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Coming as the revived master of horror machine was persistently generating film versions, quality be damned, the first installment felt like a sloppy admiration piece. With its retro suburban environment, teenage actors, gifted youths and disturbing local antagonist, it was almost imitation and, similar to the poorest the author's tales, it was also awkwardly crowded.

Funnily enough the inspiration originated from from the author's own lineage, as it was based on a short story from King’s son Joe Hill, expanded into a film that was a surprise $161m hit. It was the narrative about the kidnapper, a brutal murderer of adolescents who would revel in elongating their fatal ceremony. While molestation was avoided in discussion, there was something clearly non-heteronormative about the character and the period references/societal fears he was intended to symbolize, reinforced by the actor portraying him with a noticeably camp style. But the film was too opaque to ever properly acknowledge this and even without that uneasiness, it was excessively convoluted and overly enamored with its exhaustingly grubby nastiness to work as anything beyond an unthinking horror entertainment.

Follow-up Film's Debut Amidst Production Company Challenges

Its sequel arrives as former horror hit-makers the studio are in desperate need of a win. This year they’ve struggled to make anything work, from the monster movie to the suspense story to Drop to the total box office disaster of M3gan 2.0, and so a great deal rides on whether the sequel can prove whether a short story can become a film that can create a series. However, there's an issue …

Ghostly Evolution

The original concluded with our Final Boy Finn (the young actor) eliminating the villain, assisted and trained by the ghosts of those he had killed before. This has compelled filmmaker Derrickson and his writing partner Cargill to move the franchise and its antagonist toward fresh territory, turning a flesh and blood villain into a ghostly presence, a route that takes them by way of Freddy's domain with a capability to return into the real world made possible by sleep. But different from the striped sweater villain, the Grabber is noticeably uncreative and entirely devoid of humour. The mask remains successfully disturbing but the production fails to make him as scary as he momentarily appeared in the original, limited by complex and typically puzzling guidelines.

Alpine Christian Camp Setting

Finn and his frustratingly crude sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) face him once more while stranded due to weather 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 ghostly image of her dead mother and what could be their dead antagonist's original prey while the protagonist, continuing to deal with his rage and newfound ability to fight back, is tracking to defend her. The screenplay is overly clumsy in its forced establishment, clumsily needing to get the siblings stranded at a place that will also add to background information for protagonist and antagonist, supplying particulars we didn’t really need or care to learn about. In what also feels like a more strategic decision to push the movie towards the same church-attending crowds that made the Conjuring series into huge successes, Derrickson adds a religious element, with virtue now more directly linked with the divine and paradise while bad represents Satan and damnation, belief the supreme tool against this type of antagonist.

Overcomplicated Story

The consequence of these choices is further over-stack a franchise that was previously almost failing, incorporating needless complexities to what could have been a basic scary film. Regularly I noticed too busy asking questions about the hows and whys of feasible and unfeasible occurrences to become truly immersed. It's minimal work for the performer, whose face we never really see but he maintains authentic charisma that’s generally absent in other areas in the acting team. The location is at times remarkably immersive but the majority of the persistently unfrightening scenes are flawed by a grainy 8mm texture to differentiate asleep and awake, an unsuccessful artistic decision that seems excessively meta and designed to reflect the frightening randomness of living through a genuine night terror.

Unpersuasive Series Justification

Lasting approximately two hours, Black Phone 2, comparable to earlier failures, is a unnecessarily lengthy and highly implausible case for the creation of an additional film universe. When it calls again, I recommend not answering.

• The follow-up film is out in Australia's movie houses on the sixteenth of October and in America and Britain on October 17