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Coming as the revived Stephen King machine was still churning out film versions, without concern for excellence, the original film felt like a uninspired homage. With its small town 70s backdrop, young performers, telepathic children and gnarly neighbourhood villain, it was close to pastiche and, like the very worst of his literary works, it was also inelegantly overstuffed.

Funnily enough the source was found within the household, as it was inspired by a compact narrative from the author's offspring, expanded into a film that was a surprise $161m hit. It was the narrative about the kidnapper, a brutal murderer of children who would enjoy extending the ritual of their deaths. While sexual abuse was never mentioned, there was something unmistakably LGBTQ-suggestive about the character and the period references/societal fears he was obviously meant to represent, strengthened by Ethan Hawke acting with a noticeably camp style. But the film was too ambiguous to ever properly acknowledge this and even without that uneasiness, it was overly complicated and overly enamored with its exhaustingly grubby nastiness to work as anything more than an undiscerning sleepover nightmare fuel.

Follow-up Film's Debut During Studio Struggles

The next chapter comes as previous scary movie successes the production company are in desperate need of a win. This year they’ve struggled to make any project successful, from Wolf Man to their thriller to their action film to the complete commercial failure of the robotic follow-up, and so much depends on whether Black Phone 2 can prove whether a short story can become a motion picture that can spawn a franchise. However, there's an issue …

Ghostly Evolution

The first film ended with our protagonist 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 direction that guides them by way of Freddy's domain with an ability to cross back into the real world enabled through nightmares. But different from the striped sweater villain, the Grabber is clearly unimaginative and completely lacking comedy. The disguise stays effectively jarring but the film struggles to make him as frightening as he briefly was in the initial film, trapped by convoluted and often confusing rules.

Mountain Retreat Location

Finn and his annoyingly foul-mouthed sister Gwen (the actress) face him once more while snowed in at an alpine Christian camp for kids, the follow-up also referencing in the direction of Jason Voorhees the Friday the 13th antagonist. The female lead is led there by an apparition of her deceased parent and potentially their dead antagonist's original prey while the protagonist, continuing to deal with his rage and recently discovered defensive skills, is pursuing to safeguard her. The screenplay is overly clumsy in its forced establishment, awkwardly requiring to get the siblings stranded at a place that will also add to background information for protagonist and antagonist, providing information we weren't particularly interested in or desire to understand. In what also feels like a more strategic decision to push the movie towards the comparable faith-based viewers that transformed the Conjuring movies into huge successes, 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.

Overloaded Plot

The consequence of these choices is continued over-burden a franchise that was previously nearly collapsing, including superfluous difficulties to what could have been a simple Friday night engine. I often found myself overly occupied with inquiries about the hows and whys of what could or couldn’t happen to become truly immersed. It's an undemanding role for the actor, whose features stay concealed but he maintains genuine presence that’s mostly missing elsewhere in the acting team. The setting is at times impressively atmospheric but the majority of the persistently unfrightening scenes are damaged by a rough cinematic quality to differentiate asleep and awake, an unsuccessful artistic decision that seems excessively meta and created to imitate the terrifying uncertainty of living through a genuine night terror.

Unpersuasive Series Justification

Running nearly 120 minutes, Black Phone 2, like M3gan 2.0 before it, is a excessively extended and hugely unconvincing argument for the birth of another series. If another installment comes, I recommend not answering.

• Black Phone 2 releases in Australian theaters on 16 October and in the US and UK on October 17