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Arriving as the resurrected bestselling author machine was still churning out film versions, quality be damned, the first installment felt like a sloppy admiration piece. With its 1970s small town setting, young performers, psychic kids and disturbing local antagonist, it was almost imitation and, comparable to the weakest King’s stories, it was also awkwardly crowded.

Funnily enough the source was found from the author's own lineage, as it was adapted from a brief tale from his descendant, stretched into a film that was a shocking commercial success. It was the narrative about the kidnapper, a cruel slayer of adolescents who would revel in elongating the process of killing. While assault was never mentioned, there was something unmistakably LGBTQ-suggestive about the character and the era-specific anxieties he was obviously meant to represent, reinforced by the performer portraying him with a distinctly flamboyant manner. But the film was too vague to ever fully embrace this aspect and even excluding that discomfort, it was overly complicated and too focused on its tiring griminess to work as anything more than an unthinking horror entertainment.

The Sequel's Arrival During Studio Struggles

The next chapter comes as previous scary movie successes the studio are in critical demand for a hit. Lately they've encountered difficulties to make anything work, from their werewolf film to the suspense story to Drop to the utter financial disappointment of the AI sequel, and so significant pressure rests on whether the continuation can prove whether a short story can become a film that can spawn a franchise. However, there's an issue …

Ghostly Evolution

The original concluded with our protagonist Finn (the young actor) defeating the antagonist, helped and guided by the ghosts of those he had killed before. It’s forced writer-director Scott Derrickson and his co-writer C Robert Cargill to move the franchise and its antagonist toward fresh territory, transforming a human antagonist into a ghostly presence, a route that takes them via Elm Street with a power to travel into the physical realm enabled through nightmares. But in contrast to the dream killer, the antagonist is markedly uninventive and totally without wit. The disguise stays successfully disturbing but the movie has difficulty to make him as frightening as he briefly was in the original, limited by complicated and frequently unclear regulations.

Alpine Christian Camp Setting

Finn and his annoyingly foul-mouthed sister Gwen (the actress) encounter him again while trapped by snow at a high-altitude faith-based facility for kids, the sequel also nodding toward Freddy’s one-time nemesis Jason Voorhees. Gwen is guided there by a vision of her late mother and what might be their late tormenter’s first victims while the protagonist, continuing to process his anger and recently discovered defensive skills, is tracking to defend her. The screenplay is excessively awkward in its contrived scene-setting, clumsily needing to leave the brother and sister trapped at a setting that will further contribute to histories of hero and villain, providing information we didn't actually require or desire to understand. What also appears to be a more deliberate action to guide the production in the direction of the similar religious audiences that made the Conjuring series into huge successes, the filmmaker incorporates a spiritual aspect, with virtue now more directly linked with the divine and paradise while villainy signifies the demonic and punishment, religion the final defense against a monster like this.

Over-stacked Narrative

What all of this does is continued over-burden a story that was formerly almost failing, including superfluous difficulties to what could have been a simple Friday night engine. Frequently I discovered excessively engaged in questioning about the methods and reasons of possible and impossible events to feel all that involved. It's minimal work for Hawke, whose face we never really see but he maintains genuine presence that’s generally absent in other areas in the ensemble. The environment is at times impressively atmospheric but most of the consistently un-scary set-pieces are marred by a grainy 8mm texture to separate sleep states from consciousness, an poor directorial selection that feels too self-aware and created to imitate the terrifying uncertainty of experiencing a real bad dream.

Unconvincing Franchise Argument

Lasting approximately two hours, Black Phone 2, like M3gan 2.0 before it, 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 sequel debuts in Australia's movie houses on October 16 and in the US and UK on the seventeenth of October