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Debuting as the resurrected bestselling author machine was continuing to produce screen translations, quality be damned, the first installment felt like a uninspired homage. Featuring a retro suburban environment, high school cast, gifted youths and twisted community predator, it was almost imitation and, similar to the poorest the author's tales, it was also inelegantly overstuffed.

Interestingly the call came from inside the family home, as it was based on a short story from the author's offspring, expanded into a film that was a shocking commercial success. It was the tale of the antagonist, a sadistic killer of children who would enjoy extending the process of killing. While sexual abuse was not referenced, there was something unmistakably LGBTQ-suggestive about the character and the era-specific anxieties he was clearly supposed to refer to, emphasized by the performer portraying him with a distinctly flamboyant manner. But the film was too ambiguous to ever fully embrace this aspect and even excluding that discomfort, it was excessively convoluted and overly enamored with 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 the production company are in desperate need of a win. Lately they've encountered difficulties to make any project successful, from Wolf Man to The Woman in the Yard to the adventure movie to the complete commercial failure of M3gan 2.0, and so much depends on whether the sequel can prove whether a compact tale can become a film that can create a series. There’s just one slight problem …

Ghostly Evolution

The first film ended with our protagonist Finn (the performer) killing the Grabber, helped and guided by the apparitions of earlier casualties. This situation has required filmmaker Derrickson and his collaborator C Robert Cargill to move the franchise and its killer to a new place, turning a flesh and blood villain into a ghostly presence, a path that leads them through Nightmare on Elm Street with a capability to return into reality made possible by sleep. But different from the striped sweater villain, the Grabber is clearly unimaginative and completely lacking comedy. The facial covering continues to be appropriately unsettling but the film struggles to make him as terrifying as he momentarily appeared in the first, constrained by complex and typically puzzling guidelines.

Mountain Retreat Location

The main character and his frustratingly crude sister Gwen (the actress) confront him anew while snowed in at an alpine Christian camp for kids, the sequel also nodding toward Freddy’s one-time nemesis Jason Voorhees. Gwen is guided there by a vision of her late mother and potentially their deceased villain's initial casualties while the protagonist, continuing to process his anger and fresh capacity for resistance, is following so he can protect her. The writing is excessively awkward in its artificial setup, awkwardly requiring to get the siblings stranded at a setting that will further contribute to background information for hero and villain, filling in details we weren't particularly interested in or care to learn about. What also appears to be a more calculated move to push the movie towards the comparable faith-based viewers that made the Conjuring series into massive hits, Derrickson adds a faith-based component, with morality now more strongly connected with the creator and the afterlife while evil symbolizes the devil and hell, faith the ultimate weapon against such a creature.

Overloaded Plot

The consequence of these choices is additional over-complicate a franchise that was previously close to toppling over, including superfluous difficulties to what could have been a straightforward horror movie. I often found myself overly occupied with inquiries about the methods and reasons of what could or couldn’t happen to become truly immersed. It's an undemanding role for the actor, whose features stay concealed but he possesses authentic charisma that’s mostly missing elsewhere in the cast. The setting is at times atmospherically grand but the majority of the continuously non-terrifying sequences are marred by a rough cinematic quality to distinguish dreaming from waking, an ineffective stylistic choice that seems excessively meta and constructed to mirror the horrifying unpredictability of experiencing a real bad dream.

Unconvincing Franchise Argument

At just under 2 hours, the follow-up, similar to its predecessor, is a needlessly long and extremely unpersuasive argument for the birth of an additional film universe. If another installment comes, I suggest ignoring it.

• Black Phone 2 releases in Australian theaters on 16 October and in the US and UK on 17 October