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Arriving as the re-activated bestselling author machine was persistently generating screen translations, quality be damned, the first installment felt like a lazy fanboy tribute. Set against a 1970s small town setting, teenage actors, gifted youths and twisted community predator, it was nearly parody and, comparable to the weakest King’s stories, it was also inelegantly overstuffed.

Interestingly the inspiration originated from within the household, as it was adapted from a brief tale from the author's offspring, expanded into a film that was a shocking commercial success. It was the tale of the antagonist, a cruel slayer of children who would enjoy extending the process of killing. While molestation was avoided in discussion, there was something clearly non-heteronormative about the villain and the period references/societal fears he was clearly supposed to refer to, emphasized by the performer acting with a distinctly flamboyant manner. But the film was too vague to ever fully embrace this aspect and even excluding that discomfort, it was excessively convoluted and overly enamored with its tiring griminess to work as anything more than an unthinking horror entertainment.

Second Installment's Release In the Middle of Studio Struggles

The next chapter comes as former horror hit-makers Blumhouse are in desperate need of a win. Lately they've encountered difficulties to make any project successful, from their werewolf film to the suspense story to their action film to the total box office disaster of the robotic follow-up, and so much depends on whether the sequel can prove whether a short story can become a movie that can generate multiple installments. There’s just one slight problem …

Supernatural Transformation

The original concluded with our protagonist Finn (Mason Thames) killing the Grabber, supported and coached by the apparitions of earlier casualties. This situation has required director Scott Derrickson and his collaborator C Robert Cargill to take the series and its villain in a different direction, transforming a human antagonist into a paranormal entity, a direction that guides them via Elm Street with an ability to cross back into reality enabled through nightmares. But unlike Freddy Krueger, the antagonist is markedly uninventive and entirely devoid of humour. The disguise stays successfully disturbing 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 annoyingly foul-mouthed sister Gwen (the actress) confront him anew while snowed in at a high-altitude faith-based facility for kids, the second film also acknowledging in the direction of Jason Voorhees the camp slasher. Gwen is guided there by a vision of her late mother and what could be their dead antagonist's original prey while the brother, still attempting to handle his fury and fresh capacity for resistance, is pursuing to safeguard her. The script is excessively awkward in its artificial setup, clumsily needing to leave the brother and sister trapped at a place that will also add to backstories for both protagonist and antagonist, filling in details we didn’t really need or want to know about. Additionally seeming like a more calculated move to push the movie towards the comparable faith-based viewers that transformed the Conjuring movies into huge successes, the filmmaker incorporates a spiritual aspect, with morality now more strongly connected with the divine and paradise while villainy signifies Satan and damnation, faith the ultimate weapon against a monster like this.

Overcomplicated Story

The result of these decisions is further over-stack a franchise that was previously nearly collapsing, adding unnecessary complications to what could have been a straightforward horror movie. I often found myself too busy asking questions about the processes and motivations of feasible and unfeasible occurrences to feel all that involved. It’s a low-lift effort for Hawke, whose features stay concealed but he does have genuine presence that’s mostly missing elsewhere in the acting team. The environment is at times remarkably immersive but the majority of the consistently un-scary set-pieces are damaged by a rough cinematic quality to differentiate asleep and awake, an ineffective stylistic choice that appears overly conscious and created to imitate the frightening randomness of living through a genuine night terror.

Unconvincing Franchise Argument

Lasting approximately two hours, Black Phone 2, comparable to earlier failures, is a needlessly long and highly implausible case for the creation of another series. The next time it rings, I advise letting it go to voicemail.

• The follow-up film debuts in Australian theaters on October 16 and in the US and UK on 17 October