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Coming as the resurrected Stephen King machine was still churning out adaptations, regardless of quality, the first installment felt like a lazy fanboy tribute. With its 1970s small town setting, high school cast, telepathic children and twisted community predator, it was almost imitation and, similar to the poorest his literary works, it was also awkwardly crowded.

Curiously the inspiration originated from inside the family home, as it was based on a short story from King’s son Joe Hill, stretched into a film that was a unexpected blockbuster. It was the tale of the antagonist, a sadistic killer of adolescents who would enjoy extending the ritual of their deaths. While assault was never mentioned, there was something inescapably queer-coded about the character and the era-specific anxieties he was clearly supposed to refer to, emphasized by the performer playing him with a distinctly flamboyant manner. But the film was too ambiguous to ever really admit that and even without that uneasiness, it was overly complicated and overly enamored with its exhaustingly grubby nastiness to work as only an mindless scary movie material.

Second Installment's Release In the Middle of Production Company Challenges

Its sequel arrives as once-dominant genre specialists the production company are in critical demand for a hit. Recently they've faced challenges to make any film profitable, from the monster movie to the suspense story to their action film to the total box office disaster of M3gan 2.0, and so a great deal rides on whether Black Phone 2 can prove whether a brief narrative can become a movie that can generate multiple installments. There’s just one slight problem …

Ghostly Evolution

The first film ended with our Final Boy Finn (Mason Thames) eliminating the villain, assisted and trained by the spirits of previous victims. It’s forced filmmaker Derrickson and his collaborator C Robert Cargill to take the series and its antagonist toward fresh territory, turning a flesh and blood villain into a ghostly presence, a route that takes them by way of Freddy's domain with a power to travel into the physical realm made possible by sleep. But different from the striped sweater villain, the antagonist is clearly unimaginative and totally without wit. The mask remains appropriately unsettling but the film struggles to make him as scary as he momentarily appeared in the initial film, limited by convoluted and often confusing rules.

Snowy Religious Environment

The main character and his frustratingly crude sister Gwen (the performer) confront him anew while trapped by snow at an alpine Christian camp for kids, the sequel also nodding in the direction of Jason Voorhees the Friday the 13th antagonist. The sister is directed there by a vision of her late mother and what could be their late tormenter’s first victims while the protagonist, continuing to deal with his rage and fresh capacity for resistance, is tracking to defend her. The script is too ungainly in its contrived scene-setting, inelegantly demanding to get the siblings stranded at a place that will also add to backstories for both main character and enemy, providing information we didn't actually require or desire to understand. What also appears to be a more strategic decision to guide the production in the direction of the similar religious audiences that transformed the Conjuring movies into huge successes, the filmmaker incorporates a faith-based component, with virtue now more directly linked with the divine and paradise while villainy signifies Satan and damnation, faith the ultimate weapon against this type of antagonist.

Over-stacked Narrative

The consequence of these choices is additional over-complicate a story that was formerly almost failing, including superfluous difficulties to what should be a simple Friday night engine. Regularly I noticed excessively engaged in questioning about the processes and motivations of what could or couldn’t happen to feel all that involved. It’s a low-lift effort for the actor, whose face we never really see but he does have genuine presence that’s mostly missing elsewhere in the cast. The setting is at times impressively atmospheric but most of the consistently un-scary set-pieces are damaged by a grainy 8mm texture to differentiate asleep and awake, an unsuccessful artistic decision that appears overly conscious and designed to reflect the horrifying unpredictability of living through a genuine night terror.

Unconvincing Franchise Argument

Lasting approximately two hours, the follow-up, like M3gan 2.0 before it, is a unnecessarily lengthy 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 Australian cinemas on 16 October and in the United States and United Kingdom on October 17