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Debuting as the resurrected Stephen King machine was continuing to produce screen translations, regardless of quality, the original film felt like a sloppy admiration piece. Featuring a retro suburban environment, young performers, psychic kids and disturbing local antagonist, it was close to pastiche and, similar to the poorest his literary works, it was also awkwardly crowded.

Funnily enough the source was found within the household, 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 brutal murderer of young boys who would take pleasure in prolonging the process of killing. While sexual abuse was avoided in discussion, there was something clearly non-heteronormative about the antagonist and the period references/societal fears he was clearly supposed to refer to, emphasized by Ethan Hawke acting with a noticeably camp style. But the film was too ambiguous to ever properly acknowledge this and even aside from that tension, it was overly complicated and overly enamored with its tiring griminess to work as only an mindless scary movie material.

Second Installment's Release Amidst Filmmaking Difficulties

The follow-up debuts as former horror hit-makers the studio are in urgent requirement for success. Recently they've faced challenges to make any project successful, from their werewolf film to The Woman in the Yard to Drop to the total box office disaster of the AI sequel, and so significant pressure rests on whether the continuation can prove whether a short story can become a motion picture that can create a series. But there's a complication …

Paranormal Shift

The initial movie finished with our surviving character Finn (Mason Thames) eliminating the villain, assisted and trained by the apparitions of earlier casualties. This has compelled writer-director Scott Derrickson and his writing partner Cargill to advance the story and its antagonist toward fresh territory, converting a physical threat into a supernatural one, a path that leads them via Elm Street with an ability to cross back into the physical realm facilitated by dreams. But unlike Freddy Krueger, the antagonist is clearly unimaginative and totally without wit. The mask remains effectively jarring but the film struggles to make him as terrifying as he briefly was in the initial film, constrained by convoluted and often confusing rules.

Snowy Religious Environment

The main character and his annoyingly foul-mouthed sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) encounter him again while snowed in at a mountain religious retreat for kids, the second film also acknowledging toward Freddy’s one-time nemesis Jason Voorhees. Gwen is guided there by an apparition of her deceased parent and what might be their deceased villain's initial casualties while the brother, still attempting to process his anger and fresh capacity for resistance, is following so he can protect her. The writing is overly clumsy in its forced establishment, clumsily needing to leave the brother and sister trapped at a place that will also add to histories of protagonist and antagonist, filling in details we didn't actually require or desire to understand. In what also feels like a more deliberate action to push the movie towards the similar religious audiences that transformed the Conjuring movies into huge successes, the director includes a religious element, with good now more closely associated with the creator and the afterlife while villainy signifies Satan and damnation, faith the ultimate weapon against a monster like this.

Over-stacked Narrative

What all of this does is continued over-burden a franchise that was previously close to toppling over, including superfluous difficulties to what could have been a basic scary film. Frequently I discovered excessively engaged in questioning 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 does have real screen magnetism that’s generally absent in other areas in the acting team. The environment is at times impressively atmospheric but the bulk of the consistently un-scary set-pieces are marred by a grainy 8mm texture to differentiate asleep and awake, an poor directorial selection that appears overly conscious and created to imitate the frightening randomness of experiencing a real bad dream.

Weak Continuation Rationale

At just under 2 hours, the sequel, similar to its predecessor, is a unnecessarily lengthy and extremely unpersuasive case for the creation of an additional film universe. If another installment comes, I suggest ignoring it.

• Black Phone 2 debuts in Australian cinemas on October 16 and in the US and UK on October 17