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Arriving as the revived master of horror machine was still churning out film versions, without concern for excellence, the original film felt like a uninspired homage. With its retro suburban environment, teenage actors, psychic kids and gnarly neighbourhood villain, it was almost imitation and, comparable to the weakest King’s stories, it was also inelegantly overstuffed.

Funnily enough the inspiration originated from inside the family home, as it was based on a short story from his descendant, over-extended into a film that was a surprise $161m hit. It was the narrative about the kidnapper, a sadistic killer of young boys who would revel in elongating the process of killing. While assault was never mentioned, there was something unmistakably LGBTQ-suggestive about the antagonist and the historical touchpoints/moral panics he was intended to symbolize, emphasized by Ethan Hawke portraying him with a noticeably camp style. But the film was too opaque to ever fully embrace this aspect and even aside from that tension, it was too busily plotted and too high on its exhaustingly grubby nastiness to work as only an unthinking horror entertainment.

Follow-up Film's Debut During Studio Struggles

The follow-up debuts as previous scary movie successes the production company are in desperate need of a win. Lately they've encountered difficulties to make any project successful, from the monster movie to The Woman in the Yard to the adventure movie to the utter financial disappointment of M3gan 2.0, and so much depends on whether Black Phone 2 can prove whether a short story can become a film that can create a series. However, there's an issue …

Supernatural Transformation

The original concluded with our Final Boy Finn (the young actor) eliminating the villain, helped and guided by the ghosts of those he had killed before. It’s forced filmmaker Derrickson and his collaborator C Robert Cargill to move the franchise and its villain in a different direction, converting a physical threat into a paranormal entity, a route that takes them via Elm Street with a capability to return into the physical realm enabled through nightmares. But unlike Freddy Krueger, the villain is clearly unimaginative and totally without wit. The facial covering continues to be effectively jarring but the film struggles to make him as scary as he temporarily seemed in the initial film, trapped by convoluted and often confusing rules.

Mountain Retreat Location

The protagonist and his annoyingly foul-mouthed sister Gwen (the performer) face him once more while stranded due to weather at a high-altitude faith-based facility for kids, the second film also acknowledging toward Freddy’s one-time nemesis Jason Voorhees. Gwen is guided there by a ghostly image of her dead mother and potentially their dead antagonist's original prey while the brother, still attempting to handle his fury and newfound ability to fight back, is tracking to defend her. The writing is overly clumsy in its artificial setup, inelegantly demanding to get the siblings stranded at a setting that will further contribute to histories of protagonist and antagonist, providing information we didn’t really need or desire to understand. What also appears to be a more strategic decision to edge the film toward the similar religious audiences that turned the Conjuring franchise into huge successes, the filmmaker incorporates a religious element, with good now more closely associated with the creator and the afterlife while evil symbolizes the demonic and punishment, belief the supreme tool against such a creature.

Overcomplicated Story

What all of this does is continued over-burden a franchise that was previously almost failing, incorporating needless complexities to what ought to be a simple Friday night engine. Regularly I noticed too busy asking questions about the hows and whys of possible and impossible events to experience genuine engagement. It's minimal work for the performer, whose features stay concealed but he does have authentic charisma that’s typically lacking in other aspects in the ensemble. The setting is at times atmospherically grand but most of the consistently un-scary set-pieces are flawed by a rough cinematic quality to differentiate asleep and awake, an poor directorial selection that seems excessively meta and designed to reflect the frightening randomness of being in an actual nightmare.

Weak Continuation Rationale

Lasting approximately two hours, the sequel, like M3gan 2.0 before it, is a needlessly long and extremely unpersuasive case for the creation of another series. The next time it rings, I advise letting it go to voicemail.

• Black Phone 2 is out in Australia's movie houses on 16 October and in the US and UK on October 17