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Coming as the re-activated master of horror machine was still churning out film versions, regardless of quality, The Black Phone felt like a sloppy admiration piece. Set against a small town 70s backdrop, high school cast, gifted youths and gnarly neighbourhood villain, it was almost imitation and, like the very worst of King’s stories, it was also clumsily packed.

Curiously the inspiration originated from inside the family home, as it was inspired by a compact narrative from his descendant, over-extended into a film that was a shocking commercial success. It was the tale of the antagonist, a brutal murderer of children who would revel in elongating the process of killing. While assault was not referenced, there was something unmistakably LGBTQ-suggestive about the antagonist and the historical touchpoints/moral panics he was obviously meant to represent, reinforced by the actor portraying him with a distinctly flamboyant manner. But the film was too ambiguous to ever really admit that and even aside from that tension, it was overly complicated and too high on its tiring griminess to work as anything beyond an mindless scary movie material.

Follow-up Film's Debut During Production Company Challenges

Its sequel arrives as former horror hit-makers the production company are in desperate need of a win. Recently they've faced challenges to make anything work, from their werewolf film to the suspense story to Drop to the utter financial disappointment of the robotic follow-up, and so much depends on whether Black Phone 2 can prove whether a compact tale can become a motion picture that can generate multiple installments. However, there's an issue …

Paranormal Shift

The initial movie finished with our Final Boy Finn (the performer) killing the Grabber, helped and guided by the apparitions of earlier casualties. It’s forced filmmaker Derrickson and his writing partner Cargill to advance the story and its villain in a different direction, converting a physical threat into a paranormal entity, a path that leads them by way of Freddy's domain with a power to travel into the real world facilitated by dreams. But different from the striped sweater villain, the villain is clearly unimaginative and totally without wit. The mask remains appropriately unsettling but the production fails to make him as terrifying as he briefly was in the initial film, trapped by complicated and frequently unclear regulations.

Mountain Retreat Location

The protagonist and his frustratingly crude sister Gwen (the actress) confront him anew while trapped by snow at an alpine Christian camp for kids, the follow-up also referencing regarding the hockey mask killer Jason Voorhees. Gwen is guided there by a ghostly image of her dead mother and what might be their dead antagonist's original prey while the brother, still attempting to deal with his rage and fresh capacity for resistance, is tracking to defend her. The screenplay is overly clumsy in its contrived scene-setting, inelegantly demanding to get the siblings stranded at a location that will additionally provide to backstories for both main character and enemy, filling in details we didn't actually require or want to know about. Additionally seeming like a more calculated move to push the movie towards the similar religious audiences that transformed the Conjuring movies into massive hits, the filmmaker incorporates a spiritual aspect, with good now more closely associated with the divine and paradise while evil symbolizes the devil and hell, faith the ultimate weapon against a monster like this.

Overcomplicated Story

What all of this does is additional over-complicate a series that was already almost failing, incorporating needless complexities to what should be a simple Friday night engine. I often found myself overly occupied with inquiries about the processes and motivations of what could or couldn’t happen to become truly immersed. It's minimal work for the actor, whose visage remains hidden but he possesses real screen magnetism that’s mostly missing elsewhere in the ensemble. The environment is at times atmospherically grand but the bulk of the consistently un-scary set-pieces are damaged by a grainy 8mm texture to distinguish dreaming from waking, an ineffective stylistic choice that appears overly conscious and created to imitate the terrifying uncertainty of being in an actual nightmare.

Unconvincing Franchise Argument

Lasting approximately two hours, the sequel, similar to its predecessor, is a excessively extended and extremely unpersuasive justification for the establishment of a new franchise. The next time it rings, I advise letting it go to voicemail.

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