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Coming as the resurrected master of horror machine was still churning out adaptations, without concern for excellence, the first installment felt like a uninspired homage. With its retro suburban environment, teenage actors, psychic kids and twisted community predator, it was close to pastiche and, comparable to the weakest King’s stories, it was also awkwardly crowded.

Interestingly the inspiration originated from inside the family home, as it was based on a short story from King’s son Joe Hill, stretched into a film that was a surprise $161m hit. It was the tale of the antagonist, a sadistic killer of young boys who would enjoy extending the ritual of their deaths. While molestation was not referenced, there was something unmistakably LGBTQ-suggestive about the character and the era-specific anxieties he was intended to symbolize, reinforced by the performer playing him with a noticeably camp style. But the film was too opaque to ever fully embrace this aspect and even excluding that discomfort, it was too busily plotted and overly enamored with its wearisome vileness to work as anything beyond an undiscerning sleepover nightmare fuel.

The Sequel's Arrival In the Middle of Production Company Challenges

Its sequel arrives as former horror hit-makers the production company are in desperate need of a win. This year they’ve struggled to make any project successful, from Wolf Man to The Woman in the Yard to Drop to the complete commercial failure of the robotic follow-up, and so much depends on whether Black Phone 2 can prove whether a compact tale can become a movie that can spawn a franchise. However, there's an issue …

Ghostly Evolution

The first film ended with our Final Boy Finn (the performer) killing the Grabber, assisted and trained by the ghosts of those he had killed before. This situation has required filmmaker Derrickson and his writing partner Cargill to move the franchise and its killer to a new place, turning a flesh and blood villain into a supernatural one, a path that leads them through Nightmare on Elm Street with an ability to cross back into the physical realm enabled through nightmares. But unlike Freddy Krueger, the villain is markedly uninventive and totally without wit. The disguise stays appropriately unsettling but the movie has difficulty to make him as terrifying as he momentarily appeared in the first, limited by complex and typically puzzling guidelines.

Alpine Christian Camp Setting

Finn and his annoyingly foul-mouthed sister Gwen (the actress) confront him anew while stranded due to weather at a mountain religious retreat 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 the brother, still attempting to process his anger and newfound ability to fight back, is pursuing to safeguard her. The screenplay is overly clumsy in its artificial setup, clumsily needing to maroon the main characters at a setting that will further contribute to backstories for both protagonist and antagonist, filling in details we didn't actually require or desire to understand. What also appears to be a more deliberate action to push the movie towards the comparable faith-based viewers that turned the Conjuring franchise into massive hits, the director includes a faith-based component, with good now more closely associated with the divine and paradise while bad represents Satan and damnation, faith the ultimate weapon against such a creature.

Overloaded Plot

The result of these decisions is further over-stack a series that was already close to toppling over, incorporating needless complexities to what ought to be a basic scary film. Frequently I discovered too busy asking questions about the processes and motivations of what could or couldn’t happen to experience genuine engagement. It’s a low-lift effort for Hawke, whose face we never really see but he possesses real screen magnetism that’s mostly missing elsewhere in the acting team. The location is at times atmospherically grand but most of the continuously non-terrifying sequences are flawed by a grainy 8mm texture to separate sleep states from consciousness, an poor directorial selection that appears overly conscious and constructed to mirror the frightening randomness of living through a genuine night terror.

Weak Continuation Rationale

At just under 2 hours, the sequel, like M3gan 2.0 before it, is a unnecessarily lengthy and hugely unconvincing justification for the establishment of another series. If another installment comes, I suggest ignoring it.

• The sequel releases in Australia's movie houses on October 16 and in the US and UK on 17 October