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Coming as the re-activated Stephen King machine was persistently generating screen translations, quality be damned, the original film felt like a uninspired homage. With its 1970s small town setting, young performers, gifted youths and twisted community predator, it was nearly parody and, like the very worst of the author's tales, it was also awkwardly crowded.

Funnily enough the call came from inside the family home, as it was based on a short story from his descendant, stretched into a film that was a surprise $161m hit. It was the tale of the antagonist, a cruel slayer of adolescents who would enjoy extending their fatal ceremony. While molestation was never mentioned, there was something inescapably queer-coded about the character and the period references/societal fears he was obviously meant to represent, reinforced by Ethan Hawke acting with a certain swishy, effeminate flare. But the film was too opaque to ever fully embrace this aspect and even without that uneasiness, it was too busily plotted and too focused on its wearisome vileness to work as anything beyond an mindless scary movie material.

Follow-up Film's Debut In the Middle of Filmmaking Difficulties

The follow-up debuts as former horror hit-makers the production company are in urgent requirement for success. Recently they've faced challenges to make any project successful, from the monster movie to the suspense story to the adventure movie to the utter financial disappointment of the robotic follow-up, and so significant pressure rests on whether Black Phone 2 can prove whether a short story can become a motion picture that can create a series. There’s just one slight problem …

Ghostly Evolution

The original concluded with our surviving character Finn (Mason Thames) defeating the antagonist, helped and guided by the spirits of previous victims. This situation has required director Scott Derrickson and his co-writer C Robert Cargill to advance the story and its villain in a different direction, turning a flesh and blood villain into a supernatural one, a direction that guides them through Nightmare on Elm Street with an ability to cross back into the real world facilitated by dreams. But unlike Freddy Krueger, the Grabber is markedly uninventive and completely lacking comedy. The facial covering continues to be successfully disturbing but the movie has difficulty to make him as terrifying as he momentarily appeared in the initial film, constrained by complex and typically puzzling guidelines.

Mountain Retreat Location

The main character and his annoyingly foul-mouthed sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) confront him anew while stranded due to weather at an alpine Christian camp for kids, the second film also acknowledging in the direction of Jason Voorhees Jason Voorhees. The sister is directed there by a vision of her late mother and potentially their late tormenter’s first victims while Finn, still trying to process his anger and newfound ability to fight back, is following so he can protect her. The screenplay is too ungainly in its contrived scene-setting, inelegantly demanding to get the siblings stranded at a setting that will further contribute to background information for protagonist and antagonist, supplying particulars we didn’t really need or want to know about. Additionally seeming like a more strategic decision to guide the production in the direction of the comparable faith-based viewers that made the Conjuring series into massive hits, the filmmaker incorporates a faith-based component, with good now more closely associated with the creator and the afterlife while evil symbolizes the devil and hell, religion the final defense against such a creature.

Overcomplicated Story

The result of these decisions is additional over-complicate a story that was formerly nearly collapsing, adding unnecessary complications to what should be a straightforward horror movie. I often found myself overly occupied with inquiries about the methods and reasons of feasible and unfeasible occurrences to feel all that involved. It’s a low-lift effort for the actor, whose face we never really see but he maintains real screen magnetism that’s mostly missing elsewhere in the ensemble. The setting is at times atmospherically grand but the bulk of the persistently unfrightening scenes are marred by a gritty film stock appearance to differentiate asleep and awake, an poor directorial selection that seems excessively meta and designed to reflect the terrifying uncertainty of living through a genuine night terror.

Unpersuasive Series Justification

Lasting approximately two hours, Black Phone 2, like M3gan 2.0 before it, is a needlessly long and hugely unconvincing case for the creation of an additional film universe. When it calls again, I recommend not answering.

• Black Phone 2 debuts in Australia's movie houses on the sixteenth of October and in the United States and United Kingdom on 17 October