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Debuting as the re-activated Stephen King machine was still churning out adaptations, regardless of quality, the original film felt like a uninspired homage. Set against a small town 70s backdrop, high school cast, telepathic children and twisted community predator, it was nearly parody and, like the very worst of the author's tales, it was also awkwardly crowded.

Interestingly the inspiration originated from inside the family home, as it was inspired by a compact narrative from the author's offspring, stretched into a film that was a surprise $161m hit. It was the story of the Grabber, a cruel slayer of adolescents who would enjoy extending the process of killing. While sexual abuse was avoided in discussion, there was something inescapably queer-coded about the villain and the period references/societal fears he was obviously meant to represent, strengthened by Ethan Hawke acting with a certain swishy, effeminate flare. But the film was too ambiguous to ever really admit that and even excluding that discomfort, it was overly complicated and too high on its exhaustingly grubby nastiness to work as anything more than an unthinking horror entertainment.

The Sequel's Arrival Amidst Studio Struggles

The next chapter comes as former horror hit-makers Blumhouse are in critical demand for a hit. Recently they've faced challenges to make any film profitable, from the monster movie to the suspense story to their action film to the total box office disaster of M3gan 2.0, and so a great deal rides on whether Black Phone 2 can prove whether a compact tale can become a movie that can spawn a franchise. But there's a complication …

Ghostly Evolution

The initial movie finished with our protagonist Finn (the young actor) eliminating the villain, supported and coached by the apparitions of earlier casualties. This has compelled director Scott Derrickson and his collaborator C Robert Cargill to move the franchise and its antagonist toward fresh territory, turning a flesh and blood villain into a ghostly presence, a direction that guides them via Elm Street with an ability to cross back into the real world facilitated by dreams. But different from the striped sweater villain, the villain is markedly uninventive and entirely devoid of humour. The mask remains effectively jarring but the production fails to make him as scary as he temporarily seemed in the first, trapped by complicated and frequently unclear regulations.

Alpine Christian Camp Setting

The protagonist and his irritatingly profane sibling Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) encounter him again while snowed in at an alpine Christian camp for kids, the follow-up also referencing in the direction of Jason Voorhees Jason Voorhees. The female lead is led there by a ghostly image of her dead mother and potentially their late tormenter’s first victims while Finn, still trying to handle his fury and newfound ability to fight back, is tracking to defend her. The script is excessively awkward in its contrived scene-setting, inelegantly demanding to get the siblings stranded at a place that will also add to backstories for both main character and enemy, filling in details we didn’t really need or want to know about. What also appears to be a more strategic decision to push the movie towards the same church-attending crowds that turned the Conjuring franchise into major blockbusters, Derrickson adds a faith-based component, with morality now more strongly connected with the divine and paradise while bad represents the devil and hell, belief the supreme tool against such a creature.

Overloaded Plot

What all of this does is continued over-burden a series that was already almost failing, adding unnecessary complications to what ought to be a simple Friday night engine. I often found myself overly occupied with inquiries about the processes and motivations of possible and impossible events to feel all that involved. It’s a low-lift effort for the actor, whose features stay concealed but he maintains genuine presence that’s mostly missing elsewhere in the acting team. The location is at times remarkably immersive but most of the persistently unfrightening scenes are damaged by a gritty film stock appearance to distinguish dreaming from waking, an ineffective stylistic choice that seems excessively meta and created to imitate the frightening randomness of being in an actual nightmare.

Weak Continuation Rationale

Running nearly 120 minutes, Black Phone 2, like M3gan 2.0 before it, is a excessively extended and highly implausible argument for the birth of an additional film universe. The next time it rings, I recommend not answering.

• The sequel debuts in Australian theaters on October 16 and in the US and UK on the seventeenth of October