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Coming as the revived bestselling author machine was persistently generating film versions, regardless of quality, the first installment felt like a uninspired homage. Featuring a small town 70s backdrop, young performers, psychic kids and disturbing local antagonist, it was nearly parody and, comparable to the weakest King’s stories, it was also clumsily packed.

Curiously the call came from from the author's own lineage, as it was inspired by a compact narrative from his descendant, stretched into a film that was a shocking commercial success. It was the narrative about the kidnapper, a brutal murderer of young boys who would revel in elongating their fatal ceremony. While sexual abuse was never mentioned, there was something unmistakably LGBTQ-suggestive about the character and the era-specific anxieties he was clearly supposed to refer to, strengthened by Ethan Hawke acting with a distinctly flamboyant manner. But the film was too ambiguous to ever really admit that and even without that uneasiness, it was excessively convoluted and overly enamored with its tiring griminess to work as anything beyond an mindless scary movie material.

The Sequel's Arrival Amidst Studio Struggles

Its sequel arrives as once-dominant genre specialists the production company are in urgent requirement for success. Lately they've encountered difficulties to make any film profitable, from the monster movie to their thriller to Drop to the complete commercial failure of the robotic follow-up, and so much depends on whether the sequel can prove whether a short story can become a film that can create a series. But there's a complication …

Paranormal Shift

The first film ended with our Final Boy Finn (the performer) killing the Grabber, helped and guided by the apparitions of earlier casualties. This situation has required writer-director Scott Derrickson and his writing partner Cargill to take the series and its villain in a different direction, transforming a human antagonist into a supernatural one, a route that takes them via Elm Street with a power to travel into the real world made possible by sleep. But unlike Freddy Krueger, the antagonist is noticeably uncreative and completely lacking comedy. The disguise stays successfully disturbing but the film struggles to make him as scary as he temporarily seemed in the first, constrained by complex and typically puzzling guidelines.

Snowy Religious Environment

The main character and his frustratingly crude sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) face him once more while trapped by snow at a high-altitude faith-based facility for kids, the sequel also nodding regarding the hockey mask killer the Friday the 13th antagonist. The sister is directed there by a ghostly image of her dead mother and what might be their dead antagonist's original prey while the brother, still attempting to handle his fury and fresh capacity for resistance, is following so he can protect her. The writing is excessively awkward in its artificial setup, clumsily needing to get the siblings stranded at a place that will also add to backstories for both protagonist and antagonist, providing information we didn’t really need or desire to understand. In what also feels like a more deliberate action to edge the film toward the comparable faith-based viewers that made the Conjuring series into huge successes, the filmmaker incorporates a religious element, with virtue now more directly linked with God and heaven while villainy signifies Satan and damnation, belief the supreme tool against a monster like this.

Overloaded Plot

What all of this does is additional over-complicate a story that was formerly nearly collapsing, incorporating needless complexities to what could have been a straightforward horror movie. Frequently I discovered too busy asking questions about the hows and whys of what could or couldn’t happen to experience genuine engagement. It's minimal work for the actor, whose face we never really see but he possesses genuine presence that’s mostly missing elsewhere in the cast. The setting is at times atmospherically grand but most of the consistently un-scary set-pieces are flawed by a rough cinematic quality to distinguish dreaming from waking, an unsuccessful artistic decision that appears overly conscious and created to imitate the frightening randomness of being in an actual nightmare.

Unpersuasive Series Justification

At just under 2 hours, Black Phone 2, like M3gan 2.0 before it, is a excessively extended and extremely unpersuasive justification for the establishment of another series. The next time it rings, I advise letting it go to voicemail.

• The follow-up film releases in Australian cinemas on 16 October and in America and Britain on the seventeenth of October