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Arriving as the resurrected Stephen King machine was still churning out film versions, quality be damned, the first installment felt like a uninspired homage. Featuring a retro suburban environment, young performers, psychic kids and gnarly neighbourhood villain, it was close to pastiche and, similar to the poorest his literary works, it was also clumsily packed.

Curiously the call came from from the author's own lineage, as it was adapted from a brief tale from King’s son Joe Hill, over-extended into a film that was a unexpected blockbuster. It was the narrative about the kidnapper, a sadistic killer of adolescents who would take pleasure in prolonging the process of killing. While assault was avoided in discussion, there was something inescapably queer-coded about the antagonist and the period references/societal fears he was obviously meant to represent, strengthened by Ethan Hawke portraying him with a noticeably camp style. But the film was too opaque to ever really admit that and even aside from that tension, it was too busily plotted and too focused on its wearisome vileness to work as anything more than an mindless scary movie material.

Follow-up Film's Debut During Filmmaking Difficulties

The next chapter comes as former horror hit-makers the studio are in desperate need of a win. Recently they've faced challenges to make anything work, from Wolf Man to their thriller to the adventure movie to the total box office disaster of the AI sequel, and so significant pressure rests on whether the sequel can prove whether a brief narrative 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 young actor) killing the Grabber, assisted and trained by the apparitions of earlier casualties. This has compelled director Scott Derrickson and his co-writer C Robert Cargill to advance the story and its villain in a different direction, transforming a human antagonist into a supernatural one, a direction that guides them via Elm Street with a power to travel into the real world enabled through nightmares. But different from the striped sweater villain, the Grabber is noticeably uncreative and entirely devoid of humour. The facial covering continues to be appropriately unsettling but the movie has difficulty to make him as frightening as he briefly was in the original, constrained by complicated and frequently unclear regulations.

Mountain Retreat Location

The protagonist and his annoyingly foul-mouthed sister Gwen (the performer) encounter him again while snowed in at a high-altitude faith-based facility for kids, the sequel also nodding in the direction of Jason Voorhees the camp slasher. Gwen is guided there by an apparition of her deceased parent and potentially their deceased villain's initial casualties while the brother, still attempting to process his anger and fresh capacity for resistance, is tracking to defend her. The screenplay is too ungainly in its artificial setup, awkwardly requiring to get the siblings stranded at a setting that will further contribute to background information for protagonist and antagonist, supplying particulars we didn't actually require or want to know about. What also appears to be a more calculated move to push the movie towards the comparable faith-based viewers that turned the Conjuring franchise into major blockbusters, the director includes a religious element, with morality now more strongly connected with God and heaven while villainy signifies the demonic and punishment, faith the ultimate weapon against this type of antagonist.

Overcomplicated Story

What all of this does is additional over-complicate a story that was formerly close to toppling over, incorporating needless complexities to what ought to be a basic scary film. Frequently I discovered overly occupied with inquiries about the methods and reasons of feasible and unfeasible occurrences to feel all that involved. It's an undemanding role for the performer, whose face we never really see but he does have real screen magnetism that’s typically lacking in other aspects in the acting team. The location is at times impressively atmospheric but most of the persistently unfrightening scenes are damaged by a gritty film stock appearance to separate sleep states from consciousness, an unsuccessful artistic decision that appears overly conscious and created to imitate the frightening randomness of living through a genuine night terror.

Unconvincing Franchise Argument

Lasting approximately two hours, the sequel, comparable to earlier failures, is a needlessly long and extremely unpersuasive argument for the birth of another series. When it calls again, I recommend not answering.

• Black Phone 2 debuts in Australia's movie houses on the sixteenth of October and in America and Britain on 17 October