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Arriving as the resurrected Stephen King machine was persistently generating adaptations, without concern for excellence, the original film felt like a lazy fanboy tribute. With its small town 70s backdrop, young performers, telepathic children and disturbing local antagonist, it was close to pastiche and, comparable to the weakest his literary works, it was also clumsily packed.

Funnily enough the inspiration originated from inside the family home, as it was inspired by a compact narrative from King’s son Joe Hill, over-extended into a film that was a surprise $161m hit. It was the tale of the antagonist, a sadistic killer of children who would take pleasure in prolonging the process of killing. While assault was not referenced, there was something unmistakably LGBTQ-suggestive about the antagonist and the era-specific anxieties he was intended to symbolize, strengthened by Ethan Hawke portraying him with a distinctly flamboyant manner. But the film was too opaque to ever really admit that and even excluding that discomfort, it was too busily plotted and overly enamored with its exhaustingly grubby nastiness to work as anything beyond an undiscerning sleepover nightmare fuel.

Second Installment's Release During Production Company Challenges

The follow-up debuts as once-dominant genre specialists the production company are in urgent requirement for success. Recently they've faced challenges to make any film profitable, from the monster movie to their thriller to the adventure movie to the total box office disaster of the AI sequel, and so significant pressure rests on whether the continuation can prove whether a compact tale can become a movie that can spawn a franchise. There’s just one slight problem …

Ghostly Evolution

The original concluded with our Final Boy Finn (Mason Thames) eliminating the villain, supported and coached by the apparitions of earlier casualties. It’s forced filmmaker Derrickson and his co-writer C Robert Cargill to move the franchise and its antagonist toward fresh territory, turning a flesh and blood villain into a ghostly presence, a path that leads them by way of Freddy's domain with an ability to cross back into the real world made possible by sleep. But unlike Freddy Krueger, the villain is clearly unimaginative and entirely devoid of humour. The mask remains appropriately unsettling but the film struggles to make him as frightening as he momentarily appeared in the initial film, limited by convoluted and often confusing rules.

Snowy Religious Environment

Finn and his irritatingly profane sibling Gwen (the actress) encounter him again while snowed in at an alpine Christian camp for kids, the sequel also nodding in the direction of Jason Voorhees the Friday the 13th antagonist. The sister is directed there by a vision of her late mother and potentially their late tormenter’s first victims while Finn, still trying to handle his fury and newfound ability to fight back, is pursuing to safeguard her. The writing is overly clumsy in its forced establishment, clumsily needing to maroon the main characters at a place that will also add to histories of hero and villain, providing information we didn't actually require or care to learn about. In what also feels like a more deliberate action to edge the film toward the same church-attending crowds that made the Conjuring series into major blockbusters, the director includes a religious element, with virtue now more directly linked with the creator and the afterlife while villainy signifies Satan and damnation, religion the final defense against such a creature.

Overloaded Plot

The result of these decisions is further over-stack a franchise that was previously close to toppling over, incorporating needless complexities to what ought to be a basic scary film. Regularly I noticed excessively engaged in questioning about the processes and motivations of possible and impossible events to feel all that involved. It's minimal work for Hawke, whose visage remains hidden but he does have real screen magnetism that’s generally absent in other areas in the acting team. The environment is at times atmospherically grand but most of the continuously non-terrifying sequences are flawed by a grainy 8mm texture to separate sleep states from consciousness, an poor directorial selection that seems excessively meta and designed to reflect the horrifying unpredictability of experiencing a real bad dream.

Unpersuasive Series Justification

Running nearly 120 minutes, Black Phone 2, like M3gan 2.0 before it, is a excessively extended and extremely unpersuasive justification for the establishment of a new franchise. When it calls again, I recommend not answering.

• The sequel is out in Australian theaters on October 16 and in America and Britain on 17 October