapter comes as once-dominant genre specialists the studio are in urgent requirement for success. Recently they've faced challenges to make any project successful, from their werewolf film to the suspense story to the adventure movie to the utter financial disappointment of the AI sequel, and so significant pressure rests on whether the sequel can prove whether a short story can become a film that can spawn a franchise. However, there's an issue …

Paranormal Shift

The initial movie finished with our surviving character Finn (the performer) eliminating the villain, helped and guided by the spirits of previous victims. This situation has required filmmaker Derrickson and his writing partner Cargill to take the series and its villain in a different direction, turning a flesh and blood villain into a supernatural one, a direction that guides them by way of Freddy's domain with an ability to cross back into the real world enabled through nightmares. But in contrast to the dream killer, the villain is markedly uninventive and entirely devoid of humour. The mask remains successfully disturbing but the movie has difficulty to make him as scary as he briefly was in the first, constrained by complicated and frequently unclear regulations.

Alpine Christian Camp Setting

The protagonist and his irritatingly profane sibling Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) face him once more while trapped by snow at an alpine Christian camp for kids, the follow-up also referencing in the direction of Jason Voorhees the camp slasher. The sister is directed there by an apparition of her deceased parent and what could be their late tormenter’s first victims while the brother, still attempting to handle his fury and recently discovered defensive skills, is following so he can protect her. The writing is overly clumsy in its forced establishment, awkwardly requiring to get the siblings stranded at a place that will also add to backstories for both protagonist and antagonist, providing information we didn’t really need or desire to understand. In what also feels like a more strategic decision to edge the film toward the same church-attending crowds that turned the Conjuring franchise into massive hits, the filmmaker incorporates a spiritual aspect, with good now more closely associated with the divine and paradise while villainy signifies Satan and damnation, faith the ultimate weapon against this type of antagonist.

Over-stacked Narrative

The consequence of these choices is further over-stack a series that was already nearly collapsing, including superfluous difficulties to what should be a basic scary film. Regularly I noticed overly occupied with inquiries about the processes and motivations of what could or couldn’t happen to feel all that involved. It's an undemanding role for Hawke, whose face we never really see but he possesses real screen magnetism that’s mostly missing elsewhere in the cast. The setting is at times impressively atmospheric but the bulk of the persistently unfrightening scenes are flawed by a rough cinematic quality to distinguish dreaming from waking, an unsuccessful artistic decision that seems excessively meta and created to imitate the terrifying uncertainty of experiencing a real bad dream.

Unpersuasive Series Justification

Lasting approximately two hours, Black Phone 2, like M3gan 2.0 before it, is a needlessly long and highly implausible argument for the birth of an additional film universe. If another installment comes, I recommend not answering.

• The follow-up film releases in Australian cinemas on the sixteenth of October and in the US and UK on the seventeenth of October