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Coming as the re-activated master of horror machine was continuing to produce film versions, quality be damned, the original film felt like a lazy fanboy tribute. Featuring a retro suburban environment, young performers, psychic kids and twisted community predator, it was close to pastiche and, similar to the poorest the author's tales, it was also awkwardly crowded.

Interestingly the inspiration originated from within the household, as it was inspired by a compact narrative from King’s son Joe Hill, stretched into a film that was a shocking commercial success. It was the tale of the antagonist, a cruel slayer of adolescents who would enjoy extending their fatal ceremony. While assault was not referenced, there was something clearly non-heteronormative about the antagonist and the historical touchpoints/moral panics he was intended to symbolize, reinforced by the performer acting with a noticeably camp style. But the film was too opaque to ever really admit that and even without that uneasiness, it was excessively convoluted and overly enamored with its exhaustingly grubby nastiness to work as anything beyond an unthinking horror entertainment.

The Sequel's Arrival During Production Company Challenges

The follow-up debuts as once-dominant genre specialists the production company are in urgent requirement for success. Recently they've faced challenges to make any project successful, from the monster movie to the suspense story to the adventure movie to the complete commercial failure of M3gan 2.0, and so a great deal rides on whether the sequel can prove whether a brief narrative can become a movie that can create a series. But there's a complication …

Ghostly Evolution

The first film ended with our Final Boy Finn (the performer) defeating the antagonist, assisted and trained by the ghosts of those he had killed before. It’s forced director Scott Derrickson and his collaborator C Robert Cargill to move the franchise and its villain in a different direction, converting a physical threat into a paranormal entity, a path that leads them through Nightmare on Elm Street with a power to travel into the physical realm made possible by sleep. But unlike Freddy Krueger, the Grabber is markedly uninventive and completely lacking comedy. The facial covering continues to be appropriately unsettling but the film struggles to make him as terrifying as he briefly was in the original, constrained by complex and typically puzzling guidelines.

Snowy Religious Environment

The main character and his frustratingly crude sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) confront him anew while trapped by snow at a high-altitude faith-based facility for kids, the second film also acknowledging in the direction of Jason Voorhees the Friday the 13th antagonist. The female lead is led there by a ghostly image of her dead mother and what might be their dead antagonist's original prey while the protagonist, continuing to process his anger and recently discovered defensive skills, is following so he can protect her. The writing is overly clumsy in its contrived scene-setting, inelegantly demanding to leave the brother and sister trapped at a location that will additionally provide to backstories for both protagonist and antagonist, filling in details we didn't actually require or desire to understand. Additionally seeming like a more deliberate action to guide the production in the direction of the comparable faith-based viewers that turned the Conjuring franchise into major blockbusters, the filmmaker incorporates a religious element, with good now more closely associated with the divine and paradise while bad represents the devil and hell, religion the final defense against this type of antagonist.

Over-stacked Narrative

The consequence of these choices is additional over-complicate a franchise that was previously close to toppling over, adding unnecessary complications to what should be a simple Friday night engine. I often found myself overly occupied with inquiries about the hows and whys of what could or couldn’t happen to experience genuine engagement. It's an undemanding role for Hawke, whose features stay concealed but he does have genuine presence that’s typically lacking in other aspects in the cast. The setting is at times remarkably immersive but the majority of the persistently unfrightening scenes are marred by a rough cinematic quality to separate sleep states from consciousness, an poor directorial selection that seems excessively meta and designed to reflect the frightening randomness of experiencing a real bad dream.

Unconvincing Franchise Argument

Lasting approximately two hours, the follow-up, comparable to earlier failures, is a needlessly long and extremely unpersuasive justification for the establishment of an additional film universe. When it calls again, I suggest ignoring it.

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