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Debuting as the revived bestselling author machine was persistently generating film versions, without concern for excellence, The Black Phone felt like a sloppy admiration piece. With its 1970s small town setting, young performers, gifted youths and disturbing local antagonist, it was nearly parody and, like the very worst of the author's tales, it was also awkwardly crowded.

Curiously the call came from inside the family home, as it was adapted from a brief tale from the author's offspring, over-extended into a film that was a surprise $161m hit. It was the narrative about the kidnapper, a cruel slayer of children who would revel in elongating their fatal ceremony. While assault was never mentioned, there was something unmistakably LGBTQ-suggestive about the villain and the period references/societal fears he was intended to symbolize, strengthened by the performer playing him with a noticeably camp style. But the film was too opaque to ever really admit that and even aside from that tension, it was too busily plotted and too focused on its tiring griminess to work as anything beyond an unthinking horror entertainment.

Follow-up Film's Debut During Studio Struggles

Its sequel arrives as former horror hit-makers the studio are in critical demand for a hit. Recently they've faced challenges to make any film profitable, from Wolf Man to their thriller to their action film to the complete commercial failure of M3gan 2.0, and so significant pressure rests on whether the sequel can prove whether a compact tale can become a film that can spawn a franchise. But there's a complication …

Ghostly Evolution

The original concluded with our protagonist Finn (Mason Thames) eliminating the villain, helped and guided by the apparitions of earlier casualties. This has compelled filmmaker Derrickson and his co-writer C Robert Cargill to advance the story and its villain in a different direction, converting a physical threat into a ghostly presence, a path that leads them through Nightmare on Elm Street with a capability to return into the physical realm facilitated by dreams. But different from the striped sweater villain, the antagonist is markedly uninventive and completely lacking comedy. The disguise stays successfully disturbing but the film struggles to make him as frightening as he momentarily appeared in the first, trapped by convoluted and often confusing rules.

Mountain Retreat Location

Finn and his irritatingly profane sibling Gwen (the performer) confront him anew while stranded due to weather at a high-altitude faith-based facility for kids, the second film also acknowledging regarding the hockey mask killer Jason Voorhees. 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 protagonist, continuing to handle his fury and fresh capacity for resistance, is tracking to defend her. The script is too ungainly in its contrived scene-setting, awkwardly requiring to leave the brother and sister trapped at a location that will additionally provide to histories of hero and villain, supplying particulars we weren't particularly interested in or care to learn about. Additionally seeming like a more calculated move to guide the production in the direction of the comparable faith-based viewers that transformed the Conjuring movies into huge successes, Derrickson adds a spiritual aspect, with morality now more strongly connected with the divine and paradise while evil symbolizes Satan and damnation, religion the final defense against such a creature.

Overloaded Plot

What all of this does is further over-stack a series that was already close to toppling over, adding unnecessary complications to what could have been a basic scary film. I often found myself overly occupied with inquiries about the methods and reasons of what could or couldn’t happen to become truly immersed. It's minimal work for the actor, whose features stay concealed but he does have real screen magnetism that’s generally absent in other areas in the ensemble. The location is at times impressively atmospheric but the majority of the consistently un-scary set-pieces are marred by a gritty film stock appearance to separate sleep states from consciousness, an ineffective stylistic choice that feels too self-aware and created to imitate 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 unnecessarily lengthy and highly implausible argument for the birth of another series. If another installment comes, I suggest ignoring it.

• The sequel is out in Australian cinemas on 16 October and in America and Britain on October 17