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Arriving as the resurrected master of horror machine was continuing to produce screen translations, regardless of quality, The Black Phone felt like a uninspired homage. With its small town 70s backdrop, teenage actors, gifted youths and gnarly neighbourhood villain, it was close to pastiche and, like the very worst of King’s stories, it was also clumsily packed.

Curiously the call came from from the author's own lineage, 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 story of the Grabber, a cruel slayer of children who would take pleasure in prolonging the process of killing. While molestation was avoided in discussion, there was something inescapably queer-coded about the villain and the period references/societal fears he was clearly supposed to refer to, strengthened by the actor playing 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 excessively convoluted and overly enamored with its tiring griminess to work as anything beyond an mindless scary movie material.

Follow-up Film's Debut In the Middle of Production Company Challenges

The next chapter comes as former horror hit-makers Blumhouse are in critical demand for a hit. Recently they've faced challenges to make any film profitable, from their werewolf film to the suspense story to Drop to the utter financial disappointment of the AI sequel, and so significant pressure rests on whether Black Phone 2 can prove whether a brief narrative can become a motion picture that can create a series. But there's a complication …

Paranormal Shift

The first film ended with our protagonist Finn (the performer) eliminating the villain, supported and coached by the ghosts of those he had killed before. It’s forced writer-director Scott Derrickson and his writing partner Cargill to take the series and its antagonist toward fresh territory, converting a physical threat into a ghostly presence, a path that leads them through Nightmare on Elm Street with an ability to cross back into the physical realm enabled through nightmares. But different from the striped sweater villain, the Grabber is noticeably uncreative and totally without wit. The mask remains effectively jarring but the movie has difficulty to make him as frightening as he temporarily seemed in the original, constrained by complex and typically puzzling guidelines.

Snowy Religious Environment

Finn and his frustratingly crude sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) encounter him again while snowed in at a mountain religious retreat for kids, the follow-up also referencing toward Freddy’s one-time nemesis the camp slasher. The female lead is led there by a ghostly image of her dead mother and what might be their dead antagonist's original prey while the protagonist, continuing to process his anger and newfound ability to fight back, is pursuing to safeguard her. The writing is too ungainly in its artificial setup, awkwardly requiring to get the siblings stranded at a place that will also add to background information for hero and villain, providing information we weren't particularly interested in or care to learn about. What also appears to be a more deliberate action to edge the film toward the comparable faith-based viewers that transformed the Conjuring movies into huge successes, the filmmaker incorporates a spiritual aspect, with good now more closely associated with God and heaven while villainy signifies the demonic and punishment, belief the supreme tool against this type of antagonist.

Overloaded Plot

What all of this does is further over-stack a series that was already nearly collapsing, including superfluous difficulties to what should be a basic scary film. I often found myself overly occupied with inquiries about the processes and motivations of feasible and unfeasible occurrences to feel all that involved. It's minimal work for the performer, whose visage remains hidden but he does have genuine presence that’s generally absent in other areas in the ensemble. The environment is at times atmospherically grand but the majority of the consistently un-scary set-pieces are flawed by a rough cinematic quality to distinguish dreaming from waking, an poor directorial selection that feels too self-aware and designed to reflect the frightening randomness of being in an actual nightmare.

Weak Continuation Rationale

Lasting approximately two hours, the sequel, similar to its predecessor, is a excessively extended and extremely unpersuasive argument for the birth of an additional film universe. The next time it rings, I recommend not answering.

• The sequel is out in Australia's movie houses on October 16 and in the US and UK on 17 October