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Arriving as the re-activated Stephen King machine was still churning out adaptations, quality be damned, the first installment felt like a sloppy admiration piece. With its 1970s small town setting, teenage actors, psychic kids and twisted community predator, it was close to pastiche and, comparable to the weakest the author's tales, it was also inelegantly overstuffed.

Funnily enough the source was found from the author's own lineage, 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 sadistic killer of adolescents who would enjoy extending their fatal ceremony. While sexual abuse was never mentioned, there was something clearly non-heteronormative about the character and the era-specific anxieties he was intended to symbolize, strengthened by the performer playing him with a distinctly flamboyant manner. But the film was too opaque to ever fully embrace this aspect and even aside from that tension, it was excessively convoluted and too focused on its tiring griminess to work as anything more than an unthinking horror entertainment.

Follow-up Film's Debut In the Middle of Production Company Challenges

The next chapter comes as once-dominant genre specialists the production company are in critical demand for a hit. This year they’ve struggled to make anything work, from Wolf Man to their thriller to the adventure movie 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. But there's a complication …

Ghostly Evolution

The initial movie finished with our protagonist Finn (Mason Thames) killing the Grabber, helped and guided by the ghosts of those he had killed before. This has compelled writer-director Scott Derrickson and his writing partner Cargill to move the franchise and its villain in a different direction, turning a flesh and blood villain into a paranormal entity, a direction that guides them by way of Freddy's domain with a capability to return into reality enabled through nightmares. But in contrast to the dream killer, the antagonist is noticeably uncreative and totally without wit. The mask remains effectively jarring but the film struggles to make him as scary as he briefly was in the first, constrained by convoluted and often confusing rules.

Alpine Christian Camp Setting

Finn and his irritatingly profane sibling Gwen (the performer) confront him anew while stranded due to weather at an alpine Christian camp for kids, the sequel also nodding toward Freddy’s one-time nemesis Jason Voorhees. The sister is directed there by a vision of her late mother 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 artificial setup, inelegantly demanding to leave the brother and sister trapped at a setting that will further contribute to histories of hero and villain, supplying particulars we didn’t really need or want to know about. In what also feels like a more deliberate action to push the movie towards the same church-attending crowds that transformed the Conjuring movies into massive hits, the director includes a religious element, with virtue now more directly linked with the divine and paradise while evil symbolizes the devil and hell, belief the supreme tool against such a creature.

Over-stacked Narrative

The consequence of these choices is continued over-burden a franchise that was previously close to toppling over, adding unnecessary complications to what ought to be a simple Friday night engine. I often found myself too busy asking questions about the hows and whys of feasible and unfeasible occurrences to become truly immersed. It's an undemanding role for the actor, whose features stay concealed but he possesses authentic charisma that’s typically lacking in other aspects in the cast. The location is at times impressively atmospheric but the majority of the persistently unfrightening scenes are flawed by a grainy 8mm texture to differentiate asleep and awake, an poor directorial selection that feels too self-aware and constructed to mirror the horrifying unpredictability of being in an actual nightmare.

Unpersuasive Series Justification

Lasting approximately two hours, Black Phone 2, like M3gan 2.0 before it, is a unnecessarily lengthy and hugely unconvincing case for the creation of another series. When it calls again, I recommend not answering.

• The sequel debuts in Australian theaters on the sixteenth of October and in America and Britain on 17 October