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Arriving as the resurrected bestselling author machine was continuing to produce film versions, regardless of quality, the original film felt like a uninspired homage. With its 1970s small town setting, teenage actors, telepathic children and disturbing local antagonist, it was close to pastiche and, similar to the poorest his literary works, it was also awkwardly crowded.

Curiously the call came from within the household, as it was adapted from a brief tale 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 adolescents who would revel in elongating their fatal ceremony. While sexual abuse was never mentioned, there was something clearly non-heteronormative about the character and the period references/societal fears he was intended to symbolize, strengthened by Ethan Hawke playing him with a noticeably camp style. But the film was too ambiguous to ever properly acknowledge this and even without that uneasiness, it was excessively convoluted and too high on its exhaustingly grubby nastiness to work as anything more than an undiscerning sleepover nightmare fuel.

The Sequel's Arrival In the Middle of Studio Struggles

The follow-up debuts as previous scary movie successes the studio are in urgent requirement for success. Recently they've faced challenges to make any project successful, from the monster movie to The Woman in the Yard to Drop to the complete commercial failure of the robotic follow-up, and so much depends on whether Black Phone 2 can prove whether a short story can become a movie that can spawn a franchise. However, there's an issue …

Supernatural Transformation

The original concluded with our Final Boy Finn (the performer) killing the Grabber, assisted and trained by the ghosts of those he had killed before. It’s forced filmmaker Derrickson and his writing partner Cargill to take the series and its antagonist toward fresh territory, turning a flesh and blood villain into a ghostly presence, a direction that guides them through Nightmare on Elm Street with a capability to return into the physical realm facilitated by dreams. But in contrast to the dream killer, the Grabber is noticeably uncreative and entirely devoid of humour. The mask remains appropriately unsettling but the film struggles to make him as frightening as he momentarily appeared in the first, limited by complicated and frequently unclear regulations.

Mountain Retreat Location

The main character and his annoyingly foul-mouthed sister Gwen (the actress) encounter him again while stranded due to weather at a mountain religious retreat for kids, the second film also acknowledging regarding the hockey mask killer the camp slasher. The sister is directed there by a ghostly image of her dead mother and what might be their dead antagonist's original prey while the brother, still attempting to process his anger and recently discovered defensive skills, is pursuing to safeguard her. The screenplay is overly clumsy in its forced establishment, clumsily needing to leave the brother and sister trapped at a location that will additionally provide to backstories for both main character and enemy, providing information we weren't particularly interested in or desire to understand. Additionally seeming like a more strategic decision to edge the film toward the comparable faith-based viewers that made the Conjuring series into huge successes, Derrickson adds a religious element, with virtue now more directly linked with God and heaven while bad represents Satan and damnation, belief the supreme tool against this type of antagonist.

Overloaded Plot

What all of this does is further over-stack a series that was already nearly collapsing, incorporating needless complexities to what should be a straightforward horror movie. Regularly I noticed overly occupied with inquiries about the processes and motivations of what could or couldn’t happen to experience genuine engagement. It's minimal work for Hawke, whose features stay concealed but he possesses real screen magnetism that’s typically lacking in other aspects in the cast. The environment is at times impressively atmospheric but the majority of the continuously non-terrifying sequences are flawed by a rough cinematic quality to distinguish dreaming from waking, an ineffective stylistic choice that appears overly conscious and created to imitate the terrifying uncertainty of experiencing a real bad dream.

Weak Continuation Rationale

At just under 2 hours, the sequel, similar to its predecessor, is a needlessly long and hugely unconvincing argument for the birth of an additional film universe. When it calls again, I recommend not answering.

• The sequel releases in Australian theaters on 16 October and in the US and UK on October 17