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Debuting as the revived master of horror machine was still churning out film versions, without concern for excellence, The Black Phone felt like a uninspired homage. Set against a 1970s small town setting, young performers, psychic kids and twisted community predator, it was close to pastiche and, similar to the poorest the author's tales, it was also clumsily packed.

Interestingly the inspiration originated from from the author's own lineage, as it was inspired by a compact narrative from his descendant, over-extended into a film that was a unexpected blockbuster. It was the story of the Grabber, a sadistic killer of children who would revel in elongating their fatal ceremony. While molestation was not referenced, there was something inescapably queer-coded about the antagonist and the era-specific anxieties he was clearly supposed to refer to, emphasized by Ethan Hawke acting with a noticeably camp style. But the film was too ambiguous to ever properly acknowledge this and even without that uneasiness, it was overly complicated and too high on its exhaustingly grubby nastiness to work as only an unthinking horror entertainment.

Follow-up Film's Debut Amidst Studio Struggles

Its sequel arrives as previous scary movie successes the production company are in desperate need of a win. This year they’ve struggled to make any project successful, from the monster movie to the suspense story to the adventure movie to the utter financial disappointment of the robotic follow-up, and so much depends on whether Black Phone 2 can prove whether a brief narrative can become a film that can generate multiple installments. But there's a complication …

Ghostly Evolution

The original concluded with our protagonist Finn (the performer) defeating the antagonist, helped and guided by the ghosts of those he had killed before. This has compelled director Scott Derrickson and his co-writer C Robert Cargill to advance the story and its antagonist toward fresh territory, converting a physical threat into a paranormal entity, a direction that guides them by way of Freddy's domain with a capability to return into the real world facilitated by dreams. But unlike Freddy Krueger, the antagonist is clearly unimaginative and entirely devoid of humour. The mask remains effectively jarring but the movie has difficulty to make him as frightening as he briefly was in the first, limited by convoluted and often confusing rules.

Snowy Religious Environment

The main character 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 Jason Voorhees. The sister is directed there by an apparition of her deceased parent and what might be their late tormenter’s first victims while Finn, still trying to handle his fury and newfound ability to fight back, is following so he can protect her. The screenplay is too ungainly in its contrived scene-setting, clumsily needing to leave the brother and sister trapped at a place that will also add to background information for hero and villain, providing information we didn't actually require or want to know about. Additionally seeming like a more strategic decision to edge the film toward the same church-attending crowds that turned the Conjuring franchise into massive hits, the filmmaker incorporates a spiritual aspect, with virtue now more directly linked with the creator and the afterlife while evil symbolizes the devil and hell, faith the ultimate weapon against such a creature.

Over-stacked Narrative

The consequence of these choices is additional over-complicate a franchise that was previously nearly collapsing, incorporating needless complexities to what ought to be a basic scary film. Frequently I discovered overly occupied with inquiries about the hows and whys of feasible and unfeasible occurrences to feel all that involved. It's minimal work for the actor, whose face we never really see but he maintains real screen magnetism that’s mostly missing elsewhere in the cast. The environment is at times atmospherically grand but the bulk of the persistently unfrightening scenes are marred by a grainy 8mm texture to separate sleep states from consciousness, an poor directorial selection that feels too self-aware and constructed to mirror the frightening randomness of experiencing a real bad dream.

Weak Continuation Rationale

Lasting approximately two hours, Black Phone 2, like M3gan 2.0 before it, is a unnecessarily lengthy and extremely unpersuasive case for the creation of an additional film universe. If another installment comes, I recommend not answering.

• The sequel debuts in Australian theaters on October 16 and in America and Britain on 17 October