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Coming as the resurrected Stephen King machine was continuing to produce screen translations, quality be damned, the first installment felt like a uninspired homage. Featuring a 1970s small town setting, high school cast, telepathic children and disturbing local antagonist, it was nearly parody and, similar to the poorest the author's tales, it was also inelegantly overstuffed.

Curiously the source was found inside the family home, as it was inspired by a compact narrative from King’s son Joe Hill, stretched into a film that was a shocking commercial success. It was the story of the Grabber, a cruel slayer of children who would enjoy extending their fatal ceremony. While molestation was never mentioned, there was something clearly non-heteronormative about the villain and the historical touchpoints/moral panics he was clearly supposed to refer to, emphasized by the performer acting with a noticeably camp style. But the film was too opaque to ever fully embrace this aspect and even excluding that discomfort, it was excessively convoluted and too high on its exhaustingly grubby nastiness to work as only an mindless scary movie material.

The Sequel's Arrival In the Middle of Production Company Challenges

The follow-up debuts as once-dominant genre specialists the production company are in critical demand for a hit. This year they’ve struggled to make any project successful, from the monster movie to the suspense story to Drop to the total box office disaster of the AI sequel, and so a great deal rides on whether Black Phone 2 can prove whether a brief narrative can become a film that can generate multiple installments. But there's a complication …

Supernatural Transformation

The original concluded with our protagonist Finn (Mason Thames) 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 move the franchise and its killer to a new place, converting a physical threat into a paranormal entity, a route that takes them via Elm Street with a capability to return into reality made possible by sleep. But different from the striped sweater villain, the villain is markedly uninventive and completely lacking comedy. The disguise stays successfully disturbing but the film struggles to make him as frightening as he briefly was in the original, trapped by complex and typically puzzling guidelines.

Alpine Christian Camp Setting

Finn and his frustratingly crude sister Gwen (the performer) encounter him again while snowed in at a mountain religious retreat for kids, the sequel also nodding in the direction of Jason Voorhees the camp slasher. Gwen is guided there by a ghostly image of her dead mother and what might be their dead antagonist's original prey while the protagonist, continuing to handle his fury and fresh capacity for resistance, is tracking to defend her. The writing is excessively awkward in its contrived scene-setting, inelegantly demanding to get the siblings stranded at a location that will additionally provide to background information for main character and enemy, providing information we didn’t really need or desire to understand. What also appears to be a more strategic decision to edge the film toward the similar religious audiences that made the Conjuring series into huge successes, Derrickson adds a religious element, with good now more closely associated with the creator and the afterlife while villainy signifies the demonic and punishment, faith the ultimate weapon against such a creature.

Overcomplicated Story

The consequence of these choices is further over-stack a series that was already almost failing, incorporating needless complexities to what should be a simple Friday night engine. Regularly I noticed excessively engaged in questioning about the hows and whys of what could or couldn’t happen to feel all that involved. It's minimal work for the performer, whose visage remains hidden but he does have real screen magnetism that’s mostly missing elsewhere in the acting team. The environment is at times atmospherically grand but the bulk of the continuously non-terrifying sequences are flawed by a rough cinematic quality to distinguish dreaming from waking, an poor directorial selection that appears overly conscious and designed to reflect the frightening randomness of being in an actual nightmare.

Unpersuasive Series Justification

Running nearly 120 minutes, the follow-up, similar to its predecessor, is a needlessly long and highly implausible argument for the birth of an additional film universe. The next time it rings, I suggest ignoring it.

• Black Phone 2 is out in Australia's movie houses on 16 October and in the US and UK on October 17