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Coming as the revived Stephen King machine was persistently generating adaptations, without concern for excellence, the original film felt like a lazy fanboy tribute. Set against a small town 70s backdrop, high school cast, telepathic children and gnarly neighbourhood villain, it was close to pastiche and, like the very worst of his literary works, it was also clumsily packed.

Interestingly the call came from from the author's own lineage, as it was inspired by a compact narrative from his descendant, expanded into a film that was a surprise $161m hit. It was the tale of the antagonist, a sadistic killer of children who would enjoy extending the ritual of their deaths. While sexual abuse was never mentioned, there was something clearly non-heteronormative about the antagonist and the period references/societal fears he was obviously meant to represent, reinforced by the performer acting with a certain swishy, effeminate flare. But the film was too opaque to ever fully embrace this aspect and even excluding that discomfort, it was excessively convoluted and overly enamored with its exhaustingly grubby nastiness to work as anything beyond an unthinking horror entertainment.

The Sequel's Arrival Amidst Production Company Challenges

The next chapter comes as previous scary movie successes Blumhouse are in desperate need of a win. This year they’ve struggled to make any project successful, from their werewolf film 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 film that can generate multiple installments. But there's a complication …

Paranormal Shift

The original concluded with our protagonist Finn (Mason Thames) defeating the antagonist, supported and coached by the ghosts of those he had killed before. This situation has required writer-director Scott Derrickson and his co-writer C Robert Cargill to advance the story and its killer to a new place, converting a physical threat into a ghostly presence, a path that leads them via Elm Street with a capability to return into the real world facilitated by dreams. But different from the striped sweater villain, the villain is markedly uninventive and completely lacking comedy. The facial covering continues to be appropriately unsettling but the production fails to make him as frightening as he temporarily seemed in the original, limited by complicated and frequently unclear regulations.

Snowy Religious Environment

The protagonist and his frustratingly crude sister Gwen (the performer) confront him anew while snowed in at a high-altitude faith-based facility for kids, the follow-up also referencing regarding the hockey mask killer the Friday the 13th antagonist. The sister is directed there by a vision of her late mother and what might be their late tormenter’s first victims while the protagonist, continuing to handle his fury and newfound ability to fight back, is pursuing to safeguard her. The script is overly clumsy in its contrived scene-setting, awkwardly requiring to maroon the main characters at a place that will also add to histories of hero and villain, filling in details we weren't particularly interested in or care to learn about. In what also feels like a more strategic decision to guide the production in the direction of the similar religious audiences that transformed the Conjuring movies into massive hits, Derrickson adds a religious element, with good now more closely associated with the divine and paradise while villainy signifies the demonic and punishment, religion the final defense against this type of antagonist.

Over-stacked Narrative

The consequence of these choices is additional over-complicate a story that was formerly nearly collapsing, including superfluous difficulties to what could have been a basic scary film. I often found myself too busy asking questions about the methods and reasons of what could or couldn’t happen to feel all that involved. It’s a low-lift effort for the actor, whose features stay concealed but he possesses authentic charisma that’s generally absent in other areas in the acting team. The environment is at times impressively atmospheric but most of the consistently un-scary set-pieces are marred by a grainy 8mm texture to distinguish dreaming from waking, an ineffective stylistic choice that seems excessively meta and created to imitate the horrifying unpredictability of experiencing a real bad dream.

Unconvincing Franchise Argument

Running nearly 120 minutes, Black Phone 2, like M3gan 2.0 before it, is a unnecessarily lengthy and highly implausible argument for the birth of an additional film universe. If another installment comes, I suggest ignoring it.

• Black Phone 2 releases in Australia's movie houses on 16 October and in the United States and United Kingdom on October 17