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Debuting as the resurrected master of horror machine was persistently generating screen translations, quality be damned, The Black Phone felt like a sloppy admiration piece. Featuring a 1970s small town setting, high school cast, psychic kids and gnarly neighbourhood villain, it was close to pastiche and, similar to the poorest the author's tales, it was also inelegantly overstuffed.

Funnily enough the inspiration originated from inside the family home, as it was based on a short story from the author's offspring, over-extended into a film that was a surprise $161m hit. It was the tale of the antagonist, a brutal murderer of young boys who would revel in elongating their fatal ceremony. While assault was avoided in discussion, there was something inescapably queer-coded about the character and the period references/societal fears he was clearly supposed to refer to, emphasized by Ethan Hawke portraying him with a certain swishy, effeminate flare. But the film was too ambiguous to ever properly acknowledge this and even aside from that tension, it was excessively convoluted and overly enamored with its tiring griminess to work as only an mindless scary movie material.

The Sequel's Arrival Amidst Studio Struggles

Its sequel arrives as previous scary movie successes the production company are in desperate need of a win. This year they’ve struggled to make anything work, from the monster movie to the suspense story to Drop to the utter financial disappointment of M3gan 2.0, and so significant pressure rests on whether Black Phone 2 can prove whether a compact tale can become a film that can spawn a franchise. But there's a complication …

Supernatural Transformation

The original concluded with our surviving character Finn (Mason Thames) killing the Grabber, helped and guided by the apparitions of earlier casualties. It’s forced filmmaker Derrickson and his co-writer C Robert Cargill to move the franchise and its antagonist toward fresh territory, turning a flesh and blood villain into a ghostly presence, a path that leads them via Elm Street with an ability to cross back into the real world enabled through nightmares. But different from the striped sweater villain, the Grabber is markedly uninventive and completely lacking comedy. The disguise stays effectively jarring but the movie has difficulty to make him as terrifying as he momentarily appeared in the first, constrained by convoluted and often confusing rules.

Alpine Christian Camp Setting

The main character and his irritatingly profane sibling Gwen (the performer) face him once more while snowed in at an alpine Christian camp for kids, the follow-up also referencing regarding the hockey mask killer the camp slasher. Gwen is guided there by an apparition of her deceased parent and what might be their dead antagonist's original prey while Finn, still trying to process his anger and fresh capacity for resistance, is following so he can protect her. The writing is excessively awkward in its contrived scene-setting, awkwardly requiring to leave the brother and sister trapped at a place that will also add to histories of protagonist and antagonist, providing information we weren't particularly interested in or care to learn about. In what also feels like a more calculated move to edge the film toward the similar religious audiences that transformed the Conjuring movies into major blockbusters, the filmmaker incorporates a spiritual aspect, with virtue now more directly linked with God and heaven while evil symbolizes the devil and hell, religion the final defense against a monster like this.

Overcomplicated Story

What all of this does is further over-stack a series that was already nearly collapsing, incorporating needless complexities to what should be a straightforward horror movie. I often found myself excessively engaged in questioning about the hows and whys of feasible and unfeasible occurrences to become truly immersed. It's minimal work for the performer, whose face we never really see but he does have authentic charisma that’s typically lacking in other aspects in the cast. The setting is at times atmospherically grand but the bulk of the persistently unfrightening scenes are marred by a gritty film stock appearance to distinguish dreaming from waking, an ineffective stylistic choice that feels too self-aware and designed to reflect the frightening randomness of living through a genuine night terror.

Weak Continuation Rationale

Running nearly 120 minutes, the follow-up, comparable to earlier failures, is a unnecessarily lengthy and hugely unconvincing justification for the establishment of an additional film universe. The next time it rings, I suggest ignoring it.

• The follow-up film releases in Australian theaters on 16 October and in America and Britain on October 17