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Debuting as the resurrected Stephen King machine was continuing to produce adaptations, without concern for excellence, The Black Phone felt like a lazy fanboy tribute. Featuring a small town 70s backdrop, young performers, telepathic children and disturbing local antagonist, it was close to pastiche and, like the very worst of King’s stories, it was also inelegantly overstuffed.

Funnily enough the inspiration originated from inside the family home, as it was inspired by a compact narrative from the author's offspring, stretched into a film that was a surprise $161m hit. It was the narrative about the kidnapper, a brutal murderer of children who would revel in elongating their fatal ceremony. While assault was avoided in discussion, there was something unmistakably LGBTQ-suggestive about the villain and the era-specific anxieties he was obviously meant to represent, strengthened by the actor portraying him with a noticeably camp style. But the film was too opaque to ever fully embrace this aspect and even excluding that discomfort, it was too busily plotted and overly enamored with its wearisome vileness to work as anything beyond an undiscerning sleepover nightmare fuel.

The Sequel's Arrival During Production Company Challenges

Its sequel arrives as previous scary movie successes the production company are in desperate need of a win. Lately they've encountered difficulties to make any film profitable, from their werewolf film to their thriller to their action film to the complete commercial failure of M3gan 2.0, and so significant pressure rests 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 Final Boy Finn (Mason Thames) defeating the antagonist, supported and coached by the apparitions of earlier casualties. It’s forced writer-director Scott Derrickson and his writing partner Cargill to take the series and its villain in a different direction, converting a physical threat into a paranormal entity, a route that takes them through Nightmare on Elm Street with a capability to return into the real world enabled through nightmares. But in contrast to the dream killer, the antagonist is clearly unimaginative and entirely devoid of humour. The facial covering continues to be successfully disturbing but the movie has difficulty to make him as scary as he briefly was in the first, limited by complicated and frequently unclear regulations.

Snowy Religious Environment

Finn and his annoyingly foul-mouthed sister Gwen (the actress) face him once more while snowed in at a mountain religious retreat for kids, the sequel also nodding regarding the hockey mask killer the Friday the 13th antagonist. The sister is directed there by an apparition of her deceased parent and what might be their late tormenter’s first victims while the brother, still attempting to handle his fury and recently discovered defensive skills, is following so he can protect her. The screenplay is too ungainly in its forced establishment, clumsily needing to maroon the main characters at a place that will also add to histories of main character and enemy, supplying particulars we didn't actually require or care to learn about. In what also feels like a more deliberate action to push the movie towards the similar religious audiences that transformed the Conjuring movies into major blockbusters, Derrickson adds a religious element, with good now more closely associated with the creator and the afterlife while bad represents the devil and hell, religion the final defense against this type of antagonist.

Overcomplicated Story

The consequence of these choices is continued over-burden a story that was formerly almost failing, incorporating needless complexities to what should be a simple Friday night engine. I often found myself excessively engaged in questioning about the methods and reasons of possible and impossible events to experience genuine engagement. It’s a low-lift effort for the actor, whose features stay concealed but he maintains real screen magnetism that’s typically lacking in other aspects in the ensemble. The location is at times impressively atmospheric but the majority of the consistently un-scary set-pieces are marred by a gritty film stock appearance to separate sleep states from consciousness, an ineffective stylistic choice that appears overly conscious and created to imitate the terrifying uncertainty of experiencing a real bad dream.

Unconvincing Franchise Argument

Running nearly 120 minutes, the follow-up, like M3gan 2.0 before it, is a unnecessarily lengthy and hugely unconvincing justification for the establishment of an additional film universe. When it calls again, I recommend not answering.

• The sequel releases in Australia's movie houses on 16 October and in America and Britain on the seventeenth of October