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Arriving as the revived Stephen King machine was persistently generating screen translations, quality be damned, the original film felt like a uninspired homage. Set against a small town 70s backdrop, young performers, gifted youths and disturbing local antagonist, it was close to pastiche and, comparable to the weakest the author's tales, it was also inelegantly overstuffed.

Curiously the source was found within the household, as it was adapted from a brief tale from his descendant, stretched into a film that was a surprise $161m hit. It was the tale of the antagonist, a brutal murderer of children who would enjoy extending their fatal ceremony. While assault was not referenced, there was something inescapably queer-coded about the villain and the period references/societal fears he was intended to symbolize, strengthened by Ethan Hawke playing him with a certain swishy, effeminate flare. But the film was too vague to ever really admit that and even excluding that discomfort, it was overly complicated and too focused on its wearisome vileness to work as anything beyond an mindless scary movie material.

The Sequel's Arrival During Studio Struggles

The follow-up debuts as former horror hit-makers Blumhouse are in desperate need of a win. This year they’ve struggled to make any project successful, from Wolf Man to their thriller to the adventure movie to the total box office disaster of the AI sequel, and so a great deal rides on whether the sequel can prove whether a compact tale can become a movie that can spawn a franchise. There’s just one slight problem …

Supernatural Transformation

The first film ended with our surviving character Finn (the performer) eliminating the villain, assisted and trained by the ghosts of those he had killed before. This has compelled filmmaker Derrickson and his collaborator 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 an ability to cross back into the physical realm enabled through nightmares. But different from the striped sweater villain, the Grabber is markedly uninventive and completely lacking comedy. The mask remains appropriately unsettling but the production fails to make him as scary as he temporarily seemed in the initial film, trapped by complex and typically puzzling guidelines.

Mountain Retreat Location

The protagonist and his annoyingly foul-mouthed sister Gwen (the performer) face him once more while stranded due to weather at a high-altitude faith-based facility for kids, the second film also acknowledging regarding the hockey mask killer the Friday the 13th antagonist. The sister is directed there by a vision of her late mother and what might be their deceased villain's initial casualties while the brother, still attempting to process his anger and recently discovered defensive skills, is pursuing to safeguard her. The writing is too ungainly in its artificial setup, clumsily needing to get the siblings stranded at a place that will also add to background information for protagonist and antagonist, filling in details we didn’t really need or want to know about. In what also feels like a more deliberate action to push the movie towards the similar religious audiences that turned the Conjuring franchise into massive hits, Derrickson adds a faith-based component, with morality now more strongly connected with the divine and paradise while villainy signifies the devil and hell, religion the final defense against this type of antagonist.

Over-stacked Narrative

What all of this does is further over-stack a franchise that was previously close to toppling over, including superfluous difficulties to what should be a straightforward horror movie. I often found myself overly occupied with inquiries about the hows and whys of possible and impossible events to become truly immersed. It's an undemanding role for Hawke, whose features stay concealed but he maintains real screen magnetism that’s mostly missing elsewhere in the cast. The location is at times atmospherically grand but the majority of the persistently unfrightening scenes are damaged by a grainy 8mm texture to differentiate asleep and awake, an poor directorial selection that feels too self-aware and designed to reflect the terrifying uncertainty of living through a genuine night terror.

Weak Continuation Rationale

Running nearly 120 minutes, Black Phone 2, similar to its predecessor, is a needlessly long and extremely unpersuasive justification for the establishment of an additional film universe. If another installment comes, I suggest ignoring it.

• The follow-up film releases in Australian cinemas on 16 October and in the US and UK on 17 October