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Debuting as the re-activated bestselling author machine was still churning out film versions, regardless of quality, The Black Phone felt like a lazy fanboy tribute. Set against a retro suburban environment, teenage actors, telepathic children and gnarly neighbourhood villain, it was close to pastiche and, comparable to the weakest King’s stories, it was also clumsily packed.

Interestingly the call came from inside the family home, as it was adapted from a brief tale from the author's offspring, stretched into a film that was a surprise $161m hit. It was the narrative about the kidnapper, a cruel slayer of adolescents who would revel in elongating the ritual of their deaths. While molestation was never mentioned, there was something inescapably queer-coded about the character and the historical touchpoints/moral panics he was intended to symbolize, emphasized by the performer playing him with a certain swishy, effeminate flare. But the film was too opaque to ever really admit that and even excluding that discomfort, it was too busily plotted and too high on its tiring griminess to work as only an mindless scary movie material.

The Sequel's Arrival During Production Company Challenges

Its sequel arrives as former horror hit-makers the production company are in desperate need of a win. Lately they've encountered difficulties to make any project successful, from Wolf Man to the suspense story 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 motion picture that can generate multiple installments. There’s just one slight problem …

Supernatural Transformation

The initial movie finished with our Final Boy Finn (the young actor) eliminating the villain, assisted and trained by the spirits of previous victims. It’s forced writer-director Scott Derrickson and his collaborator C Robert Cargill to take the series and its killer to a new place, converting a physical threat into a supernatural one, a path that leads them through Nightmare on Elm Street with a power to travel into the physical realm made possible by sleep. But in contrast to the dream killer, the antagonist is markedly uninventive and completely lacking comedy. The mask remains appropriately unsettling but the movie has difficulty to make him as terrifying as he temporarily seemed in the initial film, limited by convoluted and often confusing rules.

Snowy Religious Environment

The main character and his annoyingly foul-mouthed sister Gwen (the performer) face him once more while stranded due to weather at an alpine Christian camp for kids, the second film also acknowledging toward Freddy’s one-time nemesis the Friday the 13th antagonist. The female lead is led there by an apparition of her deceased parent and what could be their dead antagonist's original prey while the protagonist, continuing to deal with his rage and recently discovered defensive skills, is pursuing to safeguard her. The screenplay is too ungainly in its artificial setup, clumsily needing to leave the brother and sister trapped at a location that will additionally provide to backstories for both protagonist and antagonist, supplying particulars we didn’t really need or desire to understand. In what also feels like a more strategic decision to guide the production in the direction of the comparable faith-based viewers that turned the Conjuring franchise into major blockbusters, the filmmaker incorporates a spiritual aspect, with virtue now more directly linked with the creator and the afterlife while bad represents Satan and damnation, religion the final defense against such a creature.

Overcomplicated Story

The result of these decisions is further over-stack a franchise that was previously close to toppling over, incorporating needless complexities to what should be a basic scary film. Regularly I noticed overly occupied with inquiries about the hows and whys of what could or couldn’t happen to experience genuine engagement. It's an undemanding role for the actor, whose visage remains hidden but he maintains real screen magnetism that’s typically lacking in other aspects in the acting team. The setting is at times atmospherically grand but the bulk of the consistently un-scary set-pieces are marred by a grainy 8mm texture 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

Lasting approximately two hours, Black Phone 2, similar to its predecessor, is a needlessly long and highly implausible argument for the birth of an additional film universe. If another installment comes, I recommend not answering.

• The follow-up film releases in Australian theaters on October 16 and in the US and UK on 17 October