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Debuting as the resurrected Stephen King machine was still churning out adaptations, quality be damned, The Black Phone felt like a lazy fanboy tribute. With its 1970s small town setting, young performers, psychic kids and disturbing local antagonist, it was close to pastiche and, similar to the poorest the author's tales, it was also clumsily packed.

Funnily enough the inspiration originated from within the household, as it was adapted from a brief tale from King’s son Joe Hill, over-extended into a film that was a surprise $161m hit. It was the tale of the antagonist, a cruel slayer of young boys who would revel in elongating the ritual of their deaths. While molestation was never mentioned, there was something unmistakably LGBTQ-suggestive about the character and the historical touchpoints/moral panics he was obviously meant to represent, emphasized by the performer portraying him with a certain swishy, effeminate flare. But the film was too vague to ever really admit that and even without that uneasiness, it was overly complicated and too focused on its exhaustingly grubby nastiness to work as anything beyond an unthinking horror entertainment.

Follow-up Film's Debut During Filmmaking Difficulties

Its sequel arrives as once-dominant genre specialists Blumhouse are in desperate need of a win. Recently they've faced challenges to make any film profitable, from the monster movie to their thriller to Drop to the complete commercial failure of M3gan 2.0, and so much depends on whether Black Phone 2 can prove whether a short story can become a movie that can spawn a franchise. But there's a complication …

Supernatural Transformation

The initial movie finished with our Final Boy Finn (Mason Thames) killing the Grabber, helped and guided by the apparitions of earlier casualties. This situation has required filmmaker Derrickson and his writing partner Cargill to move the franchise and its killer to a new place, converting a physical threat into a ghostly presence, a direction that guides them by way of Freddy's domain with a capability to return into the real world enabled through nightmares. But in contrast to the dream killer, the antagonist is noticeably uncreative and completely lacking comedy. The mask remains successfully disturbing but the production fails to make him as frightening as he temporarily seemed in the original, limited by convoluted and often confusing rules.

Snowy Religious Environment

Finn and his annoyingly foul-mouthed sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) face him once more while trapped by snow at an alpine Christian camp for kids, the second film also acknowledging regarding the hockey mask killer the Friday the 13th antagonist. Gwen is guided there by a ghostly image of her dead mother and what might be their deceased villain's initial casualties while Finn, still trying to deal with his rage and fresh capacity for resistance, is pursuing to safeguard her. The writing is too ungainly in its forced establishment, inelegantly demanding to maroon the main characters at a place that will also add to backstories for both main character and enemy, providing information we didn't actually require or care to learn about. Additionally seeming like a more calculated move to push the movie towards the similar religious audiences that transformed the Conjuring movies into major blockbusters, the filmmaker incorporates a spiritual aspect, with good now more closely associated with God and heaven while evil symbolizes Satan and damnation, faith the ultimate weapon against such a creature.

Overloaded Plot

The consequence of these choices is additional over-complicate a series that was already almost failing, incorporating needless complexities to what should be a basic scary film. Frequently I discovered too busy asking questions about the methods and reasons of feasible and unfeasible occurrences to become truly immersed. It’s a low-lift effort for the performer, whose visage remains hidden but he possesses authentic charisma that’s typically lacking in other aspects in the acting team. The setting is at times remarkably immersive but the majority of the consistently un-scary set-pieces are marred by a grainy 8mm texture to differentiate asleep and awake, an poor directorial selection that seems excessively meta and constructed to mirror the horrifying unpredictability of experiencing a real bad dream.

Unconvincing Franchise Argument

At just under 2 hours, the sequel, similar to its predecessor, is a needlessly long and extremely unpersuasive case for the creation of an additional film universe. When it calls again, I recommend not answering.

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