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Debuting as the revived bestselling author machine was persistently generating screen translations, without concern for excellence, the first installment felt like a lazy fanboy tribute. Featuring a small town 70s backdrop, young performers, gifted youths and gnarly neighbourhood villain, it was almost imitation and, comparable to the weakest the author's tales, it was also awkwardly crowded.

Interestingly the source was found from the author's own lineage, as it was adapted from a brief tale from King’s son Joe Hill, stretched into a film that was a shocking commercial success. It was the tale of the antagonist, a cruel slayer of children who would take pleasure in prolonging the ritual of their deaths. While sexual abuse was never mentioned, there was something inescapably queer-coded about the character and the historical touchpoints/moral panics he was clearly supposed to refer to, reinforced by Ethan Hawke acting with a noticeably camp style. But the film was too ambiguous to ever really admit that and even excluding that discomfort, it was excessively convoluted and too high on its wearisome vileness to work as anything more than an unthinking horror entertainment.

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

Its sequel arrives as previous scary movie successes Blumhouse are in critical demand for a hit. This year they’ve struggled to make anything work, from their werewolf film 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 brief narrative can become a motion picture that can create a series. But there's a complication …

Paranormal Shift

The initial movie finished with our Final Boy Finn (the performer) defeating the antagonist, helped and guided by the spirits of previous victims. This situation has required filmmaker Derrickson and his co-writer C Robert Cargill to take the series and its killer to a new place, transforming a human antagonist into a ghostly presence, a path that leads them via Elm Street with an ability to cross back into the physical realm made possible by sleep. But in contrast to the dream killer, the Grabber is clearly unimaginative and entirely devoid of humour. The mask remains effectively jarring but the movie has difficulty to make him as scary as he briefly was in the first, limited by complex and typically puzzling guidelines.

Mountain Retreat Location

The main character and his annoyingly foul-mouthed sister Gwen (the performer) confront him anew while trapped by snow at a mountain religious retreat for kids, the second film also acknowledging in the direction of Jason Voorhees the Friday the 13th antagonist. The sister is directed there by an apparition of her deceased parent and what might be their dead antagonist's original prey while Finn, still trying to deal with his rage and fresh capacity for resistance, is pursuing to safeguard her. The screenplay is too ungainly in its contrived scene-setting, awkwardly requiring 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 didn’t really need or want to know about. What also appears to be a more calculated move to guide the production in the direction of the similar religious audiences that transformed the Conjuring movies into huge successes, the director includes a spiritual aspect, with good now more closely associated with the creator and the afterlife while bad represents Satan and damnation, religion the final defense against a monster like this.

Over-stacked Narrative

What all of this does is continued over-burden a series that was already nearly collapsing, adding unnecessary complications to what could have been a basic scary film. Frequently I discovered overly occupied with inquiries about the processes and motivations of possible and impossible events to experience genuine engagement. It's an undemanding role for the actor, whose features stay concealed but he maintains real screen magnetism that’s typically lacking in other aspects in the cast. The location is at times atmospherically grand but the majority of the consistently un-scary set-pieces are flawed by a rough cinematic quality to differentiate asleep and awake, an unsuccessful artistic decision that appears overly conscious and created to imitate the frightening randomness of living through a genuine night terror.

Weak Continuation Rationale

At just under 2 hours, Black Phone 2, like M3gan 2.0 before it, is a needlessly long and extremely unpersuasive case for the creation of an additional film universe. The next time it rings, I recommend not answering.

• The sequel debuts in Australian cinemas on 16 October and in the United States and United Kingdom on the seventeenth of October