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Debuting as the re-activated Stephen King machine was still churning out screen translations, quality be damned, the first installment felt like a uninspired homage. With its 1970s small town setting, teenage actors, gifted youths and twisted community predator, it was almost imitation and, like the very worst of the author's tales, it was also inelegantly overstuffed.

Curiously the call came from inside the family home, as it was inspired by a compact narrative from the author's offspring, stretched into a film that was a surprise $161m hit. It was the narrative about the kidnapper, a cruel slayer of adolescents who would take pleasure in prolonging the process of killing. While sexual abuse was never mentioned, there was something clearly non-heteronormative about the character and the era-specific anxieties he was clearly supposed to refer to, emphasized by the actor acting with a certain swishy, effeminate flare. But the film was too ambiguous to ever really admit that and even excluding that discomfort, it was excessively convoluted and too focused on its tiring griminess to work as anything beyond an mindless scary movie material.

The Sequel's Arrival Amidst Filmmaking Difficulties

The next chapter comes as former horror hit-makers the studio are in critical demand for a hit. Lately they've encountered difficulties to make anything work, from Wolf Man to their thriller to Drop to the utter financial disappointment of the AI sequel, and so much depends on whether Black Phone 2 can prove whether a brief narrative can become a motion picture that can generate multiple installments. There’s just one slight problem …

Paranormal Shift

The original concluded with our protagonist Finn (the performer) defeating the antagonist, supported and coached by the spirits of previous victims. This situation has required director Scott Derrickson and his writing partner Cargill to advance the story and its villain in a different direction, converting a physical threat into a ghostly presence, a direction that guides them via Elm Street with an ability to cross back into the real world facilitated by dreams. But in contrast to the dream killer, the Grabber is noticeably uncreative and completely lacking comedy. The mask remains appropriately unsettling but the film struggles to make him as terrifying as he momentarily appeared in the first, constrained by convoluted and often confusing rules.

Alpine Christian Camp Setting

The main character and his irritatingly profane sibling Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) encounter him again while snowed in at a mountain religious retreat for kids, the second film also acknowledging in the direction of Jason Voorhees Jason Voorhees. The female lead is led there by a ghostly image of her dead mother and what could be their deceased villain's initial casualties while the protagonist, continuing to deal with his rage and newfound ability to fight back, is following so he can protect her. The script is excessively awkward in its contrived scene-setting, inelegantly demanding to leave the brother and sister trapped at a location that will additionally provide to background information for protagonist and antagonist, providing information we weren't particularly interested in or want to know about. Additionally seeming like a more strategic decision to guide the production in the direction of the comparable faith-based viewers that transformed the Conjuring movies into huge successes, the director includes a spiritual aspect, with virtue now more directly linked with the creator and the afterlife while villainy signifies the devil and hell, faith the ultimate weapon against a monster like this.

Overcomplicated Story

The result of these decisions is additional over-complicate a series that was already almost failing, adding unnecessary complications to what should be a straightforward horror movie. Frequently I discovered too busy asking questions about the processes and motivations of what could or couldn’t happen to become truly immersed. It’s a low-lift effort for the actor, whose features stay concealed but he possesses real screen magnetism that’s mostly missing elsewhere in the cast. The setting is at times atmospherically grand but most of the persistently unfrightening scenes are flawed by a grainy 8mm texture to differentiate asleep and awake, an unsuccessful artistic decision that seems excessively meta and designed to reflect the terrifying uncertainty of living through a genuine night terror.

Weak Continuation Rationale

At just under 2 hours, the follow-up, comparable to earlier failures, is a unnecessarily lengthy and highly implausible case for the creation of another series. When it calls again, I recommend not answering.

• Black Phone 2 debuts in Australian theaters on 16 October and in the US and UK on the seventeenth of October