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Arriving as the revived Stephen King machine was persistently generating film versions, without concern for excellence, The Black Phone felt like a uninspired homage. With its small town 70s backdrop, young performers, gifted youths and disturbing local antagonist, it was nearly parody and, like the very worst of his literary works, it was also inelegantly overstuffed.

Curiously the call came from inside the family home, as it was adapted from a brief tale from his descendant, over-extended into a film that was a unexpected blockbuster. It was the story of the Grabber, a sadistic killer of young boys who would enjoy extending the ritual of their deaths. While sexual abuse was avoided in discussion, there was something inescapably queer-coded about the character and the era-specific anxieties he was clearly supposed to refer to, emphasized by Ethan Hawke acting with a certain swishy, effeminate flare. But the film was too opaque to ever properly acknowledge this and even aside from that tension, it was overly complicated and too high on its exhaustingly grubby nastiness to work as only an unthinking horror entertainment.

Second Installment's Release During Studio Struggles

The follow-up debuts as former horror hit-makers the studio are in critical demand for a hit. Recently they've faced challenges to make anything work, from their werewolf film to their thriller to the adventure movie to the total box office disaster of the robotic follow-up, and so significant pressure rests on whether the continuation can prove whether a brief narrative can become a film that can create a series. However, there's an issue …

Supernatural Transformation

The original concluded with our protagonist Finn (the young actor) killing the Grabber, helped and guided by the spirits of previous victims. This has compelled director Scott Derrickson and his collaborator C Robert Cargill to advance the story and its villain in a different direction, transforming a human antagonist into a ghostly presence, a route that takes them through Nightmare on Elm Street with a capability to return into the physical realm facilitated by dreams. But unlike Freddy Krueger, the villain is clearly unimaginative and entirely devoid of humour. The facial covering continues to be successfully disturbing but the production fails to make him as terrifying as he temporarily seemed in the original, limited by convoluted and often confusing rules.

Mountain Retreat Location

The main character and his frustratingly crude sister Gwen (the performer) face him once more while stranded due to weather at an alpine Christian camp for kids, the follow-up also referencing regarding the hockey mask killer the camp slasher. The female lead is led there by a ghostly image of her dead mother and potentially 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 writing is excessively awkward in its contrived scene-setting, clumsily needing to get the siblings stranded at a place that will also add to backstories for both main character and enemy, providing information we didn't actually require or want to know about. Additionally seeming like a more strategic decision to push the movie towards the comparable faith-based viewers that transformed the Conjuring movies into massive hits, the director includes a faith-based component, with morality now more strongly connected with God and heaven while bad represents the devil and hell, belief the supreme tool against a monster like this.

Over-stacked Narrative

The consequence of these choices is further over-stack a story that was formerly almost failing, incorporating needless complexities to what could have been a basic scary film. I often found myself excessively engaged in questioning about the hows and whys of feasible and unfeasible occurrences to feel all that involved. It's an undemanding role for the actor, whose visage remains hidden but he does have real screen magnetism that’s generally absent in other areas in the ensemble. The location is at times impressively atmospheric but the majority of the consistently un-scary set-pieces are marred by a grainy 8mm texture to differentiate asleep and awake, an poor directorial selection that feels too self-aware and designed to reflect the terrifying uncertainty of experiencing a real bad dream.

Unconvincing Franchise Argument

Lasting approximately two hours, the sequel, like M3gan 2.0 before it, is a unnecessarily lengthy and hugely unconvincing argument for the birth of an additional film universe. When it calls again, I recommend not answering.

• The sequel is out in Australian cinemas on 16 October and in the United States and United Kingdom on the seventeenth of October