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Arriving as the resurrected master of horror machine was persistently generating adaptations, regardless of quality, the original film felt like a sloppy admiration piece. Featuring a small town 70s backdrop, teenage actors, gifted youths and disturbing local antagonist, it was almost imitation and, similar to the poorest his literary works, it was also clumsily packed.

Interestingly the source was found from the author's own lineage, as it was based on a short story from his descendant, expanded into a film that was a surprise $161m hit. It was the narrative about the kidnapper, a sadistic killer of adolescents who would take pleasure in prolonging their fatal ceremony. While molestation was avoided in discussion, there was something unmistakably LGBTQ-suggestive about the antagonist and the era-specific anxieties he was clearly supposed to refer to, reinforced by the performer acting with a certain swishy, effeminate flare. But the film was too opaque to ever really admit that and even excluding that discomfort, it was overly complicated and too focused on its exhaustingly grubby nastiness to work as anything more than an undiscerning sleepover nightmare fuel.

The Sequel's Arrival In the Middle of Studio Struggles

The follow-up debuts as once-dominant genre specialists the production company are in critical demand for a hit. Lately they've encountered difficulties to make any film profitable, from their werewolf film to The Woman in the Yard to their action film to the complete commercial failure of the robotic follow-up, and so a great deal rides on whether the continuation can prove whether a compact tale can become a movie that can create a series. However, there's an issue …

Paranormal Shift

The original concluded with our Final Boy Finn (Mason Thames) defeating the antagonist, helped and guided by the apparitions of earlier casualties. This situation has required director Scott Derrickson and his co-writer C Robert Cargill to take the series and its villain in a different direction, converting a physical threat into a paranormal entity, a route that takes them through Nightmare on Elm Street with a capability to return into reality facilitated by dreams. But different from the striped sweater villain, the Grabber is clearly unimaginative and entirely devoid of humour. The disguise stays appropriately unsettling but the film struggles to make him as terrifying as he briefly was in the first, constrained by complicated and frequently unclear regulations.

Snowy Religious Environment

The main character and his annoyingly foul-mouthed sister Gwen (the performer) confront him anew while stranded due to weather at an alpine Christian camp for kids, the sequel also nodding in the direction of Jason Voorhees the camp slasher. The female lead is led there by a ghostly image of her dead mother and potentially their deceased villain's initial casualties while Finn, still trying to deal with his rage and newfound ability to fight back, is pursuing to safeguard her. The script is overly clumsy in its forced establishment, clumsily needing to get the siblings stranded at a place that will also add to backstories for both hero and villain, providing information we didn’t really need or want to know about. What also appears to be a more deliberate action to push the movie towards the similar religious audiences that transformed the Conjuring movies into huge successes, the director includes a spiritual aspect, with virtue now more directly linked with the divine and paradise while bad represents Satan and damnation, faith the ultimate weapon against a monster like this.

Over-stacked Narrative

What all of this does is additional over-complicate a story that was formerly nearly collapsing, including superfluous difficulties to what could have been a basic scary film. Regularly I noticed too busy asking questions about the hows and whys of what could or couldn’t happen to become truly immersed. It's an undemanding role for the actor, whose visage remains hidden but he possesses real screen magnetism that’s mostly missing elsewhere in the cast. The location is at times impressively atmospheric but the bulk of the persistently unfrightening scenes are damaged by a rough cinematic quality to separate sleep states from consciousness, an poor directorial selection that appears overly conscious and created to imitate the horrifying unpredictability of experiencing a real bad dream.

Unconvincing Franchise Argument

Lasting approximately two hours, the sequel, like M3gan 2.0 before it, is a needlessly long and highly implausible justification for the establishment of another series. If another installment comes, I suggest ignoring it.

• Black Phone 2 releases in Australian theaters on October 16 and in America and Britain on October 17