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Arriving as the resurrected bestselling author machine was persistently generating screen translations, regardless of quality, The Black Phone felt like a uninspired homage. With its 1970s small town setting, young performers, telepathic children and twisted community predator, it was nearly parody and, comparable to the weakest the author's tales, it was also inelegantly overstuffed.

Curiously the call came 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 surprise $161m hit. It was the narrative about the kidnapper, a sadistic killer of young boys who would revel in elongating their fatal ceremony. While sexual abuse was avoided in discussion, there was something unmistakably LGBTQ-suggestive about the villain and the period references/societal fears he was clearly supposed to refer to, reinforced by Ethan Hawke acting with a noticeably camp style. But the film was too ambiguous to ever properly acknowledge this and even excluding that discomfort, it was too busily plotted and too focused on its exhaustingly grubby nastiness to work as anything beyond an undiscerning sleepover nightmare fuel.

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

The next chapter comes as previous scary movie successes the studio are in critical demand for a hit. Recently they've faced challenges to make any project successful, from the monster movie to the suspense story to their action film to the complete commercial failure of the robotic follow-up, and so significant pressure rests on whether the sequel can prove whether a compact tale can become a motion picture that can spawn a franchise. But there's a complication …

Supernatural Transformation

The initial movie finished with our protagonist Finn (Mason Thames) defeating the antagonist, assisted and trained by the ghosts of those he had killed before. This has compelled writer-director Scott Derrickson and his collaborator C Robert Cargill to take the series and its killer to a new place, transforming a human antagonist into a paranormal entity, a route that takes them by way of Freddy's domain with a power to travel into reality enabled through nightmares. But in contrast to the dream killer, the villain is markedly uninventive and entirely devoid of humour. The disguise stays effectively jarring but the production fails to make him as terrifying as he temporarily seemed in the first, limited by convoluted and often confusing rules.

Alpine Christian Camp Setting

Finn and his irritatingly profane sibling Gwen (the actress) encounter him again while snowed in at a mountain religious retreat for kids, the second film also acknowledging in the direction of Jason Voorhees the camp slasher. The female lead is led there by a ghostly image of her dead mother and what might be their dead antagonist's original prey while the protagonist, continuing to deal with his rage and newfound ability to fight back, is pursuing to safeguard her. The script is excessively awkward in its artificial setup, awkwardly requiring to maroon the main characters at a place that will also add to histories of main character and enemy, supplying particulars we weren't particularly interested in or want to know about. Additionally seeming like a more strategic decision to edge the film toward the similar religious audiences that turned the Conjuring franchise into major blockbusters, Derrickson adds a religious element, with good now more closely associated with God and heaven while bad represents the demonic and punishment, religion the final defense against this type of antagonist.

Overloaded Plot

The result of these decisions is additional over-complicate a story that was formerly close to toppling over, incorporating needless complexities to what should be a straightforward horror movie. I often found myself too busy asking questions about the methods and reasons of what could or couldn’t happen to experience genuine engagement. It's minimal work for Hawke, whose features stay concealed but he possesses genuine presence that’s generally absent in other areas in the acting team. The setting is at times impressively atmospheric but the majority of the continuously non-terrifying sequences are damaged by a gritty film stock appearance to differentiate asleep and awake, an poor directorial selection that feels too self-aware and created to imitate the horrifying unpredictability of living through a genuine night terror.

Unpersuasive Series Justification

At just under 2 hours, the follow-up, comparable to earlier failures, is a unnecessarily lengthy and extremely unpersuasive argument for the birth of an additional film universe. When it calls again, I suggest ignoring it.

• Black Phone 2 is out in Australian cinemas on 16 October and in the United States and United Kingdom on October 17