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Debuting as the resurrected Stephen King machine was still churning out screen translations, quality be damned, the first installment felt like a lazy fanboy tribute. With its small town 70s backdrop, teenage actors, telepathic children and gnarly neighbourhood villain, it was almost imitation and, comparable to the weakest his literary works, it was also clumsily packed.

Curiously the source was found within the household, as it was based on a short story from King’s son Joe Hill, expanded into a film that was a surprise $161m hit. It was the tale of the antagonist, a cruel slayer of young boys who would enjoy extending the ritual of their deaths. While assault was never mentioned, there was something inescapably queer-coded about the villain and the era-specific anxieties he was clearly supposed to refer to, strengthened by the performer portraying him with a distinctly flamboyant manner. But the film was too vague to ever fully embrace this aspect and even excluding that discomfort, it was overly complicated and too focused on its exhaustingly grubby nastiness to work as only an mindless scary movie material.

Second Installment's Release During Filmmaking Difficulties

Its sequel arrives as once-dominant genre specialists the production company are in desperate need of a win. Recently they've faced challenges to make any project successful, from their werewolf film to The Woman in the Yard to their action film to the total box office disaster of the AI sequel, and so much depends on whether the continuation can prove whether a compact tale can become a motion picture that can create a series. But there's a complication …

Supernatural Transformation

The first film ended with our protagonist Finn (the performer) defeating the antagonist, assisted and trained by the spirits of previous victims. This has compelled writer-director Scott Derrickson and his co-writer C Robert Cargill to take the series and its antagonist toward fresh territory, transforming a human antagonist into a paranormal entity, a route that takes them by way of Freddy's domain with a power to travel into reality enabled through nightmares. 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 scary as he briefly was in the original, constrained by complicated and frequently unclear regulations.

Alpine Christian Camp Setting

Finn and his frustratingly crude sister Gwen (the actress) encounter him again while snowed in at a mountain religious retreat for kids, the sequel also nodding toward Freddy’s one-time nemesis the Friday the 13th antagonist. The sister is directed there by an apparition of her deceased parent and potentially their deceased villain's initial casualties while Finn, still trying to deal with his rage and recently discovered defensive skills, is following so he can protect her. The writing is excessively awkward in its forced establishment, clumsily needing to get the siblings stranded at a setting that will further contribute to histories of hero and villain, providing information we didn’t really need or want to know about. Additionally seeming like a more deliberate action to push the movie towards the comparable faith-based viewers that made the Conjuring series into major blockbusters, Derrickson adds a religious element, with virtue now more directly linked with the creator and the afterlife while evil symbolizes Satan and damnation, faith the ultimate weapon against such a creature.

Overcomplicated Story

The consequence of these choices is continued over-burden a story that was formerly nearly collapsing, incorporating needless complexities to what should be a simple Friday night engine. I often found myself excessively engaged in questioning about the processes and motivations of possible and impossible events to become truly immersed. It's minimal work for the performer, whose face we never really see but he maintains real screen magnetism that’s generally absent in other areas in the acting team. The environment is at times impressively atmospheric but the majority of the persistently unfrightening scenes are damaged by a grainy 8mm texture to distinguish dreaming from waking, an unsuccessful artistic decision that seems excessively meta and constructed to mirror the terrifying uncertainty of experiencing a real bad dream.

Unconvincing Franchise Argument

Lasting approximately two hours, the sequel, like M3gan 2.0 before it, is a excessively extended and hugely unconvincing argument for the birth of a new franchise. The next time it rings, I recommend not answering.

• Black Phone 2 is out in Australian cinemas on the sixteenth of October and in the US and UK on the seventeenth of October