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Debuting as the revived master of horror machine was continuing to produce screen translations, without concern for excellence, the original film felt like a uninspired homage. Featuring a retro suburban environment, teenage actors, telepathic children and disturbing local antagonist, it was almost imitation and, similar to the poorest his literary works, it was also awkwardly crowded.

Curiously the inspiration originated from within the household, as it was based on a short story from the author's offspring, expanded into a film that was a shocking commercial success. It was the tale of the antagonist, a sadistic killer of adolescents who would revel in elongating their fatal ceremony. While assault was avoided in discussion, there was something inescapably queer-coded about the character and the era-specific anxieties he was intended to symbolize, emphasized by the actor acting with a distinctly flamboyant manner. But the film was too opaque to ever really admit that and even aside from that tension, it was excessively convoluted and too high on its wearisome vileness to work as only an unthinking horror entertainment.

Follow-up Film's Debut During Studio Struggles

Its sequel arrives as once-dominant genre specialists the studio are in critical demand for a hit. This year they’ve struggled to make any film profitable, from the monster movie to the suspense story to their action film to the total box office disaster of the robotic follow-up, and so a great deal rides on whether Black Phone 2 can prove whether a brief narrative can become a motion picture that can generate multiple installments. But there's a complication …

Ghostly Evolution

The first film ended with our protagonist Finn (the young actor) killing the Grabber, assisted and trained by the apparitions of earlier casualties. This has compelled director Scott Derrickson and his collaborator C Robert Cargill to move the franchise and its killer to a new place, turning a flesh and blood villain into a paranormal entity, a route that takes them by way of Freddy's domain with a capability to return into reality enabled through nightmares. But unlike Freddy Krueger, the antagonist is noticeably uncreative and totally without wit. The facial covering continues to be appropriately unsettling but the production fails to make him as frightening as he temporarily seemed in the first, limited by convoluted and often confusing rules.

Mountain Retreat Location

The protagonist and his annoyingly foul-mouthed sister Gwen (the performer) confront him anew while stranded due to weather at a high-altitude faith-based facility for kids, the follow-up also referencing in the direction of Jason Voorhees the camp slasher. The female lead is led there by a vision of her late mother and what might be their late tormenter’s first victims while the protagonist, continuing to process his anger and recently discovered defensive skills, is tracking to defend her. The screenplay is excessively awkward in its forced establishment, inelegantly demanding to get the siblings stranded at a place that will also add to histories of main character and enemy, providing information we didn’t really need or want to know about. In what also feels like a more deliberate action to push the movie towards the comparable faith-based viewers that made the Conjuring series into major blockbusters, the director includes a spiritual aspect, with good now more closely associated with the divine and paradise while bad represents Satan and damnation, religion the final defense against such a creature.

Overloaded Plot

What all of this does is continued over-burden a franchise that was previously close to toppling over, including superfluous difficulties to what could have been a basic scary film. I often found myself excessively engaged in questioning about the processes and motivations of feasible and unfeasible occurrences to experience genuine engagement. It's minimal work for the actor, whose visage remains hidden but he maintains real screen magnetism that’s typically lacking in other aspects in the ensemble. The setting is at times impressively atmospheric but the majority of the persistently unfrightening scenes are marred by a gritty film stock appearance to differentiate asleep and awake, an unsuccessful artistic decision that appears overly conscious and constructed to mirror the horrifying unpredictability of living through a genuine night terror.

Unconvincing Franchise Argument

Running nearly 120 minutes, Black Phone 2, similar to its predecessor, is a needlessly long and extremely unpersuasive justification for the establishment of another series. The next time it rings, I advise letting it go to voicemail.

• The sequel debuts in Australia's movie houses on October 16 and in the US and UK on the seventeenth of October