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Debuting as the resurrected master of horror machine was continuing to produce adaptations, regardless of quality, the original film felt like a lazy fanboy tribute. Featuring a retro suburban environment, young performers, psychic kids and disturbing local antagonist, it was almost imitation and, similar to the poorest King’s stories, it was also awkwardly crowded.

Funnily enough the call came from within the household, as it was inspired by a compact narrative from his descendant, over-extended into a film that was a shocking commercial success. It was the tale of the antagonist, a cruel slayer of adolescents who would take pleasure in prolonging the ritual of their deaths. While sexual abuse was not referenced, there was something unmistakably LGBTQ-suggestive about the antagonist and the historical touchpoints/moral panics he was intended to symbolize, strengthened by Ethan Hawke portraying him with a certain swishy, effeminate flare. But the film was too vague to ever fully embrace this aspect and even aside from that tension, it was overly complicated and overly enamored with its exhaustingly grubby nastiness to work as anything beyond an mindless scary movie material.

The Sequel's Arrival During Production Company Challenges

The follow-up debuts as former horror hit-makers the studio are in urgent requirement for success. This year they’ve struggled to make any film profitable, from the monster movie 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 Black Phone 2 can prove whether a compact tale can become a film that can create a series. However, there's an issue …

Supernatural Transformation

The original concluded with our protagonist Finn (the young actor) eliminating the villain, helped and guided by the ghosts of those he had killed before. This situation has required filmmaker Derrickson and his writing partner Cargill to move the franchise and its villain in a different direction, transforming a human antagonist into a paranormal entity, a path that leads them by way of Freddy's domain with a capability to return into the real world facilitated by dreams. But in contrast to the dream killer, the antagonist is clearly unimaginative and totally without wit. The facial covering continues to be effectively jarring but the production fails to make him as scary as he temporarily seemed in the original, limited by complicated and frequently unclear regulations.

Alpine Christian Camp Setting

The protagonist and his irritatingly profane sibling Gwen (the performer) confront him anew while trapped by snow at an alpine Christian camp for kids, the second film also acknowledging toward Freddy’s one-time nemesis the camp slasher. The sister is directed there by a vision of her late mother and potentially their deceased villain's initial casualties while the protagonist, continuing to deal with his rage and recently discovered defensive skills, is tracking to defend 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 background information for main character and enemy, filling in details we weren't particularly interested in or want to know about. Additionally seeming like a more deliberate action to edge the film toward the similar religious audiences that turned the Conjuring franchise into massive hits, the director includes a religious element, with morality now more strongly connected with the divine and paradise while villainy signifies Satan and damnation, religion the final defense against this type of antagonist.

Over-stacked Narrative

The result of these decisions is further over-stack a franchise that was previously close to toppling over, including superfluous difficulties to what ought to be a straightforward horror movie. I often found myself excessively engaged in questioning about the hows and whys of possible and impossible events to become truly immersed. It’s a low-lift effort for the actor, whose face we never really see but he maintains real screen magnetism that’s typically lacking in other aspects in the acting team. The location is at times atmospherically grand but the majority of the consistently un-scary set-pieces are flawed by a gritty film stock appearance to distinguish dreaming from waking, an poor directorial selection that feels too self-aware and constructed to mirror the frightening randomness of experiencing a real bad dream.

Weak Continuation Rationale

Running nearly 120 minutes, the follow-up, comparable to earlier failures, is a needlessly long and extremely unpersuasive case for the creation of another series. If another installment comes, I advise letting it go to voicemail.

• The follow-up film is out in Australian theaters on October 16 and in the US and UK on the seventeenth of October