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Arriving as the revived master of horror machine was persistently generating screen translations, regardless of quality, the first installment felt like a lazy fanboy tribute. With its retro suburban environment, teenage actors, gifted youths and disturbing local antagonist, it was almost imitation and, similar to the poorest his literary works, it was also awkwardly crowded.

Interestingly the source was found inside the family home, as it was adapted from a brief tale from his descendant, stretched into a film that was a unexpected blockbuster. It was the story of the Grabber, a cruel slayer of children who would revel in elongating the process of killing. While assault was never mentioned, there was something clearly non-heteronormative about the villain and the historical touchpoints/moral panics he was obviously meant to represent, reinforced by the performer acting with a certain swishy, effeminate flare. But the film was too ambiguous to ever properly acknowledge this and even aside from that tension, it was overly complicated and too high on its exhaustingly grubby nastiness to work as anything more than an unthinking horror entertainment.

Follow-up Film's Debut Amidst Filmmaking Difficulties

The next chapter comes as previous scary movie successes Blumhouse are in critical demand for a hit. Recently they've faced challenges to make any project successful, from Wolf Man to The Woman in the Yard to Drop to the total box office disaster of the robotic follow-up, and so significant pressure rests on whether Black Phone 2 can prove whether a brief narrative can become a movie that can create a series. However, there's an issue …

Ghostly Evolution

The initial movie finished with our Final Boy Finn (the performer) eliminating the villain, supported and coached by the ghosts of those he had killed before. This has compelled writer-director Scott Derrickson and his collaborator C Robert Cargill to move the franchise and its killer to a new place, transforming a human antagonist into a ghostly presence, a route that takes them by way of Freddy's domain with a power to travel into reality enabled through nightmares. But unlike Freddy Krueger, the Grabber is clearly unimaginative and completely lacking comedy. The mask remains successfully disturbing but the production fails to make him as terrifying as he briefly was in the original, trapped by complex and typically puzzling guidelines.

Alpine Christian Camp Setting

The main character and his frustratingly crude sister Gwen (the performer) encounter him again while snowed in at a mountain religious retreat for kids, the follow-up also referencing regarding the hockey mask killer the camp slasher. The sister is directed there by an apparition of her deceased parent and what might be their late tormenter’s first victims while Finn, still trying to handle his fury and recently discovered defensive skills, is tracking to defend her. The screenplay is excessively awkward in its contrived scene-setting, clumsily needing to get the siblings stranded at a place that will also add to histories of hero and villain, filling in details we didn’t really need or want to know about. Additionally seeming like a more strategic decision to push the movie towards the comparable faith-based viewers that transformed the Conjuring movies into major blockbusters, the director includes a religious element, with virtue now more directly linked with the divine and paradise while evil symbolizes the demonic and punishment, belief the supreme tool against such a creature.

Over-stacked Narrative

The result of these decisions is continued over-burden a series that was already nearly collapsing, adding unnecessary complications to what could have been a simple Friday night engine. I often found myself excessively engaged in questioning about the hows and whys of what could or couldn’t happen to become truly immersed. It's minimal work for the actor, whose visage remains hidden but he possesses authentic charisma that’s mostly missing elsewhere in the ensemble. The environment is at times atmospherically grand but the majority of the continuously non-terrifying sequences are marred by a gritty film stock appearance to distinguish dreaming from waking, an ineffective stylistic choice that feels too self-aware and created to imitate the frightening randomness of being in an actual nightmare.

Unpersuasive Series Justification

At just under 2 hours, the follow-up, like M3gan 2.0 before it, is a unnecessarily lengthy and hugely unconvincing argument for the birth of an additional film universe. When it calls again, I advise letting it go to voicemail.

• The sequel is out in Australian cinemas on the sixteenth of October and in America and Britain on the seventeenth of October