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Arriving as the re-activated Stephen King machine was still churning out adaptations, quality be damned, The Black Phone felt like a lazy fanboy tribute. Set against a retro suburban environment, young performers, gifted youths and gnarly neighbourhood villain, it was almost imitation and, comparable to the weakest his literary works, it was also awkwardly crowded.

Interestingly the call came from within the household, as it was adapted from a brief tale from his descendant, over-extended into a film that was a unexpected blockbuster. It was the narrative about the kidnapper, a cruel slayer of young boys who would take pleasure in prolonging their fatal ceremony. While molestation was avoided in discussion, there was something inescapably queer-coded about the antagonist and the historical touchpoints/moral panics he was clearly supposed to refer to, emphasized by the actor playing him with a distinctly flamboyant manner. But the film was too opaque to ever properly acknowledge this and even without that uneasiness, it was too busily plotted and overly enamored with its tiring griminess to work as anything more than an undiscerning sleepover nightmare fuel.

The Sequel's Arrival Amidst Filmmaking Difficulties

The follow-up debuts as once-dominant genre specialists the production company are in desperate need of a win. This year they’ve struggled to make any project successful, from Wolf Man to The Woman in the Yard to their action film to the total box office disaster of the AI sequel, and so a great deal rides on whether the continuation can prove whether a compact tale can become a film that can spawn a franchise. But there's a complication …

Supernatural Transformation

The initial movie finished with our surviving character Finn (the young actor) killing the Grabber, assisted and trained by the apparitions of earlier casualties. This has compelled writer-director Scott Derrickson and his collaborator C Robert Cargill to take the series and its killer to a new place, converting a physical threat into a ghostly presence, a route that takes them via Elm Street with a power to travel into the physical realm facilitated by dreams. But in contrast to the dream killer, the antagonist is clearly unimaginative and entirely devoid of humour. The disguise stays effectively jarring but the movie has difficulty to make him as terrifying as he briefly was in the first, constrained by convoluted and often confusing rules.

Snowy Religious Environment

The main character and his annoyingly foul-mouthed sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) confront him anew while stranded due to weather at an alpine Christian camp for kids, the follow-up also referencing toward Freddy’s one-time nemesis the Friday the 13th antagonist. The sister is directed there by a ghostly image of her dead mother and what might be their late tormenter’s first victims while the brother, still attempting to process his anger and fresh capacity for resistance, is following so he can protect her. The script is too ungainly in its forced establishment, awkwardly requiring to maroon the main characters at a location that will additionally provide to histories of hero and villain, providing information we didn’t really need or desire to understand. Additionally seeming like a more calculated move to push the movie towards the similar religious audiences that made the Conjuring series into huge successes, Derrickson adds a faith-based component, with virtue now more directly linked with the creator and the afterlife while evil symbolizes Satan and damnation, belief the supreme tool against this type of antagonist.

Overcomplicated Story

The result of these decisions is additional over-complicate a series that was already close to toppling over, adding unnecessary complications to what should be a simple Friday night engine. I often found myself too busy asking questions about the processes and motivations of possible and impossible events to experience genuine engagement. It's an undemanding role for Hawke, whose visage remains hidden but he maintains genuine presence that’s typically lacking in other aspects in the acting team. The setting is at times remarkably immersive but the majority of the continuously non-terrifying sequences are marred by a rough cinematic quality to separate sleep states from consciousness, an poor directorial selection that seems excessively meta and constructed to mirror the frightening randomness of living through a genuine night terror.

Unpersuasive Series Justification

Lasting approximately two hours, Black Phone 2, like M3gan 2.0 before it, is a needlessly long and hugely unconvincing argument for the birth of a new franchise. The next time it rings, I suggest ignoring it.

• Black Phone 2 is out in Australian cinemas on 16 October and in America and Britain on October 17